For starters, you will never, ever catch me multitasking. For starters, less multitasking, and more planing. Keeping it simple is the key. The result less juggling of multiple projects, half cooked job, less chaos and stress, and more high quality work done to completion. You certainly can fulfil multiple tasks, but you should tackle them one at a time so each one — and each person on the other end of that task — gets 100 percent of your attention and energy.
Be Your Best Personal Assistant:
The first step to success involves taking responsibility for your own actions and behaviour. It may sound ominous, but in fact this kind of approach can be very rewarding and satisfying. That’s because it’s a way of putting yourself in the driving seat.
1. Improve your time management skills
The phrase ‘time is money’ is often true. Having the ability to use your initiative to manage and plan your time appropriately is seen as a key skill. You’ll need to think about how you are going to carry out certain tasks and undertake them in the most time and cost efficient manner, which will enable you to achieve more with less.
2. Prioritise your work
This is part of
It involves placing and executing your tasks in a particular order to prevent things mounting up and needing to be completed all at once.
Stress is created when you become overloaded with too much, so prioritising your workload should help to avoid this happening. Increase your productivity by managing your workloads according to deadlines and its level of importance.
3. Deal with things as they come in
Rather than waiting for your work to pile up, it’s a good idea to get things out of the way as soon as they hit your desk.
Deal with the incoming; mail, email, text message, social network comments, phone calls, immediately as you receive them either delete it or send a response, do not keep them for later.
You can also set your own deadlines ahead of any project or task to ensure that you get things done as quickly as possible.
4. Write to do lists or use task reminders in email programs like Microsoft Outlook
Do not rely on your memory, get into habit of writing to do lists. You can use reminders and task lists to help you remember what you need to do and by when, as well as to check them off once they have been done. It will also provide a record of what you have done during a given period. Tasks can include a variety of things, including the following for example:
5. Don’t be shy but ask questions
If you aren’t sure what to do, or how to go about a particular task, then make sure that you pluck up the courage to ask questions. To leave it until later will make your life more difficult and cause anxiety. Also try to read any manuals or relevant internet sites which might hold the answer you are looking for.
6. Focus on what’s important
It is crucial to focus on what’s important. So, for example,
Don’t waste your time on junk mail and emails.
7. Learn is to say “No!”
One of the most important things you can learn is to say “No!” While you shouldn’t decline tasks just for the sake of it, saying no to requests that will unnecessarily pile pressure on you when you have more urgent tasks to undertake is important.
You will be storing up trouble later if you say yes when you know your workload is already at full capacity. So make sure you are decisive about what you can achieve, how and when.
Your colleagues will respect you all the more for it, particularly if you can also offer solutions to a particular problem in a way that increases the overall productivity of your organisation.
Managing yourself and planning your time effectively will allow you to rise. You never know, it could eventually lead to a much deserved promotion and success.
If you take just a casual look at the iOS App Store, you’ll see that personal assistants are a dime a dozen, and I have personally tried and discarded many. Many iOS users are perfectly content with Siri, the in-built iOS personal assistant which can do everything from take notes to telling you the meaning of life.
But Siri only does what you tell it to do – it responds to direct questions, it doesn’t take the initiative and remind you of things itself. So what if you need a virtual personal assistant keeping a watch on your schedule and telling you when peoples birthdays were, or keeping your address book up-to-date? One good app for that is the free EasilyDo. It takes a bit of setting up, but finally you’ll have a nice little app keeping watch on the little details while you take care of the bigger picture stuff.
Once you’ve installed it and opened it up, head to the settings and you’ll a row along the top indicating all possible accounts that you can connect. At present, it supports Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Exchange, iCloud, IMAP mail accounts, Evernote, LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox and Box.
