by Kara | Oct 24, 2024 | General, Home, Organizational, Outsourcing, Residential
Have you ever imagined having someone take care of all those tasks that consume your day? Let’s dive into a typical day in the life of a personal assistant and see how they can bring ease and simplicity to your life.
9:00 AM – Setting the Tone for the Day
Your household assistant arrives, bringing a sense of calm and focus as they prepare to tackle the day. They begin by reviewing your schedule and to-do list, scanning your communication channels for any pressing matters. With a load of laundry started, the house tidied up, and a shopping list prepared, they ensure that your day flows smoothly, leaving you free to focus on what truly matters.
10:00 AM – Running Those Never-Ending Errands
Picture your personal assistant expertly navigating their route, efficiently checking off your errands. Need groceries, dry cleaning picked up, or a special gift sourced? Your assistant handles it all with care and by the time they return, your errands are complete and you haven’t had to lift a finger.
12:00 PM – Bringing Meals to Life
Your kitchen becomes a haven of culinary creativity as your personal assistant whips up meals tailored just for you. Whether it’s a favorite family recipe or something new to delight your taste buds, they handle the cooking and also the clean-up, that way you can enjoy the delicious results without the hassle. Imagine coming home to the comforting aroma of a home-cooked meal, ready to be enjoyed together.
1:00 PM – Keeping Your Home in Perfect Order
As the afternoon unfolds, your personal assistant keeps things running smoothly. The kitchen and dining areas are cleaned, laundry is folded, every room is tidied up and trash is taken out. By the time they’re done, your home is a sanctuary of order and tranquility.
2:00 PM – Managing Life’s Details
Your personal assistant is on the phone coordinating every last detail for your upcoming event. Whether it’s organizing a special occasion, overseeing a home improvement project, or arranging travel plans, they manage it all with thoughtful precision. You just rest easy knowing that every aspect is handled, leaving you free to enjoy the moments that matter.
4:00 PM – Wrapping Up the Day
As the day winds down, your personal assistant makes sure everything is in place, leaving your home in perfect order. They’ll be back tomorrow or any other day, ready to pick up where they left off with the same dedication and care.
At Pepper’s Personal Assistants, we understand that every home is unique, which is why we tailor our services to meet your specific needs and schedule. By welcoming a personal assistant into your life, you can let go of the daily tasks that drain your time and energy, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.
Ready to simplify your life? Contact us today or schedule a call to learn more about how Pepper’s Personal Assistants can bring ease and joy to your life.
by Kara | May 13, 2024 | Home, Organizational
Spring is the perfect time to refresh and rejuvenate your home after the winter months. The garden is coming back to life, and it’s becoming warm enough to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
With the help of our handy checklist, you can manage your household and keep everything clean, organized, and operating smoothly.
Spring Household Maintenance Planner for Working Moms
As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” However, it’s easy to forget or put off home maintenance if you don’t have a list of what to check for and a method for keeping everything organized. One survey found that 68 percent of homeowners don’t have an annual home maintenance checklist or routine.
Completing your annual spring-cleaning is easier with an “organize my house” checklist and some prioritizing in advance. In fact, there are a variety of tools out there to help busy moms plan and schedule household tasks. They include:
- Apps such as Trello and Asana
- Home management books
- Free printables for home organization
No matter what method you use to prioritize and schedule your home maintenance to-dos, consider adding the following items to your checklist:
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Exterior Repairs and Maintenance
- Check for damage to your home’s exterior, including the foundation, siding, roof, and gutters, and identify vendors to help with repairs.
- Inspect caulking around doors and windows and reseal as needed.
- Identify any areas of pest or insect damage and schedule a preventative or remedial exterminator visit.
- Spruce up outdoor spaces by cleaning patio furniture, power-washing decks and walkways, and testing exterior lighting.
- Begin cleanup of lawn and consider hiring a professional landscaper for pruning, mulching, and garden planting.
- Clean out the outdoor grill and firepit.
- Schedule lawn irrigation system startup and annual testing.
- Schedule pool opening.
Interior Decluttering and Maintenance
- Do a walk-through of each room and determine what needs to be reorganized.
- Donate or sell items you no longer need.
- Identify furniture and furnishings in need of repair or replacement.
- Deep-clean carpets and reseal wood floors as needed.
- Clean windows, drapes, and other upholstery to remove built-up dirt and allergens.
- Dust surfaces throughout each room.
- Test and replace batteries in smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms.
- Organize garage and storage spaces as needed.
HVAC, Plumbing, and Appliance Maintenance
- Schedule a professional inspection and cleaning for your HVAC and plumbing equipment, including:
- Furnace/boiler
- Chimney interior
- Septic and well systems
- Sump pump
- Water softener
- Dehumidification system
- Replace HVAC air filters and clean heating/cooling vents and returns.
- Inspect faucets, toilets, and pipes for leaks and signs of damage and repair as needed.
- Clean and descale dishwasher, washing machine, and other appliances to maintain efficiency.
- Replace refrigerator water filters as needed.
- Run an oven self-cleaning cycle.
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How Pepper’s Personal Assistants Helps Busy Moms
Keeping up with household maintenance can feel overwhelming. And if you’re managing household chores, childcare, and your career, you may be like many moms who feel even more stretched. In one survey, 93 percent of moms reported feeling burned out.
Thankfully, there’s hope. At Pepper’s Personal Assistants, we understand how hectic your schedule can be as a working mom, and we’re here to help you plan and organize your lengthy to-do list. One of our highly skilled household assistants can help you easily tackle your spring checklist, so you get it all done and have more time for the people and things you love. From organizing clutter to scheduling maintenance appointments and supervising repairs, your assistant can handle it all. (You don’t even have to be home for it to get done).
To see how much time you can get back in your day, download our free resource: What Your Life Could Look Like with a Household Assistant.
by Kara | Apr 24, 2024 | Home, Organizational
Of all the time-consuming household chores out there, laundry is one of the most frustrating. You can only avoid laundry for so long, and when the piles of clothes keep growing, so does your stress level.
If you’re an overwhelmed mom at the end of her rope, there are some things you can do to “lighten your load” and manage your laundry with fewer headaches.
Why Doing the Laundry Is So Challenging
No matter the size of your family, laundry can be a tedious chore—and one that never gets permanently crossed off your to-do list. The moment you think you’re done, there’s more laundry ready to go in the washer.
For many moms, the whole process of sorting, washing, folding, and putting clothes away is exhausting. When life gets extra busy, it’s not unusual to have clothes sitting in the dryer all day or clean clothes that never make it back to the closet.
If doing laundry eats up a lot more of your time than you’d like, you’re not alone. Research has found that the average mom spends an estimated 3.5 hours on laundry each week, totaling five months of her life spent on laundry by the time her child reaches age 18. Imagine what else you could do with five extra months of time!
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5 Tips to Help Overwhelmed Moms Stay On Top of the Laundry
Though laundry is necessary in every household, full-time working moms are too busy to spend more time on it than is necessary. Between your career, family responsibilities, and other household chores, you have more than enough on your plate.
If you’re wondering how to keep up with laundry and avoid feeling paralyzed by a messy house, take the stress out of laundry day with these practical tips:
1. Set a realistic and repeatable wash schedule.
Depending on your family size and lifestyle, it may be easier to have set days for doing laundry rather than making every day laundry day. For example, you could set aside a morning or afternoon and finish all the laundry in that time frame.
Alternatively, you could set up a weekly schedule in which you commit to doing a specific number of loads on specific days. There are also apps, such as Todoist or Home Tasker, that can help you create and stick to a laundry schedule that fits your family’s needs.
2. Don’t wash after every wear.
Many clothing items—such as undergarments, socks, and T-shirts—require a wash after every wear, but others do not. For example, you can wear jeans and some sweaters more than once before washing them. By washing these items only when they become soiled or stained, you can reduce your weekly washing load and avoid the premature wear and tear of those items.
3. Fold clothes as soon as they’re done in the dryer.
Taking clothes out of the dryer immediately often provides the satisfaction that one more load is done and off your to-do list. But folding and putting away clothes right away does more than give you a sense of achievement: It also helps you cut down on wrinkles and save some ironing time.
4. Sort laundry throughout the week.
If you’re already an overwhelmed mom, you’ll likely become even more distressed at the sight of an enormous pile of unsorted laundry. However, if you pre-sort dirty laundry right after you wear it, you can quickly grab a load for washing without having to sort it first.
There are different ways to sort: You can place hampers for whites, colors, and delicates in a central location, or you can make it easier for everyone to chip in by placing sorting hampers in bedrooms. The next time you need to throw a quick load of whites into the washer, the items will be sorted and ready to go.
5. Enlist some help.
Of course, all the laundry needs to get done, but it doesn’t all have to be done by you. You can split laundry responsibilities among household members—or save time for everyone by outsourcing laundry duties to a household assistant. A household assistant can do the laundry, put all the clothes away, and keep your laundry room tidy and stocked. A reliable assistant can also make dry cleaning runs and tackle many other household chores for you and your family.
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Get More Hours Back in Your Day
Household laundry is too time-consuming to manage without the right help and an efficient system for getting it all done. By outsourcing chores to a trusted household assistant, you could say goodbye to ever doing laundry again and go from being an overwhelmed mom to a content and unstressed mom.
To learn more, download our e-book, What Your Life Could Look Like with a Household Assistant.
by Kara | Apr 4, 2024 | News, Organizational
At any point in time, you have a lot going on. Between your career, kid-related activities, and household responsibilities, you sometimes struggle to ensure it doesn’t all collapse around you.
But just because you aspire to have it all doesn’t mean you have to do it all. With the help of a household assistant, you can cross everything off your to-do list and fit quality family time and self-care into your schedule.
The Challenges of Balancing Work, Family, and Personal Time
If you’ve ever felt there’s too much to manage and not enough time to do it, you’re not alone. A recent study found that most working parents are stretched too thin, with 66 percent saying they feel burned out. Working mothers have a particularly hard time because they shoulder many household responsibilities without help. More than one in four (28 percent) working moms in the study reported managing family responsibilities alone during weekends, and 41.3 percent said they managed them alone during the week.
The weight of family and household chores leaves most working moms with little to no personal time. According to a 2023 Motherly study, 62 percent of moms get less than an hour to themselves each day. If you can relate, you know how frustrating it can be to lack time for yourself and the things that matter most to you.
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How a Household Assistant Helps
Time is one of the most valuable yet scarce resources we have. However, for working mothers who feel pressure to be a supermom and do it all, it seems there are never enough hours in the day.
If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by a messy house or like you’re on an endless hamster wheel of trying to be a great career professional, mother, and friend and make time for yourself, there’s a viable solution! Getting much-needed help from a personal assistant provides the freedom you need to focus more on what you want to do and less on what you have to do. Research shows outsourcing household chores can even feel more rewarding than a salary increase.
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Here are three key benefits you can enjoy by making this time-saving (and life-changing) investment:
1. More Time for the Things That Matter Most
Instead of spending the bulk of your evenings and weekends on draining household chores, such as doing laundry, washing dishes, or making appointments, you can outsource these tasks to a household assistant. Think of all the time you’ll have for family and personal activities when you have someone to take ownership of completing all those chores and clearing them off your plate.
Your assistant can handle the following tasks for you:
- Doing laundry
- Shopping for groceries and preparing food
- Making returns and running other errands
- Paying bills
- Walking the dog
- Making and rescheduling appointments
- Supervising repair technicians and taking deliveries
- Planning travel, including packing and unpacking
2. A Less Stressful Life
Carrying the mental load of everything on your to-do list is draining enough. But spending hours on chores while you feel guilty neglecting the things and people most important to you is also stressful. However, you can remove those stressors with a personal assistant who can bring more organization and order to your life and household.
When you work with Pepper’s Personal Assistants, we take the time to understand your household needs and match you with the ideal household assistant for you and your family. Once your assistant is up and running, you’ll need only a 15-minute weekly check-in with them to gain the peace of mind that comes with knowing all the chores are getting done the way you would do them yourself (or better!).
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3. Household Help Without the Administrative Headaches
Working with a household assistant doesn’t have to include the added responsibilities of managing payroll, taxes, and labor law compliance. When you hire a Pepper’s personal assistant, you get experienced household help, and we do all the rest. We manage everything from your assistant’s pay and payroll taxes to their health benefits and performance reviews.
Work with Seattle’s Trusted Source of Personal Household Assistants
Life is too short to spend on household chores that rob you of precious time with your family and other passions. By delegating those chores to an experienced and trustworthy household assistant, you can enjoy more of life while keeping your household running like clockwork.
Discover how to put more hours back into your week, and download our guide, What Your Life Could Look Like with a Household Assistant.
