I just got a personal assistant, but they aren’t saving me any time. What am I doing wrong?
Several people have asked me about this. There are many different issues that could be involved, but I see a lot of people who hire an assistant and then can’t think of what they wanted them to do. Either that, or it turns out their original ideas are all things that really can’t be handed off to someone else.
Here are some of the things I have had assistants do for me. Some of these tasks can be done virtually, but many of them require physical presence. I’m leaving out most of the things my assistant helps me do for clients and trying to primarily give you some ideas of how your assistant can save you time in other areas.
- Make appointments and reservations. This includes travel plans, car appointments, finding and meeting an architect, etc. This really starts becoming efficient when you start asking for things like, “Reserve me a hotel in X for conference X and find the nearest car dealership that can do a tune up sometime during the week while I’m at the conference. Make sure they can drop me off and pick me up at the conference center.”
- Research for blog posts. Many of the recent “links” style posts were researched and written by my assistant.
- Find and crop photos. When we post a new article on Productivity501, it requires finding a photograph and cropping it several different ways. I’ve been having assistants do this for a while. It saves me a lot of time and they usually enjoy it.
- Proof reading. When I finish up a post, it helps to have someone else read over it and make sure I didn’t make any silly mistakes or leave out words.
- Order stuff. Things like tracking down a newspaper subscription or locating someone who can print letterhead on a particular type of paper can eat up a lot of my time very quickly. These are the types of things an assistant can really help save you time on.
- Conduct interviews. We have done a number group interviews with people on Productivity501. While these are fun to do, they can be extremely time consuming to collate all the answers. My assistants have helped locate people to interview and then gathered and formated the responses.
- Household tasks. Having someone who can sweep the floor, replace a light bulb or empty the dishwasher can really free up a lot of your time–especially when you are busy and traveling.
- House sitting. When we travel, my assistant sometimes stays at our place. This helps make sure we don’t miss any important packages and that the dog gets let out.
- Clipping newspapers and magazines. If you need particular articles clipped from a newspaper or magazine, this can be a great task for an assistant as long as you can clearly explain what you need them to look for. For example, I needed an average cost for house rentals in a particular area. My assistant clipped and scanned all the classified ads matching my criteria for a period of time.
- Car stuff. Filling the car with gas, vacuuming the interior and washing the car are all things that can eat up your time. If we are getting ready to go on a trip, I’ll have my assistant get the car ready so I can concentrate on other things.
- Running errands. Being able to send someone out to do stuff like get batteries, a usb cable and make copies of some keys is very handy–especially if you are dealing with traffic or long lines.
- Writing letters. There is something powerful about sending your words on paper. With an assistant, I can simply email her a few thoughts and who I want to send them to. She will edit it, look up the addresses and names (for example the CEO of Sprint) and leave it on my desk ready to sign, seal and drop in the mail.
- Shipping. My assistant is well known at the post office and UPS store. I can give her an item and say, give this to John Doe and she takes care of packaging, locating addresses, and shipping off the package.
- Scanning. My assistant takes care of scanning everything in that I want to convert to paperless. She went through my file cabinets and scanned everything in. I have some more papers in storage that I hope to have her convert in the near future.
- Making deposits. When a check comes in, my assistant handles all of the physical part of the deposit. She endorses the check, makes out a deposit slip, addresses and stamps the envelope, and scans all the papers in before sending it to the bank.
- Convert Podcasts to CDs. I promised a very non-technical person I’d make some CDs from a podcast. My assistant took care of creating the necessary CDs from the MP3 files.
None of these items are particularly technical. I’ve left out some of the more complicated things because they are pretty specific to my business. At the least, this should give you some ideas of ways to use an assistant that you might not have thought of.
Sounds like you have a great assistant!
That was a great list!! Virtual Assistants are the powerhouse of any business these days. I would also like to share some tips on effectively utilising a VA.
I’ve been an Admin to C level executives for close to 30 years. There is no way I’d arrange or run to fill the gas, do errands, or personal efforts. But then again, if you’re at home, that would be different. Please, don’t ever, ever ask me to make and bring coffee!!!!!
I think you provided some excellent tips on how to efficiently use an assistant to free up your time to do other higher priority tasks. Do you only use a US-based assistant for the tasks you mentioned or do you also use VAs?
-Justin
I have used both. However as you can see from the list, many of the tasks require physical presence so more recently I’ve been using an onsite assistant.
I am an assistant, have been for around 7 years now, and agree with the statement that generally what people think they want their assistant to handle is usually not something that they KNOW HOW to hand off. To save time, you must first put in time to train your assistant to think one step AHEAD of you, which can take a little while. If you really, truly, want an assistant that will make things easy-breasy when they’re handling things for you that you never knew you needed handled, they need to learn to think about what you MIGHT need before you think you need it. No easy feat!