by Kara | May 16, 2019 | Residential
Your personal assistant gives you an invaluable gift: time, and the freedom to do whatever you want with it. No longer booked with chores, errands, and everything else that fills your calendar, your time finally becomes your own.
But for those of you who are used to going nonstop from morning to night, deciding what to do with this newfound freedom can be a challenge. For you busy bees, we have five ideas to help pass the hours.
1. Pamper Yourself
When was the last time you spoiled yourself? This doesn’t have to mean going all-out at the spa, but could involve getting a pedicure or a massage, or even just soaking in the tub at home with candles, bubbles, and all the works. Another idea is to find a quiet place and grab that book you’ve been wanting to read.
Everyone deserves to indulge themselves every now and then, so don’t hold yourself back!
2. Exercise
While exercising may not be your ideal way of spending your free time, as one of the first things people drop when they get busy, it’s important to include it in your schedule. Plus, exercise just makes you feel good, both physically and mentally. It even helps lower your stress levels, and since your personal assistant will already be reducing your stress, you’ll be feeling less stressed than ever!
[Related: Why Self-Care Is Crucial, and How to Make the Time for It]
3. Spend Some Quality Time Together
When we’re busy, we often overlook our relationships, canceling plans or just not making the time to check in or meet up. Do this enough, and those relationships will inevitably suffer.
With your newly open schedule, make an effort to spend quality time with your loved ones. Set a regular coffee or lunch date with those who live nearby, or a call with anyone who’s farther away.
4. Pursue a Hobby
Remember when you were a kid and were encouraged to develop and practice hobbies? Well, hobbies actually become more important as you get older, as they help you relax and take your mind off of everyday stresses.
Whether you’re returning to a hobby you’ve left off or picking up a new one, be sure to find the time for at least one activity you enjoy.
[Related: 15-Minute Habits That Add Balance to Your Busy Day]
5. Do Nothing at All
Sometimes, we get so caught up in doing things that we forget what it’s like to just take a breather. Doing nothing gives you a chance to give your brain a break and be alone with your thoughts, potentially even helping you realize what it is you really want to do with your free time.
Essentially, it’s okay to not have a plan for what to do, or to have a plan to do nothing at all — whatever way you want to look at it.
Ready to start taking hold of your time — and your life? We can help tackle your household management, errands, and chores to make your evenings your own again. Contact Pepper’s Personal Assistants to reclaim your free time today.
Featured image via Unsplash
by Kara | Dec 7, 2018 | Residential
No matter what your resolutions are this year, getting organized will give you the peace of mind — and energy! — you need to focus on them. Follow our five tips to make the most of your New Year.
Prepare for a Fresh Start
Don’t let clutter weigh you down this New Year. Prepare for a fresh start by going through everything before January 1st — and we mean everything. Clean out your fridge and freezer, sort through old mail and paperwork, downsize your closet, and then tackle anything that’s leftover. Once you’ve gotten rid of everything that you don’t need or use, give your house a thorough cleaning.
Get Your Finances in Order
Whether your goal is to save money or just to stick to a budget, getting your finances in order prior to 2019 will help you stay on track. Make a detailed list of your fixed monthly expenses, including items such as rent or mortgage payments, utilities, insurance, phone bills, groceries, gas, and so on. Loan payments and transfers to a savings account count, too. After you’ve added all the costs up, you’ll know how much you have leftover for unnecessary expenses, such as eating out or going to the movies. If you use a spreadsheet or app to track everything you spend throughout the month, sticking to your budget and staying on top of your finances will be easy.
Start Scheduling
Now is the time to start scheduling for the New Year, and that includes both the fun and the not so fun activities. Is it time for a dentist appointment, doctor’s appointment, haircut, or oil change? Make appointments for everyone in your family. You can also start planning any vacations for the upcoming year (especially since you’ll have your new budget sorted out). Be sure to note everything in the same calendar, so you have one master source for your entire schedule.
Do Some Meal Prep
We don’t mean for the entire year, but the more you can prepare now, the more you’ll appreciate it later! Make things easy for yourself by creating freezer meals that you can toss in the crockpot or oven for busy weekday evenings. Rather than spending your entire night cooking or relying on takeout, you can enjoy healthy meals that require no additional work.
Hire a Personal Assistant
Hiring a personal assistant is the one thing you can do that will make absolutely everything easier as you enter the New Year. Pepper’s Personal Assistants can help with light housework, making appointments, meal prep and grocery shopping, and more. Contact us today to learn how we can help you get organized for 2019!
For more tips, read about how to reduce your stress in the New Year.
Featured image via Pixabay
by Kara | Sep 5, 2018 | Grocery, Laundry, Organizational, Residential
You’ve probably admired successful people who seem to do it all, and wondered just how they do it. A likely answer is that they don’t.
Outsourcing Spurs Success
Working professionals are increasingly turning to outsourcing as a means to lessen their loads, avoid fatigue, and perform higher-quality work. And they don’t just do this for business tasks, but for housework as well.
In fact, a study performed by the American Association of University Professors, which analyzed scientists’ “strategies to lighten the household load in order to maintain highly productive careers,” found a correlation between outsourcing core housework and being a highly productive science faculty member (based on the amount of articles published throughout a scientist’s career).
You can boil this down to economics — and we’re not talking about monetary costs here, but about opportunity costs. Every hour spent on a monotonous chore is an hour that could have gone toward a more productive activity. Professionals who understand the value of their time know that it’s better spent on what they’re really great at than scrubbing dishes.
What to Outsource
If you’re now wondering whether you’ve spent too much time doing tedious tasks yourself, you’re probably also wondering what to start outsourcing. The following tasks are a good place to begin, as they’re time-consuming and unrewarding for many people.
Grocery Shopping
Have someone else shop for you, have your groceries delivered, or even have someone else set up your home delivery. Either way, you’ll save yourself tons of time: The average person spends around 60 hours grocery shopping every year, and that’s not even counting travel time.
Cooking
People who are crunched for time often end up eating frozen meals or takeout more often than not. Outsourcing cooking can not only save you time, but also enable you to eat much healthier than before.
Those who really enjoy cooking also have the option of outsourcing meal prep, leaving everything ready for them to get started when they get home from work.
Laundry
For women, laundry consumes even more time than grocery shopping, at over 103 hours a year (men spend around 30 hours annually). Although you can always do the folding while half-watching TV, why not put all of your attention toward something more worthwhile?
Pet Care
Pet care can encompass at-home grooming, grooming and veterinary appointments, walks, cage or tank cleaning, and other chores and errands. These tasks often make having a pet feel like more of a burden than anything else, and leave you too worn out to spend any quality time with the animal.
Pave Your Own Way to Success
At some point, just finding the right people to take over these tasks for you becomes a task in itself. The easy solution to this problem is to hire a personal assistant. We’ll handle any household management, errands, and chores ourselves, and find, contract, and schedule the rest of the services for you — so you can put that time toward whatever you see fit.
by Kara | Aug 3, 2018 | Organizational, Residential
We’ve talked about meal prepping, scheduling, and balancing your career and home life before, but let’s face it — you can never be too prepared for back-to-school season. Be sure to set aside some time to help you get organized before the rush of household, homework, and school activities replace the mellow pace of summer.
Get to the Stores Before Everyone Else
We’ve all been there: The first day of school is right around the corner, and we’ve left back-to-school shopping for the last minute. The stores are full of like-minded parents, and school supply options are dwindling. You wish you had taken care of this sooner.
According to a RetailMeNot survey, back-to-school shopping causes anxiety for nine out of 10 parents, and for 63 percent of those parents, in-store dilemmas — such as crowds and not finding the right supplies — are a source of that anxiety. For a stress-free shopping experience, consider hitting the stores — and finding your kids’ favorite supplies — at least four weeks before school starts. You’ll be happy you did!
Out With the Old, In With the New
Don’t let clutter hold you or your kids back this school year. Kids quickly outgrow clothing, shoes, toys, and just about everything else before you may even notice. If they can’t or don’t use it, donate or recycle these used items and make space for new memories.
Check out these other tips designed to bring some peace into your life during this active season.
Clean Out the Cupboards
Spring cleaning has become a ritual for many households, but back-to-school season warrants a deep cleaning just as much. Once you’re finished decluttering, keep your motor running and give the whole house a thorough scrubbing. You’ll be glad you did come September.
Compile Your Documentation
Schools often require certain documentation at the beginning of the year, especially if you’re enrolling your child at the school for the first time. To avoid scrambling for these documents later on, get everything in order ahead of time. This may require making appointments for immunizations or physical exams, if your child plays sports.
Create a Filing System
Once school starts, you can expect to see a steady flow of paper making its way home in your children’s backpacks: homework, art projects, parent handouts, progress reports, and more. Rather than let these cherished mementos pile up or get scattered throughout your home, create a filing system for everything you want or need to keep. This will help you keep things organized and hold onto only what’s really necessary.
Call in a Personal Assistant
Does accomplishing all of this before school starts seem like an impossible task? You don’t have to do it alone. Hire a personal assistant to take on some of your errands, chores, and other household management tasks and help give you a stress-free back-to-school transition. Plus, this will free you up to spend more time with your kids before they start class!
by Kara | Jul 13, 2018 | Organizational, Residential
Summer is now in full swing, and we all know that in the Northwest, those sunny days are numbered. If you’re missing out on this precious sunlight due to household chores and other indoor tasks, the time has come to set your priorities straight. Keep reading to learn why spending time in the sun is crucial and discover new ways to get outside.
How Sunlight Helps
Spending time in the sun can improve your well-being in the following ways.
Strengthens Your Immune System
When you spend time in the sun, your body produces vitamin D, which is necessary to keep your immune system going strong. A lack of vitamin D can also increase your likelihood of developing an autoimmune disorder. When paired with proper sunscreen practices, spending time in the sun can be an easy way to stay healthy!
Keeps Your Bones and Teeth Healthy
As long as you consume enough calcium, sun exposure can help keep your bones and teeth strong. This is because vitamin D makes it easier for your bones to absorb calcium. Having a vitamin D deficiency can even make you more susceptible to osteoporosis.
Potentially Helps You Live Longer
According to a study that followed nearly 30,000 Swedish women for 20 years, those who spent the most time in the sun lived an average of 0.6 to 2.1 years longer than the sun avoiders, primarily because they were less likely to have developed cardiovascular disease and other noncancer illnesses. Although the study’s authors can’t confirm direct causation, they do think that sunshine exposure may improve cardiovascular health.
Makes You Happier
Spending time in the sun causes your brain to release more serotonin, a hormone responsible for improving mood and focus. If you don’t get enough sunshine, your serotonin levels may drop, increasing your risk of major depressive disorder with seasonal pattern (depression caused by seasonal changes).
To keep your spirits high this summer, get outside and enjoy the sun!
How to Spend More Time Outside
We know that when the sun comes out, the number of items on your to-do list doesn’t decrease. To get outside without neglecting your responsibilities, consider hiring a personal assistant to handle some of your household management, chores, errands, and whatever else is keeping you indoors.
by Kara | Mar 7, 2018 | Residential
This year’s icy Seattle winter will soon begin to thaw, which means locals will soon emerge from their indoor sanctuaries and into the sun. As you gear up for another summer rotation of entertaining guests who are vacationing in town, hosting backyard dinner parties, and clearing room in your schedule for event season, this is the perfect time to get everything in order at home. After all, the spring cleaning phenomenon exists for a reason; not only does the spring bloom inspire motivation, it’s also a chance to brace for even busier times ahead.
Though it’s easy to let household tasks pile up, everyone benefits from a clean and organized environment. Whether you’re currently living with a season’s worth of clutter that is begging to be sorted or are itching to deep-clean your digs, here are some basic cleaning and organization tips to get you started.
Focus on Cleaning Products
You can often get good (and environmentally safe) results using products you probably already have in your pantry. For example, try scrubbing the inside of your refrigerator with a mixture of soda water and salt. The bubbling soda water combined with salt granules can make an efficient appliance cleaner.
If you notice hard water stains accumulating by your faucets, soak some paper towels in white vinegar and lay them over the stains for 60 minutes. This softens the deposits and allows for easy removal.
End the Paper Chase
Paperwork is a major source of clutter at home. Eliminate piles by creating a filing system for the important documents you must keep. Label manila folders and file them immediately in a designated cabinet, bin, drawer, or box where they are easily accessible. If you run a home office or have a large number of paper documents that need to be organized, you might even want to invest in a small business document scanner to help make your office paperless.
Just say no to junk mail! Before stepping into the house, re-route your junk mail, magazine inserts and reply envelopes to the recycle bin. Keep a mini trash can inside of the car and dump it daily. It can pull double-duty as a container for items that need to go back into the car from the house.
Enlist Some Help
A personal assistant can help you tidy up this season, even as your own schedule starts to fill up! Your PA can be your partner in spring cleaning and organization in the following ways (and many more!):
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- Organize those pesky papers and files mentioned above.
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- Do some light cleaning (such as dusting, dishes, laundry, and more) to maintain your freshly clean spaces all season long.
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- Water your plants and keep them healthy as they bloom, further brightening your home.
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- Prep in-season veggies and fruits for healthy meals that are ready-to-go when you get home from work.
- Set up service appointments to take care of seasonal concerns such as landscaping, car maintenance, or roof repairs.
Don’t Stop There
Spring cleaning applies outside the home as well as inside! A well-organized shed can help you keep your lawn and garden supplies at the ready for seasonal planting and pruning.
Finally, once your winter clutter has been eliminated, relax and enjoy your clean and organized surroundings. Invite friends over and enjoy!
