If you feel like you’re constantly in a massive time crunch, you’re not alone. According to research from Gallup, 48 percent of Americans today say they just don’t have enough time. But despite sounding like a major crisis, that percentage has been about the same since 2001. And the number isn’t necessarily rising, as the percentage was slightly lower in the 1990s.
While the good news is the business factor isn’t necessarily getting worse, it’s still impacting nearly half of the U.S. population. That’s why you need to focus on streamlining your personal life and business to tackle the tedious, repetitive tasks and processes. You can become your own personal assistant by leveraging the right technology and mindset from the start. Here’s how to get started.
Get the right technology
Being your own personal assistant starts with having the right technology to keep you competitive in your industry and highly productive. But while everyone else is scrambling to snag the latest smartphone, you can get ahead by focusing on the foundation within your devices, applications and mobile platforms.
For our inner personal assistants, Qualcomm’s mobile platforms can learn our voice and preferences and act accordingly with 5G, AI and IoT advancements. For starters, the Samsung Galaxy S8 was built with a Qualcomm mobile processor and includes Bixby, a personal assistant that understands talk, text and taps, so you can save time and work more efficiently.
Automate your work
An email pops up in your business inbox, you open it, download the attachment, upload it to Dropbox and alert one of your team members that it’s ready for review. Then you sit down and do the same thing again an hour later. By the end of the day, you’ve repeated these steps a dozen time and wasted hours of valuable time doing nothing. Instead of hiring a personal assistant to deal with it for you, use Zapier to connect over 1,000 web apps to automate workflows. It can do everything from automating your social media presence to integrating Google Calendar events to Slack so your team never misses a meeting. You can even stay in touch with your prospects by adding form respondents from Typeform to your mailing list in MailChimp. When you set up a Trigger, Zapier will automatically execute the entire process so you never have to waste valuable time again.
Create systems and processes
Zapier can help streamline your workflow and eliminate the need for repetitive tasks, but you still need to create seamless systems and processes in your business. Start by looking at the foundations of your life and business. For example, if you have trouble staying on top of your bills, create automatic payments for at least the minimum amount so you’re never late. Or you can use Amazon Prime Subscribe & Save to send you the same shipment of coffee, snacks and office supplies at the same time every month.
You can use the same types of processes in your business as well. Create training videos and manuals for your team so you don’t need to keep training every time you hire. You can also draft forms and contracts in advance to automatically send new clients to onboard them by sending out a single link from Dropbox. The trick is breaking down every process you do over and over again and creating a stable foundation.
You don’t need to wait until you have more money to hire a personal assistant — become your own by eliminating all those time-consuming tasks with the help of the right technology, apps and mindset in place.
