Women who work in the financial services sector, and who also maintain a busy family life, face a productivity challenge. Work demands are speeding up, while the pressures on parents seem only to increase with every passing year. For women looking for some way to bridge the time and energy gaps that can result, technology can help.

The biggest issue for women who work in the financial services sector involves balancing commitments between family and work, especially when children are involved. In many cases, this means being in two places at once. You have a conference call, but need to be at a children’s ball game. You have to travel to a parent/teacher meeting, but should be in the office finishing a report. In short, you have to be productive while on the move.

– Smartphone and accessories

A mobile device is vital for a working parent who has to fulfil family and work duties at the same time. Your smartphone will be your communications hub, connecting you to family and work at different times.

Buying the best in this category certainly pays off, especially as most mobile communications plans mean you’ll be using the same phone for at least the next two years. Look for long battery life (you don’t want to run out of juice on the move) and decent performance, which means a model with the latest chip set designed to manage all your applications at a high speed.

The BlackBerry Priv, from Waterloo, Ont.-based BlackBerry Ltd., scores high on all these fronts. With a 3,410-MaH battery that lasts longer than most other devices’ batteries on the market, the Priv also features a slide-out hardware keyboard, which you will thank yourself for after plowing through your tenth email of the day. Perhaps most important for parents working remotely in the sensitive financial advisory business, the device encrypts information by default.

To complement your phone, you’re going to need something that lets you talk and use your hands at the same time. This journalist has changed diapers while on conference calls, but only with the help of a Bluetooth headset. An in-ear model, such as the Jawbone Era (https://jawbone.com/headsets/era) is unobtrusive and stylish, and will leave you hands-free.

Speaking of conference calls, San Francisco-based Voxeet (www.voxeet.com) offers a business-class messaging service that lets you conduct group text chats, join scheduled calls with a single button in the mobile app or just have your contacts call you.

This feature will be welcome for you in between dropping the kids at school and heading to your first client meeting of the day. At times like these, you won’t have the time to hunt down a number and a conference call password.

– Remote access

Busy working mothers will need to access sensitive information from outside the office so that they can work at home, perhaps after the children are in bed. There are several approaches to this challenge.

One involves copying data to a removable storage device and taking it with you to plug into your PC at home. If taking this approach, ensure that the storage device is encrypted. The news media are littered with stories of lost or stolen hard drives and USB keys. IronKey, from Oakdale, Minn.-based Imation Corp., offers encrypted USB and hard-drive devices such as the H200, which includes a built-in fingerprint scanner (www.ironkey.com).

The other options involve accessing the data online from home. Remote-access software runs on your desktop or laptop computer at work, and lets you access your office computer from home or on the road. Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix Systems Inc. offers GoToMyPC (www.gotomypc.com/remote-access), and Boston-based LogMeIn Inc. offers LogMeIn Pro (https://secure.logmein.com).

Each of these software products runs on a Mac or PC in your office and makes files and applications available to you at home. The advantage with these applications is that you also can access your work computer from a tablet device or even a phone, meaning that you don’t need a PC at home at all. An iPad will do, along with a keyboard accessory for more intensive work. This feature enables you to do anything that you’d normally do on your office desktop, including editing and printing files, and is suitable for work on the road, too.

– Scheduling software

For many advisors, keeping work and personal life separate is a distant dream. Balancing work and personal schedules involves having an integrated view of those work and personal schedules. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Google Inc. offers one of the best calendars for this challenge.

Google Calendar (https://calendar.google.com) is readily available on Android and iOS platforms and allows parents to schedule meetings and colour-code them to delineate work and family events.

Separate calendars also can be created for children’s activities (so that you can schedule in school holidays, for example). Users can share their private calendars with each other, giving you and your spouse, for example, an integrated view of your commitments alongside work appointments. That overview will make arranging quality time together easier.

Google Calendar can be set to remind you about appointments in advance. But you will need an effective task-management system to help you manage a variety of personal and work-based tasks. Consider a system that lets you tag tasks according to specific contexts or people. Your system should be available on your mobile platform and online, and you should be able to share tasks with people, so that you can delegate work tasks to a colleague or domestic tasks to a partner.

A location-aware smartphone-based task-management app can be especially useful for busy women who are frequently mobile. The premium version of ToDoist (https://todoist.com), from San Francisco-based Doist Ltd., is a task manager that offers this feature alongside the others for US$29 a year. You can tag tasks according to location, and the app will alert you to things to do or discuss when you get to your office, home, the grocery store or the school.

Technology can help women working in financial services to squeeze more into their day, but the important thing is not to let your work life take over. The technology should be a way of meeting your commitments, not a conduit for more work that follows you home and gets in the way of what’s truly important. There will always be more work. The real skill comes with learning when to say no and switch off.

AUTOMATE YOUR LIFE

Busy financial advisors juggling home and work life can use online calendars and task managers to simplify their lives. But the truly tech-savvy can take things one step further and let technology work for them behind the scenes. Hidden away on the Internet are websites that let you automate countless repetitive tasks.

If This Then That (IFTTT; https://ifttt.com), a web-based service, connects to hundreds of online services, from Google Calendar to the online file storage system Dropbox. You can tell IFTTT how your accounts on those services can work together by writing online “recipes” that you can share. Then, IFTTT talks to the services on behalf of your various accounts.

This tool leads to some useful shortcuts that you can use to take care of the little things. For example, IFTTT can send you a text if any emails arrive from your five most valuable clients. You can save email attachments to a cloud-based storage service such as Google Drive or Dropbox for easy retrieval. Whenever you take a picture of a receipt, you can ask IFTTT to save it to the Evernote note-taking app (www.evernote.com) to minimize the accounting pain at tax time. You can track your mileage in an online spreadsheet by having your smartphone beam your location data to the service. You might find maintaining your social media channels that help build new business difficult, but automating such tasks can share new blog posts to a Facebook page or to Twitter.

Automation isn’t just for software services, either. Internet-connected home-based automation systems make controlling what happens in your house possible when you’re on the road. Internet-connected thermostats, such as Google Inc.’s Nest (https://nest.com), can be set remotely to control the heating in your house, and Philips Lighting BV’s Hue lighting system (www2.meethue.com) can do the same thing for your lights. You also can install Internet-connected power points in your home, enabling you to turn on the slow cooker from the office for when the kids get home and you’re still in meetings with clients.

Using home-automation hubs such as Samsung Group’s SmartThings (www.smartthings.com) allows you to control many aspects of your home at once. You can even unlock the door remotely for the repairman after seeing him on your Internet-connected door cam while you are at the office.

The interesting part comes when you connect your smartphone and your home-automation system using IFTTT. The service can be programmed to set your Internet-connected thermostat to warm when you get within a few kilometres of the house, or to turn on your lawn sprinkler during the evening if the Weather Network app tells you it will be dry tomorrow.

© 2016 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.