One hour of 'smartly' invested time each week creates 10 to 15 hours of additional productivity for me. How? I hired a Virtual Assistant (VA) and receive some outstanding support in a few important areas of my life. By doing this, I've been able to accomplish more while freeing up time for other things.
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| Virtual Assistants Can Help You Work While You Travel. Photo: Finland 2010 |
Although some Virtual Assistant arrangements don't work out, my experience has been simply great. Yes, I was fortunate enough to find the right virtual assistant from India, but I think a lot of the success that we’ve had together has been related to 'how we agreed to work with each other' right from day one. I wanted to share some of the ‘real life experience’ that I’ve had over the last two years as it may help you get off to a much better start with your Virtual Assistant:
Getting It Right: 4 Must Do's When Working With VAs
1. Paint The "Big Picture". Setup a ‘meet and greet’ through Skype with your preferred candidate and make sure that your potential VA understands your lifestyle and your specific business endeavor. The goal of the meeting is for your VA to see how their role is connected to your success. This shared understanding of the ‘big picture’ is an important factor is establishing a productive relationship with your VA. Most online advice speaks to the importance of clearly communicating specific tasks to your virtual assistant which is important, but I think by not investing time in developing your VA’s understanding of the ‘big picture’ makes the relationship very transactional and results in lower quality work.
2. Clarify the VA’s role and yours. I find that most employers define the working relationship with their VAs, but I like to approach it slightly differently. I first ask my virtual assistant what terms, conditions, and processes have worked for them with other clients and I try to leverage this experience. I also clarify my opinion of my role by writing it down for them and asking for feedback. Lastly, we work on defining their role. I find this approach deepens the relationship.
3. Establish one shared collaboration environment. I routinely use Google Apps, which is by far the best collaboration tool on the market in my opinion. It includes email, calendars, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation applications as well as a whole lot more. This shared environment reduces the unnecessary back and forth that traditional email generates.
4. Develop a clear “Activity" list. I have set up my VA contract as a ‘on demand service’ which means that some months I required their service and other months I don’t. To manage the activity list I created a spreadsheet in Google Apps that captures details such as:
1. Paint The "Big Picture". Setup a ‘meet and greet’ through Skype with your preferred candidate and make sure that your potential VA understands your lifestyle and your specific business endeavor. The goal of the meeting is for your VA to see how their role is connected to your success. This shared understanding of the ‘big picture’ is an important factor is establishing a productive relationship with your VA. Most online advice speaks to the importance of clearly communicating specific tasks to your virtual assistant which is important, but I think by not investing time in developing your VA’s understanding of the ‘big picture’ makes the relationship very transactional and results in lower quality work.
2. Clarify the VA’s role and yours. I find that most employers define the working relationship with their VAs, but I like to approach it slightly differently. I first ask my virtual assistant what terms, conditions, and processes have worked for them with other clients and I try to leverage this experience. I also clarify my opinion of my role by writing it down for them and asking for feedback. Lastly, we work on defining their role. I find this approach deepens the relationship.
3. Establish one shared collaboration environment. I routinely use Google Apps, which is by far the best collaboration tool on the market in my opinion. It includes email, calendars, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation applications as well as a whole lot more. This shared environment reduces the unnecessary back and forth that traditional email generates.
4. Develop a clear “Activity" list. I have set up my VA contract as a ‘on demand service’ which means that some months I required their service and other months I don’t. To manage the activity list I created a spreadsheet in Google Apps that captures details such as:
- Start Date
- Requested Due Date
- Estimated Effort (hours)
- Agreement on forecasted effort (hours)
- Task Description
- Status
- Actual Effort
- Notes
For a free copy of the spreadsheet that I use please send me an email and I’d be more than happy to share it with you.
The type of tasks that I have my VA help me with vary considerable, but are usually related to activities to support some hobby businesses that my wife and I have:
- Research on various topics
- Gather data (primary or secondary)
- Manage marketing campaigns
- Creating initial drafts of some short articles
The time that I save by getting help from my VA saves me 10 to 15 hours of work each week. This is time that I spend developing other areas of my business, spending time with family and friends, as well as freeing up some time to maintain my workout program. Virtual assistants, can help you recover the most scarce resource of all TIME.
If you don’t have a VA yet ... I challenge you to find one and try it out for a month or two. You'll be surprised what you can accomplish with the right support.
If you don’t have a VA yet ... I challenge you to find one and try it out for a month or two. You'll be surprised what you can accomplish with the right support.
Chris
