How does a Virtual Assistant Manage their day?
How does a Virtual Assistant Manage their day?
There are many benefits of working for yourself, mainly having the flexibility and choice to choose how you wish to manage your working week or even manage each individual day.
Having these choices makes managing your work and family life commitments so much easier as being a busy business women and wife and mother isn’t always easy to maintain.
Setting up Virtual Admin Services gave me the freedom to make the choices I wanted to in order to balance my work/ family commitments without compromising my career or my family.
Let’s look at how I achieve this.
Every VA will work in a slightly different way and daily routines will vary widely depending on the requirements of client and the commitments that the Virtual Assistant may have.
I make sure my clients fit in around my family and their needs as well as the needs of my clients. If it
doesn’t work for my family, then I won’t take on that client. The whole point of me becoming a VA was so that I could make the decisions about how I wanted to work to create a better lifestyle for my family.
How do I plan my day?
Well this will largely depend on if I have a client at present or how many I have. (don’t be under the assumption that if I don’t have a client I sit and twiddle my thumbs. There is plenty to work on with in my own business, such as marketing, blogging and keeping up to date with my own admin).
Getting up an hour before waking the rest of the household up gives me the advantage of sitting peacefully drinking my coffee and I check my calendar for the day, catching up with my social media pages and just generally preparing myself for the day.
My next task is dropping all the children at school before I come back and I settle in at my desk with yet another cup of coffee and get started on any client work that I have on. Clients tasks can include lots of different things including email management, research, document editing, transcription and many more things. The list is very long of the kind of tasks that I can take on for a client and each client has individual needs.
Anytime I am not busy on clients projects I take this opportunity to update my website, make connections on LinkedIn, update my Twitter and Facebook pages.
At lunchtime, I take the opportunity to leave my desk and do some of the household chores that may need doing in my house. I like to get my washing on, clean the kitchen and if the weather is nice sit in the garden for half an hour and relax.
Then it’s back to work, placing customer care phone calls, chasing up client’s invoices for them, research assignments and many more tasks that are assigned to me.
In the afternoon, I stop what I am doing and I go and pick my children from school, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is the end of my working day, far from it. Being a Virtual assistant is flexible and fits in around your commitments but it won’t work unless you put in the time and effort to keep it going. That being said, when I get back from the school run and the kids are doing their homework I finish off any work that needs to be done for clients for that day.
In the evening after the children have gone to bed I spend some time making plans for the next day, making changes to my website, update my social media sites and writing my blog I also do any other admin that needs doing.
Eventually when all work is done I settle down with my husband to watch TV and chill out.
Overall I love having the flexibility to do what I want to do when I want to do it, but, I do have to be very organised and very disciplined so that I make the most of my time and enjoy my family life too.
Do you think being a Virtual Assistant is for you?
If you are already one do you have a similar experience with your working day?
Let me know your experiences of working for yourself!
