by Francis
(November 19, 2012)
Recently, my virtual assistant needed a week of time out due to personal reasons. This is something every employer must be able to understand.
Your virtual assistant is not a machine. He has family, friends and important events in his life that will take priority over your online tasks from time to time.
Of course, some of my projects still are of very high importance. So, I found this compromise with my virtual assistant: he is able to log a few hours every week to take care of the most pressing matters. One of them is to coordinate work with my virtual transcriptionist on my team. Another one is for him to manage my online researcher, who’s also on my team. And to train a new member of my team who’s a little bit hard to teach.
What I did to take care of this matter quickly is I prioritized my work. By the way, I used a normal email this time.
Normally, I communicate with my virtual assistant using screen recordings and audio recordings. This saves me time writing. Since this time my virtual assistant is the one with less time than me, I turned it around and took the time to write a carefully crafted report via email.
Remember, the one person with fewer time gets the VIP treatment.
What are the tasks that I find most important?
First, as I said, to manage my other team members. It’s very important to stay in contact with your team members if you have hired more than one virtual or personal assistant. If you stop communicating with your team, this will hurt you in the end.
Since I’ve managed to work out some trust with the team members that are longer on my team, I don’t worry too much about this. Still, my VA has to follow up at least every other day with everyone in my team.
The second priority is to take care of my email marketing efforts.
The third priority is for him to help me with monetizing my other website.
What about all other tasks?
Seriously, they can wait for a week!
An online business is something you should do for fun and for profit if you’re successful. But it should never weigh down your personal life or the personal life of your virtual assistant for that matter.
So, it will be a break for everyone and all the ideas I will be coming up. In the meantime, I will be able to safely store them into our shared Dropbox for when my virtual assistant come back. Then, he’ll easily be able to pick up where we left off and work out the back log of projects.
Comments for Prioritizing Your Outsourcing Tasks for When You’re Virtual Assistant Has to Take Some Time Out
| Nov 19, 2012 | Do it yourself when your VA is seriously excused If you’re VA is seriously hindered on doing his job, it’s back to the drawing board and you better take care of things yourself. This really puts some work of your VA back into perspective 😉 |
| Nov 26, 2012 | Keep A Calendar A great way to stay on task is by using an online calendar like Google. If you keep ongoing tasks on it you can pickup at any time or someone else could know exactly what should be done when. |
| Nov 27, 2012 | Have a contingency plan Thanks for chipping in 🙂 Great tip with using the Google Calendar. In fact, there are tons of useful tools from Google your assistant should be using. (Click here to read my post about making your assistant Google-Savvy) What’s also important is to have a “plan B” in place. Your assistant could get sick, or he could stop working for you and start working for someone else. You have to define which are your most crucial tasks that have to be done no matter what. Either do them yourself, as I have written before, or train someone to be a “backup virtual assistant” in case your main helper drops out. |
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