Unlocking the Best-Kept Secrets of Life Management from Personal Assistants

Begin with proper organization

Are you feelling stressed out with piles of disorganized papers and other items cluttering your desk? Make like the professional PAs and have everything organized with military precision. Before you even start organizing all of your things, you should first sort them out into neat and categorized sections so you know exactly where everything should go. This is done to ensure that you don’t mix things up and prevent important stuff from getting lost in the fray. This process may take some considerable time, but patience is a key virtue.

Having a clear and foolproof organizational system is important because it helps you stay focused and disciplined with your life. Best of all, the organizing techniques that you’ve done to your physical property can also be applied to intangible matters such as your email inbox. Organizing your email account will surely lift a significant weight upon your shoulders since you don’t have to suffer the indignity of sifting through so much digital content in order to find what you’re looking for, and thereby making your online correspondence that much easier to manage.

Make a habit of creating lists

If you’re the kind of person that has to handle a lot of things on any given day, then make like a seasoned PA and create lists every day. Yes, you’ve read that right: every single day. Personal assistants never start their day unless they have a complete checklist of things that they need to cross off before they deem their job done for the day. As such, you should aspire to create to-do lists daily so that you’ll never have to miss any important job or task that needs to be done.

Thanks to the conveniences of modern technology, you can now use your arsenal of mobile devices—laptop, tablet, smartphone—to create your daily lists via special apps. That way, you’ll always have your list for the day with you at all times, and you’ll be able to see what things you’ve already accomplished and what you still need to finish. Bear in mind that when creating such lists, you need to make them at least a day before so that you won’t have to waste precious time trying to come up with essential tasks that you need to do.

Schedule everything on the calendar

In relation to the previous section about making a habit of creating lists, you should also be mindful of making sure that everything you will do is properly scheduled on the calendar. Since personal assistants are responsible for scheduling any and all appointments of their employers, you should also make it a point to have everything plotted with their allotted time frame. You’ll breathe a sigh of relief every time you will do this because it prevents you from creating conflicting schedules, plus knowing exactly which jobs need to be prioritized.

Another advantage of habitual calendar scheduling is that this will not allow you to forget important special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. A lot of people who are so focused with their work tend to miss crucial moments in their personal lives, so don’t be one of these people. Use the calendar app on your phone, tablet, or laptop and make sure that the scheduled events on them match with the activities outlined on your daily lists so that everything you have is completely organized and synchronized at the same time.

Never forget to take notes

Whenever you spontaneously come up with a great idea or remembered something important, your first instinct should be to note it down immediately before you forget it. Personal assistants are experts at note taking because they’re used to their employers dictating or rattling off whatever it is that they need to remember for later. In your case, you should always be alert and ready to jot down that sudden burst of inspiration or recollection the second it comes into your mind and put it into pen and paper so you’ll have a physical record of your ideas.

Keeping a small journal or diary with you everywhere is vital because note taking isn’t just about transcribing your own thoughts and ideas; such tools are also good if you need to write down important information that you’ve learned or encountered on a typical day. However, if you prefer a more modern way to record your thoughts, you can always use your smartphone and rely on a standard note taking app for easy storage. Another great alternative would be to record your thoughts on a voice recording app so you can easily play back whatever it is you want to remember.

Establish regular daily routines

Even though your typical week will have varying tasks to accomplish, there are still some things that will remain constant all throughout which will help you get through the day with relative ease. Personal assistants who have experienced long tenures with certain employers understand the value of maintaining regular routines infused with a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule because it keeps their bosses relaxed and less prone to feeling stress. Therefore, it would be in your best interest to make sure that you have your own personal pockets of time that will allow you a bit of breathing room amidst the chaos.

For instance: if you know that you will never function properly in the mornings unless you are able to have your special cup of coffee, cappuccino, or blended drink at Starbucks, then make sure that you stop by the ubiquitous coffee shop first thing in the morning before proceeding with everything else on your itinerary for the day. Little things like this truly matter when you look at the big picture because without the comfort of familiar routines, you’re unlikely to get your tasks done efficiently or competently.

Always maintain grace under pressure

Earlier, we mentioned that personal assistants have it really tough, especially if they happen to be under the employ of a very demanding and hard-to-please boss. But what many PAs are capable of is that they don’t take things personally when work is involved because they must remain poised and professional above all. Possessing a high threshold for patience is necessary because life is never perfect and sometimes things just aren’t going to go your way all the time, so you have to stay level-headed every time you encounter stress.

Whenever you’re having a bad day at work, remember to never take out your frustrations against anyone else since that will come off as completely unprofessional. A good way for you to control your emotions from boiling over is to take a step back and take deep, calming breaths while thinking about things that you’re immensely grateful for. This is just one of the many stress-relieving techniques you can do in order to ensure that you’ll always remain calm and collected even when everything else around you is mired in so much disarray.