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Helping you with the administrative tasks is not the only job of being a Virtual Assistant. An Online Personal Assistant can help you assist your business in various ways; one is helping you manage your people. Lots of VA are most skilled and technology savvy. They can be a great factor in increasing your efficiency in running your business.

Reliability
One of the abilities of the best Virtual Assistant is Reliability. It is the most important one, and it seems to be the most common. Clients outsource you and expect you to be always available to be their online personal assistant. Your clients trusted you and expected you to finish your task on time. You need to let the client know whats going on the assigned task, instituting how and when you should update them when they outsource you and also before you begin each new task. Being reliable and professional is necessary for this industry. Reliability is having good communication and keeping your clients updated.

Time Management
Another ability is using their time more effectively and practicing good time management skills. Most of the Virtual Assistant work in long hours and that is why it’s important to plan your tasks well. You’ll probably have numerous things to do in a day so plan ahead (leaving time for unplanned things to drop in) and schedule tasks for when you’re at your most efficient. Providing a calendar to all your assignments will surely help you.

Good Communication
Having good communication skills is one ability that will satisfy your client. A Virtual Assistant must inform the client how there is progressing, so it is very important to establish how and when to update them also when each new task had begun. If unforeseen circumstances cause a delay in your work, you email your client before your deadline passes to let them know when they can expect your tasks and why.
Online Personal Assistant are asked to do various things they have never done before and sometimes to do everything. To become an effective virtual assistant, you need to be resourceful and find the data yourself. Providing solutions and solving problems for clients is the whole point of becoming a virtual assistant. Be honest with your client about the extent of your abilities, and you will do well. You’re not supposed to know everything, but the best virtual assistant will inform clients when he never encountered a task before and reassured the client that he would be satisfied to find out what needs to be completed and get back to the client with the right answers.
The Online Personal Assistant should keep on learning and to be on top of trends and changes in both his industry and in the world of technology. He should have keen investigative skills. If his client wants him to use a new application to communicate with him, then he should quickly learn how it works.

Five years ago I began an exciting journey to find a new career after exiting the military. What I thought would be an experience that would provide endless opportunities and bountiful employment offers was anything but that. At this point in my life I was two years in to receiving a bachelors degree in computer science, had developed a well put resume that translated all of my military experience and training into relevant skills for the job I was seeking and had spent hours practicing responses for interview questions. In my mind I had done everything I could to prepare myself to secure my dream job. But instead I found myself working part-time for an Internet service provider making minimum wage and answering customer service requests day in and day out.

I wanted more. This was not the future I had envisioned for myself after serving five years in the Army. I was tenacious and driven. I had a solid background and compelling achievements. Even so I spent the next year daydreaming between customer service calls of the career that I wish had. The career I should have.

Beginning a job search and finding a new career is a major undertaking for any job seeker. I found transitioning into the civilian workforce after leaving the military to be especially challenging. Employers are inundated by hundreds of resumes for most job openings. Therefore, recruiters rank applicants by matching keywords and you may be overlooked if important skills and qualifications are missing from your resume. Your resume must contain the keywords employers are looking for and demonstrate the value you would bring to the company through your accomplishments.

When I began job hunting I wasted countless hours analyzing jobs for skills that aligned with my resume and comparing my resume to job descriptions. I studied each and every job posting and sent numerous resumes out weekly with no response. I just kept sending out the same resume to employer after employer without making any changes and as a result never hearing anything back.

What I ultimately discovered is that your resume is THE most important document in your job search. Customize your resume to stand out. If you want to grab hiring managers’ attention, you must take the time to tailor your resume to each job posting. Tailoring your resume to a job description is essential to stand out as the right candidate. Your resume must be focused, tailored to the job posting and professional. You need a great resume, targeted EVERY TIME to the position you are applying for. The effort you put in up front can make all the difference to whether you actually get the job you want.

Eventually I learned how to tailor my resume and align my qualifications to the position I wanted, and landed that dream job at a top-notch software company. My experience inspired me to create SkillSyncer, a keyword optimization tool designed to help job seekers optimize and tailor their resume. SkillSyncer is powered by machine learning that intelligently compares your resume to a job posting and identifies skills and keywords that are absent from your resume.

If you are involved with social media for your business, you probably have some knowledge about search engine optimization (SEO). As a business person (whether a business owner or a business person), you understand the importance of a content marketing strategy in order to succeed. There are certain tricks that will help you with SEO.

The critical nature of SEO
Your ability to optimize your content in the most effective way possible can truly be critical to your business’ success. If you are not sure why it is so important for your business that you optimize your content, just remember that if your content is not optimized for the search engines, your rankings on the search engines’ pages will be low and people who are searching for what you do will not be able to find you. The truth is that people are inclined to choose whatever is at the top of the page and very few have the patience to drill down the list (or, certainly not to subsequent pages).

There are some SEO tricks that may help your business tremendously. In any case, they are certainly worth trying.

Present your content in short segments and make it easily searched and shared: As you are writing your content, it is very important that you do so with the search engines in mind. What you should have in your mind at all times is that you can break your content down into short segments (that can stand alone or be a part of a greater whole at the same time). Of course, your content should be search-friendly, easily digested, and easily shared at the same time. It is critical that you write content that satisfies the needs of your target audience members. It must be more about them than it is about you. You should have the concept of WIIFM? (What’s In It For Me?) in mind whenever you write content. What that means is that you must be able to solve the other person’s problems before you consider your needs. Of course, in due course, your needs will be met as well.

Focus your content in two different directions: Undoubtedly, your first responsibility is to write with your target audience members in mind. As you probably aware, you must connect with those people on an emotional/human level. If you are not able to do that, you will not be able to establish and grow a relationship with the other person in any real way. Now that we have established why the first direction is so important, it is time to consider the second direction. That is to focus your writing on the spiders. Just in case you are not sure what the term, “spider” means, spiders are the robots that search the web to look for clues about which pages of content are worthy of ranking high (higher than other pages). That second focus is just as important as the first focus because, without the spiders, your content will not get noticed. Of course, your ultimate goal is for humans to notice what you are sharing and build a relationship with you based on what they are reading. However, they won’t have access to the content if the spiders don’t deem it worth ranking at the top of the search engines’ pages. It is a simple concept. The concept of how the spiders work is that they pay attention to how frequently you post, how interesting your content happens to be, the strength of your headlines, how solid the structure of your content is, the quality of your links, and how engaged your audience is with you. Spiders are built to compare your content to the other content that is on the web (on a similar topic, of course). Because spiders are not human, they do have some limitations when it comes to being able to judge certain things, however.

Try out an auditing tool (but do the research to determine how much you can do with it and how much you can’t): The way that an SEO auditing tool works is that you enter one of your keywords or key phrases into the tool and then that keyword or key phrase will receive a grade (poor or good). That should be enough of a guide for you to tweak what needs to be tweaked before you go any further with your content. You can find a list of auditing tools by doing a search. You should take a good look at each one so that you can determine which tool will work most effectively for your particular business.
Conclusion
You have the potential to really make a difference for your business by implementing the tips that you have here. They may very well help you to drive more traffic to your website, which is one of your constant goals. Certainly, you have nothing to lose and, probably, a great deal to gain. Of course, none of those tips will be effective if you are not producing top-quality content, which you are undoubtedly doing.

Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company’s Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. He also reduced company travel and travel costs by introducing and implementing various collaboration technologies.

His expertise includes business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.

The digital world is full of new ideas and strategies, but the value of the old, traditional marketing can never decrease. It is as important and effective as digital marketing. Everything depends on the target audience.

Advertisements in newspapers and magazines have the same effect as the advertisements on social media sites, however, your brand and product should determine the medium you are choosing to advertise. The strategies which are used for marketing are usually an integration of traditional and digital in most cases. Bringing both the marketing forms together creates a larger space for the customers to choose over products and brands, and this also creates a relationship of trust between the brand and the consumer.

It’s very important for the brand to take along its loyal customers from the past together with them, and using traditional marketing strategies makes sure that they don’t lose any of their old customers behind.

New mechanics are used to attract more customers but that doesn’t mean that the traditional systems were ineffective. It all boils down to what product needs to be marketed and where?

Even in this digital era, common strategies like personal selling and publicity by the old customers have been successful in holding onto the old customers and bringing in new customers as well.

Advertisements through social media, giving away sample products, surprise giveaways can attract new customers, but combining both the marketing forms together would help to create a larger customer potential and growth in the brand name and sales of the product. Inbound and outbound marketing revolve around the social media marketing. Inbound is all about attracting customers through SEO and social media marketing, and outbound is reaching the audience through various paid and natural search advertising. The limit to reach people is different for both of them. It is important to know where to use the inbound and outbound marketing.

Conventional way of advertising surely is a passive while the web marketing is active and involves the target audience. Some medium work better than the other mediums; so it only makes sense to utilize both the classic and internet marketing techniques and allows the brand message to spread across different mediums.

Interactions and exposure given by the conventional way are much larger than the social media marketing. It is important to take the old and new ideas simultaneously to reach extensive audience and to be in the competition.

Our businesses also differ in terms of interface with clients. If you do “business to business” transactions, the number of people you interact with on a daily basis may differ from someone whose business relies on interacting with consumers. Appointments may be more practical in some instances than others. You have to tailor-make how you manage access to your particular situation if you are to eliminate distractions. Having said that it is important to note that some people do not mind spending the whole day at the office entertaining friends, visitors, and casual acquaintances dropping into the office whenever they feel like it. Do not be that kind of person. It sets the wrong kind of example to junior staff and can harm one’s productivity because these people take up time that you do not have and besides you want to cultivate a professional environment.

The demands of the day are enough to fill the eight working hours available unless if you tend to stay back and play catch up. How do you stay competitive in the market if there is no separation between work and play? Anybody serious about success and achieving effective results will put boundaries that are clear so that there is no confusion. Entrepreneurs are more susceptible to this especially when the workplace is easily accessible. The fact that you are your own boss even puts more responsibility on you to maintain self-discipline and self – management. I have written a whole book called, “Achieve More through Self – Leadership. In it I walk you through the practicalities of how you can get better results through managing self.

Appointments are an important way of not only managing time but managing life. They help you become more structured and productive. Some people seem not to be able to honour their appointments. I once attended a job interview that was supposed to start at 10:30am. By 11:30am there had been no communication about what was happening or when the supposed job interview was going to take place. I decided at the point that this company was probably not good enough for me to join because if you don’t respect people’s time you probably do not respect them.

You may be saying appointments are just not for me yet you never rock up at the doctor, dentist, lawyer or hairstylist without an appointment. Why is that the case? Because you simply won’t see the dentist without an appointment. They have given you conditions acceptable to them. We tell the world around us how to treat us by what we allow.

Some people are always available when you want to see them. If you are always free to see people at short notice, you are probably not that organized. The one who owns a diary will manage the one who doesn’t own one. Why? Because the one without the diary is always available, even though he is very likely to forget important meetings, dates and engagements because of a lack of organization. I used to have a boss who kept a diary and whatever you promised to do in the line of work, he would write down, including the day and time you said he would have it by. You would of-course forget because you didn’t record it like he did and when the time to deliver comes, guess who would be found wanting. It was then that I decided that I do not commit to an action that I am not willing to write down because, what’s written gets done!

You may be saying, “what if my business feeds off the “walk-ins? The fact that your business relies on walk – in customers should not be an excuse for disorder. Sometimes those who drop in unannounced may indeed be potential customers, suppliers, cold-calling salespeople, and even worthwhile business contacts. There is nothing wrong if the call is beneficial to you and your business but I believe there must be a structure and way of doing things that follows certain pre-set principles. I remember seeing a poster in an office that said “if you don’t have anything to do please don’t do it here”. It’s humorous yes, but true. Appointments help to structure your day and helps you allocate time to what’s important. This means you can focus on your most important asset: the paying customer. There is nothing as bad as walking into a place wanting to do business and staff are inattentive because there is just a demand on their time. I am more understanding if the personnel are not busy entertaining social visits at work.

In conclusion, you know your business situation better than any of us. All we can do is make recommendations that will enable efficiency that leads to growth. Some of you may actually need a personal assistant who will put order in your office and focus on the things you are not willing to do that will enable to focus on the highly value things you ought to do such as running a business.

Do you think successful people are just plain lucky?

Successful people did not become successful because they were lucky.

They did not achieve success by accident. Being at the right place at the right time, meeting relevant people, reading the appropriate book, did not come about accidentally or by luck.

Luck is brought about by Labour Under Correct Knowledge.

Successful people prepared themselves. Instead of giving up on anything they started and wanted to achieve they got stronger by learning more.

Success is a methodical, orderly and deliberate process of deciding what you want to do with your life, what are the steps that you need to undertake to get you there, and lastly what you will do once you get there.

One of the most important aspects, if not the most important aspect to success, is the ability to visualise your successful outcome and stay focused on it until you achieve it.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge, knowledge is limited.” – Albert Einstein

Successful people understood the potential power behind knowledge, yet they also understood that, for them to close the gap between where they are and where they wanted to be, they would have to piece together the enigma that is most often referred to as “life”.

They had to build a picture, a vision, of success in their mind, and then go about taking action on creating that envisioned life.

In much the same way, you have to be serious about your present and future, you need to have the knowledge that is required so you, too, may close the gap: you need to be and remain determined to devote yourself to taking massive action to build your business of succeeding in life.

You, too, will need to see the end, your dream and destiny that you desire in your mind’s eye. It is up to you to take the necessary and relevant action to make it all happen. It’s just like going to the doctor with a particular health problem.

The doctor may prescribe a medication for you to take four times a day, yet he cannot be there with you to ensure that you are taking the medication.

It comes back to deciding to be responsible for your life.

Have you noticed how it all stems from that one attitude? Being responsible for your own life.

Your success, your being responsible 100% for you to live your dream life starts here.

When you accept 100% responsibility for yourself and your current life situation, you will have the power to move towards those things you truly desire in life: which is success in all areas of your life.

This life-changing article is about possibilities and opportunities, knowledge and tools. It will help expose your unique course in life.

It will inspire, support and motivate you to excel, to do what successful people do, to have all that successful people have, and to become a shining example of a successful person.

Here, you’re not being told what you couldn’t do, instead you are being told to shoot for the stars. And above all, you are being shown how to shoot for those stars.

“A person is what he thinks about all day long.” – Emerson

Interesting thought, wouldn’t you think? So much so, it’s worth repeating: “A person is what he thinks about all day long.”

Success and happiness cannot happen if you possess the same old thoughts and beliefs.

If you do not change your mind, if you do not get rid of the unsupportive thoughts and beliefs, you will inevitably remain stuck in your old ways. Not much, if anything, will change.

Let’s give you a quick overview on how change comes about:

Your BEHAVIOUR, how you act (or perhaps do not act), controls your success or failure. Your ability to attain high levels of success is dependent upon your actions and behaviours. Your results are the outcome of your behaviour. Now let’s consider where your behaviours come from and what controls them?

Your FEELINGS command your behaviour. Every action that you take is first filtered through your feelings that reside in your subconscious mind. How you feel about something determines what you do and how well you do it. So where do your feelings come from?

Your ATTITUDES create and influence your feelings. Your attitude is your perspective from which you view life. Whatever attitude you have about anything will affect how you feel, which, in turn, affects how you act. Where do your attitudes come from?

Your BELIEFS create, control and influence your attitudes. What you believe about anything will determine your attitude about it, which will create your feelings, and then which will direct your behaviour and action. Belief patterns are so powerful that two people who are in the same situation could perceive things completely differently. It only requires us to believe what we see and how we see it. We all have thousands of beliefs – big and small. And where do your beliefs come from?

Your THOUGHTS create, control and influence your beliefs. Your thoughts are real and are immensely powerful. Everything you accept from the outside world and everything you feed yourself from within is a product of your thoughts. Everything starts as a thought.

So, it goes without saying you need to learn to control your thoughts. And when you do, you will automatically control your beliefs, your attitudes, your feelings and, consequently, your behaviour and actions.

The big secret to success:

Learn to control your thoughts and you will influence your behaviours and actions. It’s all a mind-set. That’s what we’ve been saying all along.

Success is predictable and is not achieved by accident.

Have the mind-set of the successful people and you will achieve success. Believe and it is yours!

“There is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.” – Joel Osteen

Science of success experts have concluded that the brain is a goal-setting organism.

That is fantastic news for us: for whatever goal we give to our subconscious mind, it will work for us day and night, 24/7, to achieve it for us; to make it a reality.

The principal breakthrough that scientists made was that we do not need to waste our precious time and effort trying to change old thoughts and behaviours: we just simply create new ones.

And the other discovery they made was that we can continue to create new thoughts, new memories, new behaviours, new skills, and learn new things for as long as we are alive on this earth.

Now, with the new discoveries in recent years, it has been scientifically proven that our capacity to achieve and succeed literally has no limits.

Our brain has the capacity to continually learn during our entire lifetime.

Our brain can form new thoughts, can have new memories, and can learn new things by the millions, no matter what your age is. By the millions.

That’s how many new things we can learn, that’s how many new skills we can learn, that’s how many new thoughts we can have, that’s how many new behaviours we can adopt.

This is encouraging because there is no limit on your capacity to achieve new things.

No limits whatsoever for the human brain to learn, memorise, develop, achieve and perform at higher levels than ever imagined. It makes no difference what your age is: you are capable of learning anything new that you want to learn.

That adds to what we spoke of earlier: no more excuses.

“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” – Malcolm X

Your brain has the capacity to achieve way beyond what was ever thought possible. So now is the time to break out of your limited thinking and start dreaming big and imagining unlimited possibilities.

Becoming successful is not impossible.

It is a choice you make through a decision. Every day, step-by-step, you may climb the mountain of success if you’ve decided to do so, if you’re committed to accomplish what the others think impossible.

Design your future now.

Prepare to receive what you desire.

Thanks to the phenomenal advances made in cognitive science and the development of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), personal change, personal transformation, has come a very long way.

In fact, personal growth is no longer a mystery.

NLP has brought to light that change, transformation and growth can be fast, reliable, and even fun. It has shown us that we do not need to spend thousands of hours slaving away to increase our creative-thinking abilities.

By practicing a few simple exercises and applications, you can start your creative juices flowing, and you may even amaze yourself at the quality and quantity of good ideas that you can come up with to expedite your success.

It can allow you to achieve something you seek within days and months as opposed to years and decades. That’s the power of the progress science has made on how the brain works, and also how you can have your mind to be your best ally in achieving anything you want.

Learn to live as you like by no longer living as you dislike.

Are you ready to get on the road to success and fulfilment?

Bear in mind, much like everything else in life, success requires practice and massive, consistent action.

“Success doesn’t mean the absence of failures; it means the attainment of ultimate objectives. It means winning the war, not every battle.” – Edwin C Bliss

Do you feel as if you’ve outgrown your circle of friends? Perhaps you do not feel safe or understood any longer. There may be fewer and fewer things you can share with people in your habitual circle, and it leaves you feeling lonely or isolated. If so, you are not alone. Welcome to one of the core dynamics of continuous growth!

As we continue to evolve, many of us struggle with a sense of not quite fitting in with our traditional community or tribe: we may have expanded or changed beyond the borders of tribal norms, and no longer find the same sense of belonging there. Other members may have tightened the tribal rules to foster a sense of security. As a result, we may feel a sense of disconnection or alienation.

In truth, each one of us belongs to many tribes simultaneously: there is your original tribe – the family you were born into – and then there are all the communities of choice you have joined: your work tribe, your social circles, your faith-based community, your neighborhood, and more. These communities are not static; they are in continuous flux because they consist of individuals who are in continuous states of change. When there is a lot of change happening in either the individual or the community, a sense of dissonance results.

How are we to deal with this? First, it is important to recognize that tribal allegiances were historically forged for survival. They were adapted over the course of centuries to ensure the safety and survival of the group. Survival required that individuation be sacrificed for the trade-off of security.

In modern society, the tables are flipped. Whether we enjoy it or not, change is essential for survival at every level of being. The pace of change is driven by technological advances and happens with increasing rapidity: sociologists estimate that more change has taken place in society over the course of the past 100 years, than in the totality of the previous 6,000 years. Individual adaptation now is a requirement for survival, and the pace of individual change does not always match the pace at which our various tribal communities evolve. The resulting dissonance can cause intense friction and pain.

Dissonance also results from confusion between the concepts of ‘connection’ and ‘community.’ We tend to equate one with the other, when they really relate to different qualities. Connection relates to connectivity: the objective physical technology or media that enables us to build community, but which does not represent the quality of that community. Connectivity simply offers the opportunity to connect with others through internet, texting, phone calls, or any other social networking options.

Community is the result of building relationship through meaningful interaction over time. There is no shortcut; it is a process that develops when bonds of trust and intimacy are nurtured and honored.

And here lies a caveat: When we confuse connectivity with community, we depersonalize the sacred nature of true community and start relating to people as objects. Instead of developing intimacy over time, we collect friends on social network sites or try to buy people’s allegiance. Yet friending is simply an act of connecting; it does not create intimacy.

In fact, social experiments indicate that technologically dominated connectivity results in alienation and social collapse over time. In a groundbreaking social experiment conducted by Josh Harris, one of the founders of social networking on the internet, he found that the more people’s private lives were exposed by 24/7 technology, the more their sense of intimacy and relationship deteriorated until the community collapsed in violence and self-destructive behavior.

It is time to revisit our concepts of community so we can create tribes that offer a true sense of intimacy and belonging.

In his 1987 book, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, psychologist M. Scott Peck described several core characteristics of true community. Beyond the obvious components of inclusivity, commitment and participatory consensus, Peck pointed out the quality of embracing diversity through realism. When each member contributes their unique viewpoint from a place of humility and goodwill, the community benefits from a broader perspective in which to better grasp the full context of a situation. In other words, mutual tolerance helps members to embrace one another’s different viewpoints as an integral part of the whole, instead of imposing a forced compliance to groupthink or cohesion.

In an environment like this, members experience and express compassion and respect for one another. They allow others to share their vulnerability, to learn and grow, and to express who they truly are. When conflict arises, they learn to resolve it with wisdom and grace. Members listen to and respect each others’ gifts, accept each others’ limitations, celebrate their differences, and commit to find solutions together rather than to fight against each other. Indeed, the true spirit of community is the spirit of peace, love, wisdom and power. The source of this spirit may be seen as an outgrowth of the collective self or as the manifestation of a Higher Will.

Does this description of community sound spiritual to you? It is indeed, because Spirit is the common denominator among all of us, regardless of how separate we feel from others.

As human beings, we often experience a socio-economic sense of separation from others because of different opinions, beliefs, expectations, language, culture, or interests, since each one of us expresses these in a way uniquely different from anyone else. And still, we continue to differentiate! In this ongoing process, we continue to evolve or devolve in response to life. A community that felt like a good fit last year may no longer work today; the places where we felt embraced, now may suffocate us. Over the course of a lifetime, we can expect to outgrow and change allegiances to many of the tribal communities we once belonged to.

And yet, when we transcend the layers of physical appearance, mental beliefs and socio-economic conditioning, we find in the presence of Spirit a common denominator in everyone around us. Perhaps it is time to expand our tribal definitions to embrace a spiritual community that includes all of mankind as children of God.

Mother Teresa admonished her nuns to see Jesus in every leper they encountered, to find His presence as they looked into the eyes of the homeless. When we can look past the issues that divide us to find omnipresent Divinity in each other, we will uncover the foundations of true community.

Spiritual community transcends all socio-economic borders, beliefs and backgrounds. It is inclusive because it operates on voluntary self-responsibility and mutual compassion, and its doors are open to everyone.

Building this type of community takes time: time to listen, to hear, to respond and to participate. Take a few moments to read the description of spiritual community again. Then, make time in your life to foster that type of connection with people who matter to you. You are one of the architects of community in your life, and you can participate in building a tribe where you belong.

What would happen to you if your home life was more organized than it is right now? Can work-life balance be achieved? What are the tools at our disposal? Could scheduling appointments and keeping them at home help us save time and prioritize?

What is the challenge we face? I sometimes find that time spent at home can be the busiest time, especially in the times we live in. Imagine someone working from home, home-schooling children, and sometimes even doing a side hustle. Imagine also the full-time home-based entrepreneur. How do they manage to do all they need to do in a day?. We are living in a time when many entrepreneurs and even company employees have adopted work- at – home culture. This comes with its challenges as the lines become blurred between home and work. These blurred lines and constraints on the limited resource called time result in over-worked, under-rested, burnt-out individuals. Whilst good time management has been encouraged and indeed, embraced in the workplace, I believe more needs to be done in changing the mindset for the elusive work-life balance to be achieved.

What are the tools at our disposal? To manage time effectively at home, there are many interventions one can employ including setting goals for the day, prioritizing wisely, setting a time limit for every task, organizing oneself, and instituting the discipline of appointments. Yes, an appointment at home! We can spend time pontificating on the pros and cons of each intervention, however, I believe we need to focus on appointments and see how this can powerfully change the course of one’s day regardless of whether it’s a workday or weekend. Life is busy as it is without any intrusions. The question is how do you handle the one who announces that they are at the gate. These can be friends, neighbors, a salesman of some product you do not even need. I am not promoting regimentation here but rather a culture of filling your day with what’s important. Everything that we succeed at is because we carefully plan and execute it. I am a firm believer that you cannot manage time if you do not manage yourself thus I implore you to incorporate planning and appointments into your repertoire. I am not talking about something I do not do. I have to achieve many things in a day therefore I set appointments with my work, others, and myself.

Could scheduling appointments and keeping them on the home front help us save time and prioritize? Whereas we have established that it is a normal business practice to set appointments and keep them, we need to abandon the liberal open-door policy of allowing all and sundry to have access to us as and when they please on the home front. Please understand where I am coming from. We each have greatness within us but for us to achieve it we need to culture great habits. Employing the use of appointments at home and seeing only those people you had agreed to see removes non-essential encounters especially during the most productive hours. I know this will vary with culture, geographical region, or even level of affluence, whether you live in a low density or high-density residential area, but doesn’t negate the need to be organized and effective. Controlling access determines how organized you are and how well you will work and rest when the time for scheduled rest comes.

What do we need to do differently? We need to be disciplined and diligent, learn to say no, now is not a good time, let’s make an appointment for next week. What are the benefits of this approach? You are not always fire-fighting to meet deadlines, You are not always tired because you have not taken time out to rest. You have set aside enough time to spend with your loved ones or a loved one. If you are a busy person, I am sure you appreciate what I am saying. Whether it’s time to work uninterrupted, family time, or “me-time”, it takes some kind of order to enjoy it.

I am not saying that those that come unannounced are bad people. No, not at all, they probably are people you enjoy spending time with. Nevertheless, there must be prior communication so that you can attend to your visitor(s) when it is convenient for both you and them. It can be quite disrupting and a whole day can just pass by without achieving anything that you had planned to do.

As we grow older we begin to appreciate that rest and recovery need to be scheduled. The fact that I am relaxing doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything to do. One therefore cannot assume that just because you are at home you are available. Maybe you have scheduled that time to rest. That is important. You need to make an appointment with yourself, spouses need to also set aside time for each other. Parents need to schedule a time to spend with their children. When you have some sort of order in your life you determine who sees you and who you see. It also means that your relationships will be healthy and that makes you a happier person.

In conclusion, I believe that the work-life balance can be achieved. There are many tools at our disposal just like it is in the workplace.I believe we could do more and be happier if we are disciplined enough to make only the commitments we can keep.I am certain that setting appointments and keeping them at home help us save time and prioritize.