Hire A Personal Virtual Assistant To Free Your Time – Tasks to Outsource
Imagine somebody provided you Fridays off for the remainder of your life. How a lot would you be keen to pay to work solely Monday via Thursday? Put one other manner, what’s an hour of your time value?
Whatever you answer, it’s nearly definitely a larger quantity than a digital assistant (VA) prices. There lies the guts of the chance introduced by VAs: You can delegate your routine work to another person for a fraction of your time’s worth, releasing that point up for issues like associates, household, and enjoyable.
Here’s how a VA could make your life simpler.
What Is a Virtual Assistant?
A digital assistant works for you remotely, doing no matter duties you assign them. They normally work remotely, however they do the identical work an in-person personal assistant or administrative assistant would do for you.
That may embrace taking routine work duties off your plate, managing your calendar, screening your emails, reserving journey for you, and taking good care of personal errands like ordering items and sending playing cards.
Think “J.A.R.V.I.S.” from the “Iron Man” film, besides as a reside human being.
VA’s hourly charges rely on the place they reside and their talent set. General VAs residing in nations with a low price of residing or foreign money valued lower than the U.S. greenback have a tendency to be the most cost effective, whereas VAs with particular talent units or these residing in Western Europe or North America have a tendency to cost extra. In common, count on to pay between $5 and $25 per hour for a common VA and between $10 and $70 per hour for a specialist VA.
Why Hire a VA?
Say you earn $50 an hour, however you spend a fifth of your working hours on low-skill duties like compiling information and studies. You may proceed spending eight hours — the equal of a full workday — each week on these routine duties. Or you may pay somebody $10 per hour to do them for you.
In a 40-hour workweek, meaning decreasing your take-home paycheck from $2,000 per week to $1,920 per week and having to work solely 32 hours fairly than 40.
Or you may preserve working these eight hours however spend them engaged on high-skill duties and flying previous your friends on productiveness. That ought to position you properly to get a elevate the subsequent time you negotiate pay and advantages. Just be certain that your boss doesn’t thoughts you utilizing a VA.
If you telecommute or in any other case work a job the place you don’t want to be bodily current, you may actually cease working Fridays in case your VA picks up 20% of your workload.
Beyond your work, you can too delegate personal duties to a VA to unlock time with your loved ones. How many Saturday hours have you ever wasted contacting some company’s buyer assist or sifting via your payments? A VA can simply do these duties for you.
By losing much less time on mundane duties, you can too focus extra on the massive image, like your monetary objectives, your budgeting technique, and your investments and retirement planning.
Tasks You Can Outsource to a VA
When you’re not within the behavior of delegating work, it doesn’t come simply. If you’re having bother arising with concepts for duties you possibly can move on to a VA, begin with this record.
1. Travel Planning
Whether you journey largely for business or pleasure, your VA could make all of your preparations for you. All you’ve to inform them is what you need out of your journey.
For instance, you may say, “Find me the cheapest flight from BWI to LAX that leaves the morning of November 3 with a return departure that takes off after 3pm on November 6. Please also book me the most affordable four-star hotel within a 15-minute walk of this address. Oh, and make sure it has a pool.”
Later that day, you’ll get your reserving confirmations. The day earlier than your flights, your VA may even examine you in and electronic mail you your boarding passes.
Beyond discovering the finest airfare offers and scoring offers on lodge bookings, your VA can e-book you a rental automobile, dinner reservations, and tickets to occasions. They may even analysis enjoyable issues for you to do in your journey and plan your itinerary. Just inform them what you want to do, and so they’ll discover actions that meet your requests.
Feeling extra adventurous? You can take it a step additional and have them analysis total locations for you. For instance, “Find me a cheap European country to explore, with high-quality wine regions, sandy beaches, and plenty of medieval architecture and history.” They may run all the pieces by you earlier than reserving, or you may let it’s a shock to add to the sense of thriller and journey.
Regardless, you don’t have to spend any time scouring journey web sites and researching neighborhoods to keep in every metropolis. Just inform your VA your parameters and allow them to deal with it for you.
2. Personal Errands
You don’t have to go on trip on your VA to e-book your dinner reservations. Have them deal with that and different personal errands for you.
Remember how Jim Carrey’s secretary in “Liar, Liar” purchased his son’s birthday items for him? While you won’t need to take it to that excessive, you possibly can delegate duties like minor items, personal playing cards, and different social niceties to your VA. I’m horrible about sending out greeting playing cards, in order that’s one factor I’d let a VA deal with for me.
If you hate garments purchasing, you may even give them your sizing info, fundamental fashion, and a price range. They can order you new garments as you want them, with or with out your approval earlier than shopping for.
3. Hiring and Arranging In-Person Support
Your digital assistant can’t carry out in-person jobs for you, however they’ll discover somebody who can.
For instance, if you happen to hate cleansing your property, have your VA hire a maid for you thru Handy.com and schedule their visits. It doesn’t have to be costly. Or underneath $200 per 30 days, you and your partner can cease bickering about cleansing the toilet and mopping the flooring.
If you’ve children, your VA can analysis and hire a well-reviewed nanny, au pair, babysitter, or day care service, relying in your wants and price range. Again, they’ll ship these on your evaluate first if you happen to desire.
4. Administrative Work
You do loads of work, each personal {and professional}, that doesn’t require a ton of thought.
That consists of scheduling conferences and managing your calendar, getting into information into spreadsheets, and fielding cellphone calls from folks you don’t want or need to discuss to. You additionally undoubtedly spend an excessive amount of time in your electronic mail inbox.
All of that work might be handed to a VA.
When the loud, chaotic world clamors on your consideration, they’ll run interference to display screen who reaches you and who doesn’t. You can reroute work calls to them and instruct them to solely join you with an important callers. Even higher, they’ll display screen your emails and move alongside an important on your personal consideration. Routine emails they’ll reply to for you or just delete.
5. Screening and Managing Physical Mail
Similarly, your VA can obtain your bodily mail for you, throw out the spam, pay the payments, and even arrange paperless billing in your accounts to decrease the paper payments. For the minority of mail you want to see your self, they’ll both scan a copy of it and electronic mail it to you or ahead it bodily.
You can set this up in one in all two methods. One possibility is opening a P.O. field close to the place the VA lives or works, assuming they reside in the identical nation. They choose up your mail a couple of times per week, sorting and managing it for you.
Or, higher but, open a P.O. field with a personal mail service that may scan your mail so your VA can evaluate it on-line. I exploit one known as St. Brendan’s Isle. They scan the envelopes, permitting me to select Shred, Scan, or Forward for each bit of mail. You’ll by no means find yourself with one other pile of mail in your eating room desk.
6. Bookkeeping
While it might be nice in case your VA may fill out your tax return for you, they’ll do the subsequent smartest thing by assembling all of the numbers and figures you want to both full your personal tax return or ship your fino to an accountant.
They can log into your monetary accounts and obtain tax statements like 1099s out of your brokerage account or mortgage curiosity 1098 statements out of your mortgage lender. They can observe deductible bills for you if you happen to present them with a record. And if in addition they kind and deal with your bodily mail, they’ll have already got vital tax paperwork like your W2.
That makes it quick and straightforward to do your taxes utilizing on-line accounting software.
Even on a month-to-month foundation, your VA can observe your revenue and bills. If your revenue dips or your bills spike, they’ll let you already know.
Granted, offering this stage of monetary entry to your VA requires belief. Only you possibly can determine in your consolation stage, however the longer you’re employed with a VA and the extra duties you delegate to them, the extra you’ll know if you happen to can belief them.
7. Basic Banking
Your VA pays your payments for you, arrange financial institution transfers, or make rotating investments for you to dollar cost average. Better but, they’ll automate these duties to simplify your funds even additional.
They may also create an account with a robo-advisor like Personal Capital to deal with these recurring investments, together with selecting investments for you based mostly in your profile and routinely rebalancing your portfolio.
8. Creating Regular Reports
In each your job and your personal funds, you’ve essential numbers try to be monitoring often. That means weekly, month-to-month, quarterly, and annual studies with particular key metrics.
Those numbers differ from individual to individual and job to job. But there are a few numbers everybody ought to observe often, similar to web value and financial savings rate. As somebody wanting to attain monetary independence and retire early (FIRE), I additionally observe my FIRE ratio each month — the p.c of my residing bills I can cover with passive revenue from my investments.
Online apps like Mint can automate a lot of this monitoring for you, however they’ll’t do all the pieces. Decide on the essential numbers in your job and personal funds that you really want to observe often, and have your VA create easy studies for you.
9. Tech Help
How usually have you ever wished to throw your computer towards the wall in frustration?
Between putting in new packages, cleansing out unused recordsdata and information, and a hundred different tech duties, serving as your personal tech assist will get previous quick. So cease doing it.
Nowadays, you possibly can grant distant entry to your computer to anybody anyplace on the planet. Use a program like Chrome Remote Desktop or AnyDesk to give your VA entry to your computer, and so they can set up packages or arrange your computer the way in which you need it.
If you don’t already use an computerized cloud backup service, have your VA set that up for you as effectively. That manner, in case your computer crashes, all of your recordsdata and information stay saved off-site. I exploit Carbonite.
10. Contacting Customer Support
Few duties are as depressing as contacting, ready on maintain, and talking with buyer assist brokers. Yet now we have to do it each time we run into a problem utilizing a services or products. Let your VA do it for you so you possibly can watch your child’s soccer sport as a substitute.
Just inform your VA what downside you’re experiencing, give them your related account credentials, and allow them to kind it out for you.
11. Producing Graphs and Graphics for Your Presentations
Most of us aren’t nice at creating graphs or designing graphics. And it reveals in each the period of time we waste doing it and the way amateurish the tip outcomes look.
Stop losing your time exterior of your talent set. Ask your VA if they’ve expertise creating graphs or graphics, and in that case, nice. If not, they’ll hire an inexpensive specialist on Fiverr for a couple of dollars.
Your studies and displays will out of the blue look much more skilled, and also you’ll cease losing hours every week or month on one thing you frankly aren’t excellent at.
12. Party Planning and Social Scheduling
Throwing events and different occasions is anxious. They contain a lot of shifting elements, which will get overwhelming quick.
Give your VA a record of the specs, and so they can deal with the remainder. From discovering a venue to sending invites to arranging meals, music, and leisure, it’s seemingly they’ll plan all of it remotely.
Your VA may also handle your social life generally. That may imply including social plans to your calendar, responding in your behalf when associates or relations electronic mail you about getting collectively, and even proactively emailing family and friends to suggest plans.
13. Finding Fun Activities
Beyond managing your social calendar, your VA can discover enjoyable issues to do for you. Ask them to discover you a stylish new restaurant and e-book reservations on your date evening on Friday. Have them discover the most effective native glad hours in your space, ship you a live performance calendar, or lookup the most effective close by mountain climbing trails. Or job them to analysis family-friendly native actions taking place over the subsequent month to plan outings with the children
If you’ve bother arising with enjoyable methods to spend your nights and weekends, let your VA recommend actions for you based mostly on what you want. You’ll go from by no means being in-the-know to all the time having an thought prepared for a Saturday journey.
14. Planning Your Meals
My spouse and I are consistently searching for meal concepts. All too usually, the night comes and neither of us has a plan for what to make, so we simply order supply. It’s costly, unhealthy, and simply plain lazy.
If you’re the identical, you possibly can job your VA with discovering simple however scrumptious recipes for you to make. Have them begin constructing a library of your favourite recipes and including new ones to it. They can ship you a meal plan for the approaching week, full with a grocery record of all obligatory components.
If you actually need to make life simple, you possibly can even have them order that record on-line for supply, so the groceries merely seem at your door. Just be certain that your VA is aware of once you’ll be residence so the supply might be accomplished.
They may even search for recipes your children could make with you as a household exercise.
15. Any Other Routine Tasks at Your Job
Every job has routine duties. Chances are, a lot of them might be delegated to a VA. As a web based business proprietor, a few duties I delegate to an assistant embrace:
- Answering routine customer support emails
- Posting adverts
- Sending follow-up emails to leads
- Loading emails from my business’s Facebook group to our electronic mail autoresponder
- Scrubbing our electronic mail record each 60 days
- Keeping our press web page up to date
If you telecommute or have a job the place you don’t have to be bodily current for each working minute, delegating these duties can shave hours off your work week. You actually can reclaim a full day of labor each week and spend it with your loved ones, associates, or out {golfing}, mountain climbing, or skydiving.
How to Hire a VA
The most blatant place to begin is with VA companies, the place you pay the company an hourly charge fairly than paying the VA immediately. The VAs come prescreened for you, and sometimes the company assigns probably the most acceptable VA based mostly in your personal wants. In most instances, these firms have environment friendly methods in place for reporting precisely what duties the VA has achieved on any given day or week.
It takes the entire guesswork out of hiring a VA. And they cost a premium for it, after all. Check out OnlineJobs, OkayRelax, Efficise, or the U.S.-based Fancy Hands to begin your seek for a VA company.
Alternatively, you possibly can hire a VA via freelancing web sites like Fiverr and Upwork. You can select from 1000’s of VAs and display screen them based mostly on their expertise with particular duties. You profit from different shopper opinions and a clear cost platform. Because you’re paying the VA immediately, you chop out the intermediary of the company company, however you do pay a charge to the platform.
However, you additionally don’t get the belief that comes with a company model identify, and the duty of screening and discovering an efficient VA falls to you.
To hire a VA much more immediately, you possibly can ask for referrals from associates, relations, colleagues, and even members of on-line communities like Facebook teams. That means you lose the protections put in place by freelance platforms, similar to cost escrowing and peer opinions, nevertheless it additionally means no charges.
Unless you personally know somebody with a spectacular VA wanting to tackle extra purchasers, begin extra conservatively with both an company or a freelance platform.
Final Word
In immediately’s world, most jobs don’t measure your success by what number of hours you sit at your desk. They measure your outcomes. And you possibly can ship these outcomes whereas working fewer hours if you happen to usher in a VA to knock out the low-skill duties.
Take benefit of geoarbitrage — decrease price of residing and labor in different nations — to outsource the underside quarter of your work, and all of the tedious personal duties you don’t get pleasure from, to a digital assistant. For a fraction of your hourly rate, you possibly can regain management of your time.
Time is probably the most useful useful resource on the planet. You can all the time earn extra money, however you possibly can by no means reclaim time spent doing stuff you don’t get pleasure from.
Are you contemplating hiring a VA? What duties do you propose to outsource to them?