21st Century Personal Assistant

There is a common misconception today about the role of a personal assistant. Some people seem to think that a personal assistant's job is to run errands, get coffee, be receptionist or hang around and perform some secretarial duties as and when needed.

However, the role of a Personal Assistant has changed tremendously, since the tranditional type secretarial role. Many successful business people have utilised their personal assisant's skills to maximise their productivity.

Top Level Personal Assistants

Top level assistants are known as Lifestyle Managers, Executive Assistants and Board Level Personal Assistants. These assistants generally work for the Chairman, CEO's, Managing Directors, Celebrities, Wealthy Individuals and Sports Stars. These top level personal assistants manage and organise both business and personal affairs for these individuals.

It is important to consider the level of assistance you will need before you hire someone to assist you. If you are a home business or an individual you may want to consider hiring a top level Virtual Personal Assistant because of the benefits it will add to your business namely, saving costs and added resources.

Top level Personal Assistants know how to be business managers, they are your confidant, know how to delegate work to others and make life easier. A good personal assistant often does more thant what they are being paid for.

Attributes of a top level personal assistant:

• Strong work ethics.
• Strong PR and effective communication skills.
• Leadership and problem solving skills.
• The ability to multi-task under pressure.
• The ability to display self discipline.
• The ability to organise and be organised.
• The ability to manage projects.
• Be proactive and come up with solution.
• Flexibility and be adabtable.

Ultimately, a personal assistant works alongside you as your right hand person. The more work they can handle the more value they add to you.

Having a good personal assistant can play a key role in your success as an individual!

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Economic cuts, can we prevent people losing their jobs?

A company I work with sadly had to let go of a few of their staff members. This showed a very dismal and bleak reality of what is going on.

You hear it on the news, read it in the newspapers and you are not really sure how or exactly to what extent it can impact your life but when you are faced head on with the impact of this economic crises it shows you just what affect it has on the people we know around us who are caught up in it.

This led me to think about what one can do to contribute and help make the process easier or even find a solution that helps make things better.

It is perhaps time for all of us to start brainstorming and thinking about ways we can contribute and do our bit or perhaps come up with ideas that builds on more ideas which leads to happier results.

I would imagine that if you are a business owner, entrepreneur, employer a key question on your mind must be:

How to cut costs and how to prevent your employees from losing their jobs and losing their livelihoods?

One solution could lie in virtual working also known as remote working, outsourcing and flexible working. Every bit of technology and software being developed today is all being geared for this new way of working.

New World of Work by Microsoft.com

While many companies have welcomed flexible working and it has also only been open for some there are a lot of people who find it difficult to understand the concept or even not willing to embrace the concept. However, in this difficult time it could be that people would need to seriously re think their position, re think their ways of doing things and maybe embracing a change of mindset in order to have a positive impact on what is going on.

Whilst chatting to an associate of mine today he sent me this really good tool that one can use to show business owners and an employers a way to cut costs and perhaps when you are forced into the position of having to make staff redundant, you could look into this as an alternative option and work together with your staff to come up with a solution.

CAL Remote Team Working specialises in helping companies get set up and work as distributed teams.

Here is a calculator tool to show you how you can cut costs allowing staff to work from home or other locations.

Credit Crises to Collaborative Capitalism Presentation by Kiwork

Romany Thresher

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Email Management Tip

For better management of your emails get into the habit of inputting a topic in the subject box that is related to the email.

When you reply or forward an email, again think about the topic or remove the RE: and FW:

Using this method helps tremendously when you are searching for info.

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