You can for sure win several hours a day by giving your recurring tasks to a virtual assistant.
Especially if you make SEO and spend many daily hours filling forms or submitting links.
What Is A Virtual Assistant?
It is someone who works for you remotely (usually at home). He can be located anywhere in the world, and do anything you want on condition his physical presence is not required.
Here are just a few examples of what they can do for you:
- Update blogs or email newsletters
- Respond to emails or set up email lists
- Set-up, manage and update social media accounts
- Answering support tickets (with the use of Zendesk)
- Calendar management
- Transcribe voice memos, conference calls
- Any time-consuming or repetitive tasks
- Submit articles and videos
- Prepare presentations
There are so many things a virtual assistant can do that each virtual assistant has his own particular skills.
That’s why, the key is to list the tasks you need to do, and find someone who has the skills to do them all.
How To Hire A Virtual Assistant?
Two choices are possible: hiring a virtual assistant by yourself and use a site like Odesk, or using a company that proposes a 24h/7 service like Timesvr.
It is wise to hire your own assistant for any task that requires training, such as tasks related to strategy, websites research or advanced backlinks creation.
On the contrary, if the tasks are simple and basic, choose the second option and you will save time.
Note that the more you delegate strategy, the more you will need to integrate your virtual assistant in your team and really train him.
What To Delegate, And How To Do It?
Start by measuring the time you spend on each one of your tasks on one week.
You can use RescueTime to measure automatically the amount of time you spend on each of your applications and on the websites that you visit.
Then, sort these tasks by categories to identify the most time-consuming ones, and that don’t require particular skills.
Write down a clear and detailed step-by-step tutorial with screenshots for each of these tasks.
Then, you only need to send these tutorials to your assistant.
Moreover, don’t forget to give your assistant your recurring tasks, such as following the Twitter accounts that mentioned you, or accepting friend requests on Facebook.
The 80/20 Principle
You surely know the Pareto principle:
“20% of our actions produce 80% of the results.”
Thanks to your virtual assistant, you can now reuse the time you saved to focus on the tasks where you bring the most value and make the difference.
In other words, you can focus on the tasks on which no one can replace you.
Thus, delegating technical or administrative tasks to a virtual assistant will allow you to double or triple the time you can spend on more effective actions.
And the best of all is that you won’t need to work even one minute more than now.