Do you get to the end of every day and still have a long list of things to do?
Or worse, do you work later than you planned too often because you still have so much to do at the end of your day?
Have you ever considered why that happens?
We often blame it on our task lists being too long to start with … but it’s probably not that at all.
When you regularly run out of time before your daily tasks are completed, first check how much you are putting on your to-do list.
If it should have been manageable enough, then it’s time to look at exactly how you are spending your time every day.
Manage your schedule instead of letting it manage you
One of the main reasons that we don’t get everything done that we planned is that we allow ourselves to get distracted from the task at hand.
When you plan your day or your week, it probably doesn’t start out looking overloaded. That would not make any sense, to plan more things than you figure you can get done.
But then distraction and disruption come in to the picture – we move the things we had planned to do, and we add in new things that we hadn’t planned on.
In this digital age, it is much more common to get distracted than it used to be. Remember the only thing that used to distract a secretary from her work was a ringing phone!
Now email is a huge disruption in the day of a Virtual Assistant.
Studies on productivity show that the average person checks their email 15 times every day. And in one study, one-third of US workers actually admitted to responding to most emails within 15 minutes of receiving them.
The recommendation is that we should actually only check it three times a day to better manage our stress levels. But it also vastly improves our productivity.
Are you acting or reacting?
It’s no secret that being reactive is a big problem for a lot of VAs.
Because of the nature of our personalities – as support professionals – we are naturally inclined to ask someone what they want us to do, and then do it.
But as a business owner in our own right, we need to be able to separate this mentally. We need to be more responsible to ourselves in our own businesses than we are to clients.
Be purposeful. Act on purpose with everything you do.
If you get an email from a client, respond and tell them when you will be able to turn their work around for them. Don’t just jump in and derail your own day to do what they need.
Schedule what they need done in your calendar where it fits. (yes, yes, there are times when that happens but try to minimize that).
And certainly not all email is business related. But I bet if you do a quick audit of how many times you are checking your email every day, you’ll see that there is room for improvement.
Try checking your email only 3 times a day. Or maybe easier … try RESPONDING to your email only 3 times a day. Check it if you must, but book some time to respond to it.
Do it for a week and then see how much more you get done. I’m guessing, a whole lot!
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