When people don’t dedicate any time to taking care of themselves, they often overlook exercise and nutrition. While skipping a workout or opting for takeout to save time is sometimes necessary, making this your norm will take its toll on your physical health. If you fail to take care of your body, you won’t ever feel at your best.
However, your self-care routine doesn’t even have to include a proper diet and exercise in order for it to benefit your physical health (although it should). When you relax, your body triggers the relaxation response, which is essentially the opposite of the fight-or-flight response. This state helps you avoid anxiety and burnout, which is important to prevent chronic stress from damaging your health long-term and decreasing your immunity.
Mental Health
Those who don’t dedicate time to their self-care are more likely to experience low self-esteem, resentment, and unhappiness. And the burnout we mentioned above can have quite an impact on mental health as well.
Practicing self-care has been proven to increase productivity and positive thinking and impart feelings of well-being and calm. Plus, taking care of your body helps you to feel confident and good about yourself.
Ways to Practice Self-Care
Self-care looks different for every individual, but the time you set aside for yourself should include at least some of the following ideas:
When trying to find time to devote to your self-care, focus on two things.
First, prioritize your own well-being. If your priorities always lie elsewhere, you’ll never find the time (or energy) for yourself. Prioritizing yourself may mean accepting the fact that you can’t do everything — at least not on your own.
And second, you have to let others help you. Trying to perfectly juggle your work, home, relationships, and self-care is a recipe for disaster.
Hiring a personal assistant is a great way to free up time for yourself without neglecting any of your other responsibilities. Pepper’s Personal Assistants is here to help with your household management, errands, and chores, so you can spend that time and energy on something more deserving: yourself.
Ready to invest more time in yourself? Get started with a personal assistant today!
A new year means new vacations, and vacations start with making the necessary arrangements. Whether you’re fleeing to a warmer city to break up the remaining winter months, thinking ahead to spring break, or just dreaming up some weekend trips, a personal assistant can help reduce the stress of vacation planning.
Booking Flights and Hotels
Looking for flights and hotels, especially if you’re trying to get a good deal or are tied to specific dates, can be extremely time consuming. Let your personal assistant know when and where you’d like to take your vacation, what accomodations you expect from your flight and hotel, and anything else that’s pertinent. They can present you with several options and make all the arrangements after you’ve chosen which you like best.
Creating an Itinerary
If you’re visiting a new place for the first time, you’ll want to make the most of your stay there and see as much as possible; and even if your trip is a stay-at-the-beach-all-day kind of vacation, having some plans made ahead of time is smart. Your personal assistant can find and book any must-do activities; purchase and print tickets to shows, museums, and the like so you can avoid long lines; and make dinner reservations for you and your fellow travelers.
Creating Packing Lists
Your personal assistant will be aware of where you’re going and what you’re doing, making them the perfect person to create a detailed packing list for your trip. You may prefer to decide which specific items to include to fulfill the list, but they’ll know best if any scheduled activities require specific footwear, for example, or if the weather will be fluctuating during your stay. When you’re frantically packing at the last minute, you’ll appreciate not having to worry about forgetting anything important.
A new season means a whole new set of home maintenance tasks. Use this list to ensure that you keep everything in your home working properly this winter.
Clean Your Gutters
If debris are blocking up your gutters, water can accumulate against the roof and damage it, the siding, and any wood trim, potentially causing leaks or ice dams. You’ll also want to repair any damaged gutters or fascia boards.
Service Your Furnace
Have a technician clean and service your furnace or heat pump ahead of time. Otherwise, you could end up freezing and waiting around once the cold spell hits and technicians get busy.
Inspect Your Chimney
Get your chimney inspected and cleaned early on this winter season to make sure it’s in good shape. Heavy creosote buildup or blockage from other debris could cause carbon monoxide to back up into your home, or even start a chimney fire.
Check Your Sump Pump
If your home has a sump pump, you should be testing it every few months; this is especially important after a dry season and before a wet one. To see whether the pump is working, gradually pour a few gallons of water into the pit. More thorough instructions should be included in your owner’s manual.
Turn Off Outdoor Faucets
To prevent undrained water from freezing and bursting your pipes, disconnect your hoses and drain any water remaining in the faucets. Turn off the shut-off valve in your home if your faucets are not frostproof.
Drain Your Irrigation System
You won’t be using them for a while, so have a professional drain all the pipes associated with your sprinkler system to prevent them from freezing or leaking.
Caulk Around Doors and Windows
If any of your doors or windows have gaps greater than the width of a nickel between their frames and the siding, apply exterior caulk to prevent leaks on stormy days. Apply weatherstripping around doors, making sure that it blocks out all signs of daylight from within your home.
Clean and Inspect Your Roof
Clear off leaves and pine needles, which hold moisture that can damage your roof. Inspect the roof for shingles that are loose, damaged, or missing, as they could allow melting snow to leak into your home.
Winterize Your Pool and Hot Tub
Just covering your pool for the winter isn’t enough — you’ll need to check your pool chemistry every two months, throw out old pool chemicals, and add a special enzyme product to the water. Hot tubs require some work too, whether you plan on using them throughout the winter or not.
Deep Clean Your House
You’ll be spending a lot more time indoors this season, so to create a nice and comfortable environment, a deep cleaning is in order. In addition to your typical cleaning routine, wipe out cupboards and drawers, purge old food from the fridge and freezer, and go through old bills and paperwork. Decluttering and freshening up your space will make cozying up inside that much more enjoyable!
How Pepper’s Personal Assistants Can Help
Don’t know how or where to start? Let Pepper’s Personal Assistants lend a hand. We can take care of some tasks ourselves, and contract outside professionals to do the rest, freeing you up to relax and enjoy the holiday season.
Being a great personal assistant requires more than just completing to-do lists. The very best personal assistants work actively to better themselves and their services, and are aware that there’s always room for improvement. Whether you work in households or offices, the following tips should help you make that happen.
Be Observant
Good personal assistants follow direction well, but great personal assistants pick up on little things and go the extra mile without even having to be asked. Being observant will allow you greater insight into your boss’s preferences, likes, and dislikes, and help you improve your services accordingly. You may even learn from your boss and how they manage their home or business!
Take Notes
Even the best personal assistants struggle to remember everything, which is why taking notes is essential. Never find yourself without a writing utensil. When your boss spontaneously starts explaining something to you, you’ll want to have details to reference later. We’d even recommend jotting down things that may not seem important, as you never know which details will be of use.
Take Responsibility for Your Mistakes
Most bosses will forgive a mistake, but only if you come forward with it and admit that it was your fault. Making excuses or pretending that you don’t know what happened won’t impress anyone. Instead, own your error and clearly explain how you’ll avoid repeating it in the future. If you keep doing the same thing wrong your boss will think that you don’t learn from your mistakes.
Keep Your Boss Informed
Don’t keep your boss guessing about what’s going on in their home or workplace. This is especially true with things that have gone awry, but is also the case with pleasant surprises. Hearing about something from a coworker or neighbor will make your boss feel ill informed and out of the loop. They may even become suspicious about what’s going on behind the scenes.
Don’t Share Your Boss’s Information
This one should go without saying. As a personal assistant, you’ll be exposed to some of your boss’s personal and confidential information — don’t share it. This would be incredibly unprofessional and would jeopardize both your current position and your future employment opportunities.
Become Indispensable
If you do everything else right, our last recommendation should come naturally. The very best personal assistant is one that becomes absolutely necessary to their boss’s everyday life. This means that you’re anticipating their needs, using your observations to manage everything according to their preferences, and generally making their life easier. It may sound like a lot, but for the best personal assistants, it’s just part of the job.
Pepper’s Personal Assistants specializes in residential personal assistant services. If you think you have the skills to make a great personal assistant, apply to join our team!
We all love the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a task, but juggling too many items at a time can have some unwanted consequences. Read on to learn about the downsides of multitasking and how you can rid yourself of the bad habit.
Why You Shouldn’t Multitask
Your Brain Wasn’t Made for Multitasking
According to Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and multitasking expert, our brains are “not wired to multitask well.” Rather than focus on multiple things at a time, our minds are quickly switching from one task to another. And the more you try to multitask, the more you lose focus on each task you’re juggling.
Multitasking Lowers Your IQ
Believe it or not, multitasking actually decreases your intelligence: A study found that distractions caused by phone calls or emails lowered participants’ IQs by as much as 10 points. The cognitive impact of such a decrease is the same as losing an entire night of sleep.
Considering this, it’s no surprise that multitasking reduces efficiency, quality of work, and overall productivity.
Multitasking May Cause Long-Term Damage
The damage might not end when the multitasking does.
A study from the University of Sussex performed MRI scans on people who used multiple devices — such as a cell phone and TV — at once. The study found that those who multitasked more frequently tended to have less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex (the area of the brain tasked with emotional control and empathy).
Researchers still haven’t determined if multitasking is responsible for this, or if brain damage causes people to multitask. Either way, avoiding multitasking is for the best.
How to Stop Multitasking
Multitasking is so instilled in our daily lives that it may take some conscious effort to stop. Start by trying these methods.
Get Rid of Distractions
As obvious as it may sound, if you don’t expose yourself to distractions, you don’t run the risk of trying to multitask. Turn off your phone, close out of your email, and surround yourself only with whatever is necessary for the task at hand.
Give Yourself Less Time
The more time you have to dedicate to a task, the more likely you are to get distracted and start multitasking. The opposite is also true: When you’re on a tight deadline, you tend to block everything else out to focus on getting your work done as quickly as possible. To make this your norm, limit the time you allot for each task so that multitasking isn’t a possibility.
Reduce Your Tasks
When you have an inordinate amount of things to do, multitasking is always going to be a temptation. The simplest way of solving this problem is to reduce the amount on your plate. Whether you’re a young professional, CEO, or stay-at-home parent, letting a personal assistant handle some of your tasks can help you avoid multitasking — and its negative effects.
Anyone who has done it knows that being a stay-at-home parent isn’t easy. Caring for children and managing a household is a full-time job in itself, and brings with it a unique set of challenges. In addition to the day-to-day difficulties of raising children, stay-at-home parents also experience feelings of loneliness, get too little sleep, and struggle both to find time for themselves and to finish everything on their to-do lists.
While every parent’s situation is distinct, a few best practices are universally helpful to avoid burnout, improve quality of life, and make time at home more enjoyable.
Build a Support System
One of the most jarring aspects of stay-at-home parenting is the sense of complete isolation. Before having kids, you may have enjoyed a robust social life, and at least the water cooler chat typical of most workplaces. As a new parent, you may go all day without any real adult interaction — except, perhaps, at the grocery store. This is especially difficult if you feel that you can no longer relate to those who were previously good friends.
To avoid this alienation, establishing a strong support system at the very beginning is crucial. Support systems can include family, close friends, and anyone else who helps you feel that you’re not in this alone. Parents who lack friends with kids may consider attending parenting events, joining a class, or even finding a group on social media to meet people they identify with.
Find Time for Yourself
Another downside of caring for children 24/7 is that the kids are there when you wake up, they are there when you go to sleep, and you must dedicate all the time in between to kids or kid-related activities. Even during nap times or play dates, you’ll likely have an endless list of chores to address, and may feel guilty about taking time for yourself.
But putting yourself first isn’t something to feel bad about. In fact, it’s completely necessary to maintain your mental health and keep you going strong. Remember that you’re still your own person, with your own interests. Set aside time to spend on a favorite hobby, treat yourself to something nice, or even just take a walk by yourself. Making this a regular part of your schedule can help ensure that you don’t overlook your “me time” and become burned out.
Get More Sleep
Sleep deprivation is an unavoidable downside of having a baby, and can be a risk even as your children grow older. Because your job never really ends, knowing when to call it a day and get some rest can be difficult.
Lack of sleep shouldn’t become a constant in your life, though: Sleep deprivation can affect both mood and cognitive function. So, if you’re not sure why you’re in a bad mood and can’t think straight, you might not be getting enough sleep! To get back on track, make sleep a priority (the unfolded laundry can wait) and enforce a bedtime for yourself. Establishing a regular schedule can improve the quality of your sleep.
Outsource
Although many stay-at-home parents think they should be able to handle everything on their own, the truth is that it does “take a village” to raise a child. If you don’t have a village at your disposal, bringing in some outside help can work wonders. In fact, outsourcing is doubly beneficial: It not only helps you relieve stress on its own, but also gives you more time to invest in building a support system, self-care, and sleep.
So, before you get burned out, accept that being a stay-at-home parent is a tough job, and just as deserving of a personal assistant as any other profession.
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