What Would My Virtual Assistant Do?

If you don’t know what your virtual assistant would do, you need to reassess what you’re doing.

This is one of those posts I had as a draft here on The Cream and rather than delete it, I try to finish it. Sometimes it’s almost done, sometimes it’s just a line or two. Often I find that the really old ones are the hardest to bring back to life. But this is an easy one.

Way back who knows when, I wrote:

I struggle with hiring a virtual assistant (VA) because I’m not exactly sure what they would do.

This is embarrassingly telling of how I used to run my business. I’m pretty sure I “don’t know what they would do” because:

1. I did it all.
2. I believed I needed to do it all.
3. There was nothing left to do because of #1 and #2.

It’s just not working smart. Here’s how to fix that:

1. Analyze, chart, record and/or list what you do.
2. Tag the tasks according to:
   1. Importance (for the business, for the client, for you). Financially short-term, long-term.
   2. Categorize your time by what takes you longer than you think it should. What takes shorter.
   3. What do you love doing? Hate? Don’t care?
   4. What’s easily teachable and repeatable?

I’m sure there are more ways to categorize what you’re doing in your work, but here’s a start. Even just starting with this list will bring up other ideas. Map this out for a week by dividing your day up into hours (or half hours, whatever works) and then color coding or tagging or organizing.

For one, this will give you a good idea of how you’re spending your time. But by being honest with tagging, for example, what you’re good at and what you love doing as well as admitting what you’re not good at and/or don’t like doing, it will help show you the path to what you could assign to a virtual assistant.

Give it a go for a week and see how far you get and see what you learn with your colors and charts. I’m betting you learn something.