How a Virtual Assistant can Save you Time

If you find yourself regularly doing mundane, repetitive or simple tasks that collectively take an hour or more out of your workday, you may want to employ a virtual assistant (VA) and significantly reduce these “lower value” tasks. The term “virtual assistant” usually means an actual person who often works remotely. Though with voice activated AI assistance it could be a digital assistant. It depends on what services you need. Which takes us to the first step.

Step one

This is the time to reflect on the things that you are doing that cut into your productive time. You should also reflect on the things that you would do if you had more time. Start by making a list of the time savers. This would include, for example, managing emails, scheduling appointments, conducting internet research, organizing files, making travel arrangements. If your activities are more focused on marketing, they could manage social media accounts, SEO optimization, manage advertising campaigns and so forth. There are agencies that specialize in functional areas and even specific business sectors.

Ready to Make a Change?

Think about these activities and how often they take over your day and prioritize them. Once you have an idea of what you would like done and how many hours a day it would take, then you can start hunting. Depending on your company structure, this may fall to HR to work with you on defining the job description. But before you go there, it’s worth an internet search to find out what companies provide virtual assistant services. Here are a few: GetMagic.com, WingAssistant.com, Upwork.com.

Getting started

There will be a screening process before you start, but since you are hiring this virtual assistant, the company providing this service will likely have provided at least the baseline skills you are looking for. You will want to make sure that the VA is familiar with at least the highest priority tasks on your list and can pick up the lower priority, which are more likely to include some personal quirks as well.

You will want to define very clear objectives with your new potential VA. If there is a certain way you want the phone answered, or you want emails screened, then you want to be absolutely clear about what these are. This step is often viewed as customizing or training the VA so that they will provide a smooth transition to this new way of working.

Feedback

Early on you will want to follow up frequently with your VA’s activities and with some individuals who have had reason to interface with your new assistant. You may need to have a few of these “alignment” discussions early on – that would not be unusual. But those should taper off after a while. It is a good practice to establish that you will continue with periodic feedback checks, on a regular basis. Not only will this validate their services, but they may even have some ideas, based on their previous experiences, that may result in improvements beyond your expectations.

Wrap-Up

If the plan was sound and the execution done well, then you have saved that slice of lost time that you had been carrying every day. Check your list against the actual results and (hopefully) declare victory. Now you can get to work on back-filling with some more productive activities, like that new product launch that never seemed to come together.