By Jeroh Tejiri
We all know the personal story of Indra Nooyi - CEO of PepsiCo - how she juxtaposes being one of the most powerful CEOs of our time and the routine that comes with being a mother of two. She has talked about the importance of multi-tasking, delegating responsibilities to reduce your personal workload and having an understanding husband.
While these are quite inspiring, they may have little to no traction in for all women. Sometimes, the average husband may not be so ‘understanding’, or the mother-in-law may be too busy with her own life, and some househelps can be very ‘unprofessional', thereby making delegating responsibilities a nightmare.
The above issues makes the implementation of some work-life productivity tips quite daunting and creates a void which I believe technology can provide some relief in its own way. Below are real tips on using your smart devices to create the needed balance in your professional and domestic life.
1. Time Management: as the sole administrator of the family, the task of preparing the kids for school, cooking meals, cleaning, laundering and the daily task of keeping house before focusing on your job falls naturally on your shoulders. And without good time management, these tasks go from difficult to achieve too impossible. To ease the time management hassle, the use of Evernote—a mobile app available on android, iOS and Blackberry devices—helps you make digital schedules, to do lists and even include alarm-timers to periodically remind you about set tasks.
2. Communication: communication which is a key factor in balancing your work-family life can be achieved with the use of multiple tools depending on the situation at hand. Therefore mothers who travel regularly, can make use of either Skype or Google Hangout to keep tabs on domestic matters while mothers who work from home can make use of GoMeeting—a communication tool—for it simplifies the task of scheduling and attending meetings from a remote location.
3. Organization Tools: for the not ‘too technical savvy’ working moms, using a multitude of apps to keep track of your domestic/professional schedule, kids, assistants etc. can be a daunting task when one considers the time—no matter how little—needed to understand how to use these apps. So the tip here is to place your trust on one organizing software that can provide you with the above listed features and function. An example is Google open platform which provides you with:
- Google Notes—for scheduling
- Google Hangout—for communication
- Google Drive for accessing all your professional/domestic messages and
- Android based smart devices where all these co-ordination can take place.
4. Relaxation: since this article is all about the working woman achieving a healthy work-life balance, it will be unhealthy if tech tools that aid relaxation or exercise are not mentioned. So here are some apps every working woman looking to enjoy her downtime should have:
- 1000 E-books—for those who relax by curling up with a captivating novel, this app provides you with almost every novel genre you need…and yes it includes Nigerian novels in its library. To simplify your search, here are the top 10 novels every Nigerian should read.
- iRoko TV App—for the couch potato looking to spend a relaxing evening at home, you can watch your favorite Nollywood movie on your android device via the iRoko TV app while ordering your favorite dinner using the Easy Appetite app.
- Windows Health and Fitness App—finally, to keep track of the calories you ate, your workout rate and receive fitness tips on staying healthy, the Health and fitness app is the perfect tool to fine-tune your delicate work-life balance.
Jeroh Tejiri
I have a professional background in Systems Engineering and I love to figure systems out, dabble here and there with all things tech related and devise plans to take over the world. I am also a webmaster who writes Afrocentric articles on my blog www.omnicorpseo.com and loves football. Finally, I can’t go without saying hi to my wife…so, “Hi dear” and Hi All!
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