There’s a common misconception that weekends are the time to fit in life admin, work admin and all of those tasks that didn’t get ticked off in the week. If you’re still sweating the small stuff come 5pm Friday, we know someone who can help. A virtual personal assistant. Before you click close – wait a second.
If you think a virtual personal assistant isn’t for you then you just haven’t read these lightbulb reasons yet.
1. Tick off life and business admin
When did life admin become a thing? We’re not quite sure but we do know that a “day-off” can often be entirely consumed by sitting on hold to British Gas, or searching for a holiday destination. Unless you love life admin, there is 100% a better way. One big benefit of a personal assistant is that they can take care of your personal life and your business one. As ibLE Co-Founder Georgina explains, a personal assistant can organise everything from “booking hair appointments, doctor appointments and sourcing gifts to doing research on trips, booking travel and even just looking through the diary to make sure everything makes sense.”
Doesn’t that sound like the type of help you could get on board with?
2. Manage remotely
A virtual, or remote, personal assistant manages your life from afar. Like a really great fairy godmother that you never have to make a cup of tea for. Which has huge benefit if you’re a one-man or woman band, if you don’t have a physical office to put them in, or if you don’t want to be responsible for holiday, sickness and other HR headaches. Managing your PA virtually is about as simple as setting a task list and watching it get ticked off. Without you having to do a thing.
3. Keep track of things you’d otherwise forget
According to studies, an adult’s short-term memory has a limited capacity. This means at any one time, you can probably store between 5 and 9 items in your short-term memory and the duration of that “piece” of memory is about 15-30 seconds long.
Ask any business owner or CEO how many things are currently on their mental to-do list and you can bet it exceeds this limit. Let’s also not forget that the longer you’re expected to hold information, the more difficult it becomes.
Now imagine if you had an external brain, or hard drive, that you could easily transmit your to do list to. No we’re not asking you to buy a Dumbledore-style Pensieve, we’re saying you need a virtual personal assistant. They’ll keep everything you need to do, remember or come back to, safe for when you’re ready to return.
4. Get a second pair of eyes
Similarly to helping keep track of your to do list, a personal assistant is also a second pair of eyes. Whether it’s checking that your calendar is well-organised and you haven’t double booked, or thinking ahead about booking travel transfers, it’s the type of forward-thinking that will prevent problems before they’ve happened. When you’re trying to keep multiple balls up in the air this is how you place a safety net underneath, helping to catch any that might drop.
5. Delegate the tasks you can’t or won’t do
No matter how important a task may be, if you get a mental block, it will continue to sit on your to-do list gathering dust. The great thing about a personal assistant is that you can choose one who has the strengths you yourself lack. If you’re great with numbers but rubbish at writing presentations, a personal assistant can help translate the data into a powerpoint doc for you. If you don’t do spell-check, they’ll catch any grammatical errors.
If you still aren’t convinced consider this; never having to do the tasks you don’t want to do again. Only spending your time on the activities you’re good at and that you like doing. This isn’t some far-fetched dystopian future. It’s the reality when you get a virtual personal assistant.
6. Get immediate relief
Just like you’re an expert in your field, a personal assistant is an expert in theirs. This means that when you eventually make the great decision to hire one, you could be relieved of the most time-consuming, draining or repetitive tasks immediately. On the first day. This provides an immediate relief which is often missing with the hire of a new employee in say, sales or marketing.
Sure there will be some things that might take longer to teach, but many tasks your personal assistant will have been doing for years, for various clients. Making that initial handover like drinking a glass of cold water on a hot day.
7. Choose how much help you need
With a virtual PA, like the ones we help supply at ibLE, you get to choose the hours. So if you want to start with just five hours per week that’s fine, but if you suddenly need to up this to 20 hours per week, that’s equally great. This is twofold; you get the help you need without paying for any hours you aren’t using.
This also helps during seasonal periods, or quieter times in your business, as many virtual PAs will allow you to increase or reduce hours used as and when you need them.
8. Work while you’re sleeping
You might decide to hire a PA on your timezone, who can work (virtually) alongside you each day. But, thanks to modern technology, you could also hire a PA on a completely different timezone which means that while you sleep, work gets completed. This gives you the space to set tasks throughout the day as you think of them, then wake up to a completed to-do list. For entrepreneurs who aren’t able to forward-plan tasks, this gives you the time and space to allocate responsibilities and make the most of your virtual PA.
9. Switch between PAs for different needs
A virtual PA isn’t like an employee. In that, if you need to switch PAs or even use a couple of different ones for different tasks, there’s no emotional aspect involved. At ibLE, we match entrepreneurs with the best PA for them, but as our Co-Founders know, changing requirements can mean that a different PA becomes more suitable for a more-developed business. In this case, it’s easy to work with the right person for the job.
10. Avoid burnout
“Burnout” is a phrase that’s thrown around so often it’s lost some of its impact. Yet any entrepreneur or CEO who’s experienced burnout knows just how debilitating it can be. So how do you avoid it? Many will agree that the first step is delegation. Ensuring there are other hands to pick up tasks that you just don’t have enough hours to do. When you begin delegating to a virtual assistant it’s like paying money into a bank of time and energy. That you can easily reclaim, ensuring your account doesn’t run on empty.
Ready to begin putting some of these benefits of having a virtual personal assistant into your life? At ibLE, we set you up with your own dedicated personal assistant, where you only pay for what you need. Get started today.
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