Smartlife

By now, you’re familiar with the benefits of outsourcing your tasks and projects to virtual assistants. Previously, Smartlife wrote about how to choose a VA and how to choose which tasks to delegate. Actually finding a reliable VA to handle your to-dos, however, is easier said than done.

One reliable source you can turn to is a company like TaskUs that can manage the delegation of tasks to virtual assistants for you. Another way is to go directly to the VAs…

Running out of juice costs people more time than a renegade Doctor Who. Shouting “Switch to Emergency Power!” might sound like Star Trek’s Scotty, but how often have you found yourself nursing that single flashing battery bar while you wait for an important call? Squinting over a dimmed display so your laptop doesn’t die during the meeting? Hoping it’ll hold on so hard it’s like you’re trying to focus your body’s electricity into the electronics?

The simplest solution is to make sure that your devices never run dry…

Heading into the marketplace, you’ll find a lot of terrific products that get lost in the fold due largely to poor branding. On the flip side, you’ll also find a lot of mediocre products that have skyrocketed to monumental success, largely thanks to great branding and marketing.

In this way, spending time to create and develop a strong brand is well worth the investment. The conventional route would be either to come up with a brand name on your own or to hire an advertising firm to come up with…

It’s pretty easy to spend an entire day in front of the computer, between doing your work and making sure your computer does all the things you need it to do. While it may be difficult to outsource your work, you can definitely hand many of the tasks and projects necessary to keep your system up and running — such as upgrades, data backup, data recovery, file migration, troubleshooting, and files management — to specialists and online Internet service providers.

1. Backups: We all know that we’re supposed to back up

…

Google has greatly expanded beyond its core search engine to offer a wide range of free online services. Easily one of the most popular of these is Gmail, the ubiquitous web-based email client that comes with loads of storage and the ability to handle multiple email accounts.

As powerful as Gmail may be on its own, the “crazy experimental stuff” being doctored up through Gmail Labs can greatly expand on this functionality and help to improve your productivity. This applies not only to the work setting, but also when it…

There’s something about psychology that responds to external motivation. Video games make most use of this kind of change — which is unfortunate because while they’re useful relaxation tools — computer games are the opposite of everything this blog stands for. In World of Warcraft, you adapt your own lifestyle to better serve the machine; here at Smartlife we make the machines work for you. This means that we’ll be first against the electro-wall when the Cylons come, but until then, we’ll help you work smarter with…