How to Take Advantage of the Skills of Your Personal Assistant

If you have a preceding experience of working with a online assistant or VA, or assigning tasks in general, then this article is no longer new to you. You are surely aware that assigning tasks will become simple and natural with every request.

Having your online assistant has a little difference because you will not have a chance to meet personally everytime you delegate tasks. Read further and discover some simple tips on how to work and delegate tasks harmoniously with your online personal assistant.

• Spend enough time to know each other.

We can do a lot for you the more we have details about you, your business and activities, and everything related to your nature of dealing. So, we will value a lot if you will take the responsibility to send us some details about you through an email, instant messenger or phone.

We always aim to give you the best assistant to work for you but if in case you found out that you are not completely satisfied with our service, we are willing to work better in order to meet your demands.

• Try to relax and forget your problems even for a while.

If you have a lot of worries, it will be better to get it out from your head even just for a moment. This will help you a lot to do better and handle all of your tasks.

Study once again your list of tasks and then think which tasks can be given to your assistant.

No matter what is something bothering you, whether you have remember that it is the time for you to go to your dentist or the time for you to buy a plane ticket, the best solution to deal with it is to give your mind some time to rest.

With the help of your online assistant who is just an email, SMS or form away from you, you can enjoy life with less hassle and trouble and have enough time to attend to your other important matters.

• Select the tasks they can do to your contentment.

If there is one thing you should remember, it is that you should not give your personal assistant your high-stress, top priority and urgent tasks. This might give you another set of problem. It will be better if you give your personal assistant tasks that need more time to spend to.

• Make sure the tasks are actionable.

If you delegate tasks, make sure to give instructions of what exactly you want your personal assistant to do for you. Also, you should specify the steps you want to be taken in order to accomplish the tasks.

Your idea in your mind should be turned into actionable mission. Make sure that you will do everything to finish things intended for the day.

• State how you want them to give report.

If you have long tasks, you might instruct your personal assistant to report back to you as soon as they have started to make sure that they are doing right as you expect.

There are times that you think you understand everything perfectly only to find out in the end that you have done it reversely. Everybody has already experienced instances like we are already sure that we have properly given out instructions then after sometime; we have overlooked to give the key instructions.

In this instance, if you are requiring your PA to do a 300 row spreadsheet, make sure to hear from them after doing 20 rows or maybe you can ask them to file initials reports so that you can give further instructions as a supervision of the tasks. This is very essential for the first few tasks you gave us.

• Tell your assistant his next action.

When you give instructions, you can save most of your time if you tend to give the step-by step process on how to do the tasks. This will also give you an assurance that the tasks will be accomplished the way you want them to be done.

• Give specific time to accomplish the task.

Because your online  assistant will work for hourly basis, you should expect that the tasks will be completed in terms of hours. You should specify how long you want your assistant do the task and make sure to interact with your assistant while they work.

If your online assistant thinks that you have not given them enough time to finish the task, they will give feedbacks to you suggesting how to begin the task or perhaps doing only parts of it. They can also suggest how much time they need in order to accomplish your demand.

Note: you can also allow your online assistant to spend long hours  in doing your tasks especially when they are not yet familiar with what you are asking them to do so whenever  you ask them to do the same task, they will work for it, faster.

• State the deadline of submission.

You should inform your personal assistant what tasks should be prioritized in order to meet your deadlines. It will be better if you ask your PA to submit a report few days before the deadline so that you will still have time to check it out and make some comments.

• Remember that there are no such things as “too small.”

If you have a task which you think will only consume less time then you can consider doing it alone. But if you have to do 5 of those tasks then this will surely consume your time. Every task is important even the small ones especially the returning ones.

• Give repeating tasks.

If you have usual routine of work which only takes five minutes everyday like checking orders online or confirming your booking, you can allow your personal assistant to do them so as to save most of your time. Your assistant can give you summaries, information and alerts about important updates.

• Have your own standards and expectations.

It is expected that you have varied standards and expectations from tasks to tasks. You can save not only your time as well as your money if you set your expectations in every task you give.

• Make sure that you will spend additional time as you are always fond of.

Think other stuffs that you need to attend to. You might want to relax for some time. There are probably more works that your online personal assistant can handle for you.

Most of the above tips will help you to lessen the time you are spending in managing your assistant as well as your tasks. With the right strategies, outsourcing will give you more chances to spend more time to more important matters that make you earn bigger and better earnings.

Tags: Personal Assistant

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Articles, Online Personal Assistant, Personal Assistant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.