The Hyatt Place Helps Sweepstakes is over and we have our two winners.  What did they win? This:

Hyatt Place has partnered with TaskUs.com, a personal virtual assistant service, to offer two lucky UpTake readers two months (30 hours) of personal virtual assistant service and a two-night stay at a Hyatt Place.

How did we pick the winners? All comments were assigned a number starting at 1 and ending at 22  (my comments and multiple comments by other readers were not counted). All tweets and Facebook entries were also assigned a number, ranging from 23 to 54.  When it was all said and done we had 54 total entries (comments + tweets + Facebook links).  Using the random number generator at Random.org we picked two numbers between 1 and 64.  They are the winners! See, it’s not rocket surgery. Read More »

Here are some official poll results that may surprise you, a new Hyatt Place study reveals that “the number of Americans struggling with work-life balance is 71 percent, nearly double what it was in 2006.” Actually, that may not surprise you.

However, this might:  While a struggle to achieve work-life balance is not new, the study did point to why that balance is no longer achievable.   Rather than compartmentalize their life, the average American is instead multitasking all day, every day.  A few supporting stats:

• 83 percent of Americans state they often take care of work matters from home
  
• 59 percent state they often handle personal matters at work
  
• 62 percent say they are ‘constantly multitasking’
  
• On average, someone working from home is doing five tasks simultaneously

I work from home and five simultaneous tasks seems rather low — maybe that’s on a Saturday.

Here’s the cool part, Hyatt Place wants to do something about their findings and they want to do it for you.  Yes, you. Hyatt Place has partnered with TaskUs.com, a personal virtual assistant service, to offer two lucky UpTake readers two months (30 hours) of personal virtual assistant service and a two-night stay at a Hyatt Place. You read that right. It’s the Hyatt Place Helps Sweepstakes. Read More »

I need a personal assistant to manage my online identities. Between Facebook, Linked In and some online dating sites I won’t name (lest I reveal too much), keeping up with it all is getting ridiculous.

How many different ways can I get “pinged” on Facebook? I’ve been poked, super poked, bitten, given a wedgie, had a pie thrown at me, not to mention invitations to take movie quizzes, geography tests and guess which celebrity belongs to which buttocks. Reminiscent of 5th grade, there are also a few applications implying that someone might like me and I can find out if only I will disclose a few things about myself – like sending 10 friends an invitation that implies someone might like them and if they would only disclose a few things about themselves…

I think a person with experience playing tennis with a machine gun would make for a good Facebook Secretary. A key task would be to return the daily barrage of pings, pokes and put-ons. Then, since I have a secretary, the obvious next step for me would be to escalate! I won’t just be able to return fire, I will serve it up like I don’t have a day job. My connections will be so impressed with how quickly I can initiate ever newer, technologically enhanced ways to say “what up, dude?”

But I don’t want just a tactician, mind you. I want a professional administrative assistant - someone with a real strategic vision for who I want to be online. Should I be a Linked In slut with 500+ connections and accept and seek every connection possible? Or should I at least know the people I am connected to? And how should my Linked In relate to my Facebook? Just because I worked with you that doesn’t mean we are friends.

A good secretary would be able to recommend a course of action to me by answering key questions, like what happens when I press “REJECT” on an invite. Does the sender get a “YOU WERE FLUSHED!” message? If so, I will continue to keep them sitting in my request list unanswered as I have for the last two years. If not, could someone please tell me that so I can flush these people and clear up the clutter in my inbox?

As far as the dating sites go, wow, that is a-whole-nother realm. Could I really expect to hire someone with the ability to keep track of all the lies I tell about myself? And could my Facebook secretary help keep away the fear that someday the woman from Lavalife will be able to post a Date Review and share it with all the mutual-to-three-degrees-of-separation “friends” we share across five social networking sites?

Oh Facebook Secretary, how did I ever live without you?