The thought of asking this question may seem a bit preposterous and pompous if you think that personal assistants are limited to celebrities and big-shot business tycoons. Being the Average Joe (or Jane) that you and I are, might make getting a personal assistant feel a little ambitious or pretentious. Why? Because common sense tells us that life was meant to be a hard rat race, that we were meant to do everything ourselves and endure the labor of the fruits we want to enjoy but may not always be able to. Well the next paragraphs that follow will show you that you don’t need to be a rock star or a celebrity to validate your need for a personal assistant.

These days we have all become masters (and ironically) slaves to multitasking and “efficiency.” We strive to achieve maximum output but within the least amount of time used up in order to make best use of the time given us. We work doubly hard and pull overtime after another so we can “buy time” later on. But because we have spread ourselves too thin over all the errands and tasks at hand, we end up burnt out and are too fizzled to enjoy any of the time we have initially bought for ourselves. There is a simple solution to this: hire a personal assistant.

Efficiency is not always more of an issue of multitasking expertise than it is an ability to delegate tasks. We can only be in one place at one time and yet there are always a million other things we need to do. If we can be honest with ourselves, we may find that we bring it upon ourselves and pile on all the work because we’re so used to the burden (and hey, let’s admit it, sometimes just having too many things going on in our plate somehow makes us feel important and in demand, right?). But if you are an individual in a situation where there are more important things that require your time (like spending time with family or if you are a single parent and spending more time with your children is your top priority), then you will have to learn to arrange the things in your life that require your attention so that the most important ones have your complete and hands-on focus.

There are tasks you can pass on to a personal assistant—whether big or small. Below are some examples of the things you can delegate to your hired aide.

• Sorting out mail. Whether it’s postal mail or your email, this one can take anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes. If you’re running an internet-based business, chances are your inbox is flooded with feedback, product orders or delivery updates on your business and just weeding them out can consume a lot of your time. With the proper security measures and rules in place, you can hand this task to your assistant so that your time is not wasted sitting at your desk, hunched over and one click away from carpal tunnel syndrome.
• Pick up or drop off. If you have emergency needs to attend to like picking up your child from soccer practice, your assistant (assuming that this is already someone you trust and have done a background check on) can do this for you. Another thing could be picking up or dropping off an item of clothing for dry cleaning.
• Scheduling, reservations & flight booking. If you tend to have a lot of commitments and appointments that need penciling down onto your calendar, it is helpful to have an assistant jot those for you and remind you when the time comes. You can prevent situations where you failed to show up to a meeting because it slipped your mind and you lost that little post-it you wrote it on. A personal assistant is also very helpful in making reservations for you (whether for a restaurant, a sporting event or opera tickets, or even in ordering products online) and can book your flight for you as well if you happen to be too busy to do it yourself.

It really helps to simplify your life this way so that quality of the work you put out is better. Less stress on you means less things to harry or wear you down—allowing you a much more paced and cheerful disposition. This, in turn helps you produce work that resonates the enjoyment or pleasure you were able to experience because you weren’t running all over the place trying to get everything done all at once.