Francis

March 29, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Awareness of Your Productivity Increases Just By Keeping a Program Running In The Background

by Francis

awareness-of-your-productivity-inceases-just-by-keeping-a-program-running-in-the-background-21790802 — **To get more productive, just beat your own high score!**

There’s a saying:

What you can measure, can be increased.

This works well for your personal productivity. Independent of what you do, if you use the computer, you can either waste your time or get something done.

If you know that you want to relax, then you can disable rescuetime for this time. Or, just keep it running without stressing yourself.

If you know you want to get something done and don’t want to distract yourself, use rescuetime’s ability to measure your productivity to increase the amount of work you get done in a day.

And if you want to guide and coach your virtual assistant, or simply want to know what he does in the time you pay him – use this free software as well:

You can review which tasks take him more time than you would have anticipated. You can keep tab of what distracts him.

This way, you can give him feedback accordingly. And don’t forget to compliment your VA if his productivity score by far exceeds yours! 🙂

Think about it:

One proven way to monitor and keep your assistant effective is to review screenshots of his work recorded by a time-tracker software. Examples for these software are Hubstaff and the Odesk time tracker application.

But there are downsides of using this method. You need to personally review the screenshots. If you are detail-oriented and/or curious, you will tend to do that daily.

That’s what was happening to me. Although I get lots of impressions of the work of my virtual assistants this way, it also takes a considerable bunch of time out of my busy schedule.

(Note that using this software is already 100% more effective than just reviewing the work output or relying on email communication back and forth to check on your assistants! I just want you to save even more time.)

If you have established a baseline of trust with your virtual assistant using screen recording sofware of their work, then it’s time to speed up your review of your VA’s productivity.

(Just still keep the screenshot recording sofware running in the background to double check from time to time.)

If you use rescuetime (additionally) with your VA’s, you can simply check their productivity scores once a week.

That’s lots of time saved in the long run!

It gets even better: if you have a team of VAs working for you, then you can even use rescuetime to compare their productivity levels.

Some healthy competition is always working to bring the best out of your Virtual Assistants. Just don’t increase pressure until it is conceived as stress. This will be counter intuitive.

Also, this method may not work for all types of VAs. Creative tasks like graphics or design tasks may need their time.

But the more “mechanical” the outsourced task gets, the better using software for productivity helps.

Opinions? Would you use this software yourself? And if no, why not?

Comments for Awareness of your productivity inceases just by keeping a program running in the background

Nov 06, 2014

Disciplined and Motivated
by: Francis This may not be effective most of the time, but, if the person is disciplined and motivated to work, then there will be no room for procrastination.

If you work alone esp virtual workers like me, there’s plenty of room for procrastination. But if you are truly determined to do your job~~no app can measure that =)

March 9, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

oDesk Interview Answers from Real Freelancers

We asked each freelancer participant in the case study for interview answers to a set of good questions for virtual assistants. Look around to get a glimpse into the lives of VA’s from all around the world!

Case Studies:

Muhammad Rilwan - Virtual Assistant from Sri Lanka

M. Rilwan
Age: 25
Colombo, Srilanka

Kareeza - A Virtual Assistant from the Philippines

Kareeza
Age: 23
Muntinlupa, Philippines

Shailesh
Age: 30
Pune,
India

Maria B
Age: 25
Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

The interview questions

To get the background about these persons, we asked them for:

their name
how old they are
and where they are from

Because it is interesting to see why different freelancers have been inspired to do online jobs, we asked for their story.

How they came to work as a freelancer?
Why the specifically choose the outsourcing website oDesk.
And if they have used other freelancing websites and why?

To illustrate how tough or easy it is to get a job on oDesk, we asked:

“How long did it take you to get the first assignment on oDesk and how you struggled during that period?”

Next, we wanted clear answers about money questions:

What’s a good hourly rate?
What’s a bad hourly rate?
What sort of work you are willing to do at this specific hourly rate?
What hourly rate is so low that it represents abuse?
Did you think it was possible to earn money online and what changed your mind?

Then, we asked a few more personal questions:

What motivates you as a freelancer?
What gives you the extra motivation?
How do you handle criticism?

Our oDesk interview answers would not have been completed if we didn’t get a few success stories and unusual experiences from them.

Also, it was interesting to hear about their personal outlook on

What the most challenging thing is that can happen to a freelancer?
Do they see there their future is very bright?

Read Real Life Success Stories of Virtual Assistants

In general, most freelancers do not work for a very high numbers of employers at the same time. Still, we asked for the high score out of curiosity.

Then, we insisted that the oDesk workers explained in their interview answers exactly how they did it to

be successful with getting jobs,
being discovered with the cover letter
and winning the online interview.

We also asked for extensive information about their cost of living for their respective countries.

How much they could earn at a normal job?
How did their friends and family react to them doing freelancing jobs?

Getting all sorts of different interview answers from oDesk freelancers resulted in interesting outlooks on how working online on oDesk really functions.

March 9, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Outsourced Email List Building

Interested in strongly accelerating your email list building results?

Follow along as I show you how a Virtual Assistant can help you bring you traffic and subscribers.

Why is an email list important?

Building an email list is the most important step of truly getting successful with your online business.

Get ahead of your competition by starting your online business with the right set of tools.
As you “capture” interested people in your email list, you can start building a relationship with them. This way, it will be most effective when you really want to recommend a product to them.

Having a responsive, growing list is crucial for your success.

Getting traffic to your websites is the first step for building your list.

How a Virtual Assistant can help you with tasks within your email marketing service

I tested different email delivery services and without question, Aweber is the best one. It has extensive training materials available. This makes it very easy even for an inexperienced (and possibly lower cost) Virtual Assistant to get trained without much effort from the side of you, the employer.

Some tasks that are time consuming that can be effectively outsourced to a VA:

Set up emails from a word file in the Aweber interface. Especially if you use advanced designs, colors etc
Moving email autoresponders that you have set up in the past with the classic autoresponder to the more flexible and modern campaign builder. This can be very time consuming to do on your own if you have long autoresponders or many lists
Setting up lists if you segment your audience. This means that you send one set of messages to visitors interested in one aspect of your business and another one to other groups of your visitors. This allows for much better conversion rates.
Your VA can review reports, analytics from the Aweber interface and point out actionable informations for you, so that you don’t have to review the analytics yourself. Checking on analytics daily is a very pointless and ineffective, but easy to fall in time consuming activity. Just leave it to your VA who will focus on just the right things.

Put to work an email list building ebook with a VA

Your email list building efforts should all start with a comprehensive list building blueprint.

The overall blueprint involves a lot of work. Just to be honest with you.

The work needed for these strategies to work is more time consuming than hard, actually. And that’s exactly the right moment to leverage your time using outsourcing.

You can turn the hard work into more easy list building by getting one trustworthy Virtual Assistant to help you.

What are some steps to start?

First, it’s important to understand the concept of a viral list builder.

Warning:

If you don’t stay focused and jump right in, you risk losing lots of time and even money, as these services try really hard to upgrade you from free to paying members!

Three proven services that work

Here are three services (from a choice of many dozen services – don’t get sucked into it too fast!) that you can check out to generate quite a bit of traffic.

Inform yourself about the email service Viralinbox to keep the emails in your personal email account manageable. This is especially useful when you start using multiple viral list builders!
Protect all your “viral affiliate links” that you will use in this email list building project with ViralURL.
Ready to effectively generate traffic? To start, I recommend the State-of-the-Art-Mailer (SOTAM) from personal experience (including a free ebook with step-by-step instructions!).

No need to do all at once (even if all these services will try to convince you to sign up everywhere).

Stay calm and focused, and work with your VA on each service until you get the traffic and results you need. Don’t invest any money (except in your assistant, of course), before you don’t see any subscriptions.

March 9, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

What Is Effective Outsourcing And How To Master It

Effective outsourcing is part-4 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.

Click here to read part 3– Virtual assistants’ retention problems

Summary:

Outsourcing itself requires a lot of time investment. If you need something to get done by tomorrow, outsourcing might not be a good solution of your problem.
Communication is the most important factor of efficient outsourcing, not only from your assistants, but from you as well.
Most of the assistants prefer an hourly rate rather than working on a fixed price job.

Start of the Interview:

Francis:

I do agree that outsourcing is not the solution of your choice if you have tight time schedule. If you have a work that needs to be done until tomorrow, you shouldn’t outsource it.

It takes longer for someone to hire someone and train him than to do the work yourself if it’s a task which is to do within a few days.

If it’s a long term project which you have a little control over, for example, write an e-product sell it and you have a few months for that.

Then, I think, outsourcing is still a viable solution for as long as you are disciplined and quick with screening for the right assistant.

So you tell me that you need to fire people all the time, I think such an example is an extreme example. It shouldn’t happen more than two or three times.

Stefan:

Okay.

Francis:

If it happens very often then we have a problem on a different level. If the communication is clear – the expectations is clear – I mean, there can be a misunderstanding one or two times.

The first assistant is not skilled enough, the second assistant is not motivated enough. And after those two feedback loops, your risk should be very small that an assistant is neither skilled enough nor patient enough to do your job.

If this still happens then you need to work on your communication skills, in my opinion. I propose to you if you have the next job description, whenever this is, you can work together with me and we increase the quality of your job description. And I propose some help with the interview process.

Stefan:

Alright. Okay.

Francis:

That would be my proposition.

Stefan:

Yes, we can do that.

Francis:

Okay. I think this whole trust building exercise is a prerequisite before we can continue to work.

So Stefan, let’s assume that we have started out with a good job description and we have found a good quality candidate with a high level of motivation and skill for the right price.

There has been a little bit of trust building in the first week where you work together. He delivers good work results in the first week and is happy with the payment

Stefan:

Yes.

Francis:

The payment guarantee comes from oDesk. As long as he works within the guidelines in an hourly contract, he will automatically be paid.

Stefan:

You’re talking about hourly based.

Francis:

That is correct.

Stefan:

And why not fixed price? You wouldn’t recommend a fixed price at all?

Francis:

I have had a sub-section in my site where I discussed fixed price versus hourly pay. The bottom-line is fixed price is much more interesting to many assistants. All assistants I’ve asked prefer hourly pay because with fixed price, there is a risk. We tell them, “After you done the job, I pay you $20.” You have the freedom within the oDesk guidelines to not pay them because you say you are not happy.

So if this happens then the virtual assistant has no money. In other words, the risk is with his side. So he will often not be motivated to do the job. With the hourly pay, he will always be paid as long as he, for example, doesn’t surf on Facebook all the time and you end the contract because of that.

Stefan:

Well, what I don’t like about hourly pay that’s why I changed that a little bit in the past from hourly paid to, what I used in the last time, fixed price is that in the end I have absolutely no guarantee that I would have a result at all. I could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars and have nothing in the end. That is totally my risk.

Continue reading part 5 – Effective email communication with virtual assistants

March 9, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Effective Email Communication With Your VAs From Day 1

Effective email communication is part-5 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.

Click here to read part 4 – Mastering the art of effective outsourcing

Summary:

Whether it’s hourly paid or a fixed price job – you absolutely need daily communication with your virtual assistant.
For a productive email communication with your assistant, you can either use Skype or you can have him write daily emails.
My assistant makes a daily Google presentation with illustrations and bullet points of all the work he does during that day and it worked out really well for me.

Start of the Interview:

Francis:

That is true. The risk is on your end. It’s more on your end and your managing skills are needed so that the money losing risk is little. So my proposition to keep that risk as little as possible is to have a clear daily communication with your assistant.

Then the risk of losing money is very small because if an assistant works 8 hours then the most you can lose is 8 hours of work where he does nothing effective until there’s the next communication exchange.

So when the initial trust has been built and the start of the work has started – hourly paid or fixed price doesn’t matter – you absolutely need daily communication. How you do it, it’s up to you. You can Skype with your assistant. You can have him write daily emails.

as an effective email communication, I prefer them on bullet point format for easy reading for me. Or, as my assistant does it right now, he makes a daily Google documents presentation with screenshots and bullet points of his questions, updates of what he works on, etc.

This is addition of checking up on your oDesk screenshots what your assistant does, will make sure that he doesn’t work for nothing for long time.

Stefan:

Yes, that’s true.

Francis:

I agree that this is an additional time investment on your end. But if you don’t do it you, as you say, risks losing hundreds of dollars.

Stefan:

Yup. But the problem is that it just takes away time. Because imagine I have a new job, let’s say, a design for a flyer. Or a cover or whatever and I don’t have a specific idea of what I want.

I just want a few proposals from a graphic designer and I’m willing to pay, let’s say, $30 for that or $40. So that could translate into 10 hours of work. Or a fixed price where I have guaranteed something in the hands at the end or I don’t have anything and I don’t have to pay.

On the other hand, if I let him make some work for 10 hours and he just gives me 15 proposals but they are all crap; I have to pay him.

Francis:

It’s true.

Stefan:

So it’s guaranteed. And most of the time as I’ve said earlier, in the past I have never had a good result in the first work batch.

Francis:

Okay.

Stefan:

I never experienced that I give him a job, the first milestone, the first assignment and that was completely perfect 100%. That has never happened to me.

Francis:

That’s also not very unrealistic.

Stefan:

Yes, it’s not. But I want that. I’m not going to pay 10 hours for $40 and not have my cover design done when I could have a fixed price for $40. And I’m only paying that $40 when the job is done. Not before.

Are you getting my point?

Francis:

Okay, That is acceptable to me. So in this specific situation where it’s a design job, I have to say I have not much experience doing designer jobs via oDesk.

In my opinion, there are specialized services for graphics design which are much more appropriate for designer jobs than oDesk.

Stefan:

They’re way more expensive.

Francis:

Yeah, not if you take into account the time training and hiring, etc. The least expensive method to find a basic graphic design which sometimes is surprisingly good quality is to use Fiverr.

Stefan:

Okay.

Francis:

Do you know this service?

Stefan:

Yeah, I know Fiverr.

Francis:

If you have Fiverr, you can invest $5 to have roughly what you want. And then you can use this in your job description to say, “Okay, I have a basic design which is like that. I want it much better.”

Continue reading part 6 – Asking your virtual assistants for previous work samples

March 9, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Disadvantages of Outsourcing – What You Have to Know

Having virtual assistants working for you at low costs is effective and fun. However, there are some disadvantages of outsourcing work to foreign countries. If you are aware of those outsourcing disadvantages, your business will be that much more successful.

Language barrier between you and your virtual assistant

English is the most common language a must have skill for any kind of outsourcing work.

For example, if a virtual assistant only speaks Spanish , the majority of the employers will not be able to work with him.

Outsourcing is not effective if the freelancer

can’t talk English properly

can’t express or elaborate well in English

can’t understand instructions

and can’t give proper feedback about his work.

The minimal requirement to a freelancer is that he can speak, understand and communicate in English.

Notes to Virtual Assistants having trouble with English:

If you can’t express yourself well in English, working satisfactory will be hard.

English skills still can either be learned with free materials on the internet.

Also, ask your boss to give you extremely clear instructions, so that you can learn one task at a time.

If you were to choose to outsource work to one provider today, I wish you three things:

You treat your provider with respect.
You don’t get screwed over.
You a freelancer who knows English well and is bright.

Everything else is totally optional!

Exception: If you need a specialist

If you are looking for a specialist, perhaps a programmer , you cannot start with a newbie with only English skills. For this you will just have to pay more. There is always a price of high quality.

Look for the optimal freelancer for everything else:

But if you have a specific, private task, you only need a guy or a girl who

knows English
is quick with answering
responsible
and honest

Then you can do anything.

Finding the right VA needs experience

One of the bigger disadvantages of outsourcing is that you have to learn it, just like any other skill. The tips on ideal-helper, which come from years of real-life experience from both the employer and freelancer points of view, will help you with that.

And if you want to make your life easier, be sure to choose the right outsourcing company for your needs. My choice lies with Odesk.

Outsourcing work costs you money

This is on of the disadvantages of outsourcing that goes without saying. Still, you should calculate your budget before starting to work with a freelancer. It would be frustrating for him, too, if you were to fire your assistant because you run out of funds.

Fortunately, if you know how to hire a virtual assistant at the right place, you can keep costs extremely low, down to 1$/hour.

What tasks can’t you outsource?

Bruce Tulgan's famous quotation One of the smaller disadvantages of outsourcing is that even if you are hooked on the concept, there are things which your Indian personal assistant cannot do for you, even if he wanted to.

Physical work
A medical doctor can’t outsource the treatment of his patients.
If you are an architect, you can’t hire a virtual worker to carry stones.
If you are specialist, such as and scientist, you can’t outsource working e.g. with your expensive microscope.
Anything that violates your company’s privacy policy or discloses your company’s confidentiality – don’t leave it to a freelancer.
You should never outsource your tax matters.

You can outsource some of the above mentioned tasks if you write up a real contract to respectable outsourcing company. If you take care of all legalities set up an iron-clad NDA , you might be able to make an exception to some of the examples I listed above.

Managing your VA needs time

Before you start actually saving time by working together with your personal assistant, you need to invest some time training him and adjusting to each other.

Don’t be disillusioned if the first days you pass way more time writing emails and clarifying things when you just wanted to chill out at the beach while someone else works for you.

Here is my method to getting there faster:

Use screen recording software to show him exactly what you want. This goes way faster than writing emails and is actually better suited for training your virtual assistant.

You can’t simply fool around. You now have responsibility for your VA

When you have actually hired a person to work for you, you are in a working relationship. Take it as seriously as your employee takes the money he earns for giving his best for you, and think about some ethics in business basics.

You cannot just abuse the fact that your worker lives in a poor country and consider him a modern slave.

Having responsibility for another person, who probably is looking up to you, is one of the smaller disadvantages of outsourcing. Still, keep it in mind and never take the services of your worker for granted.

Those Outsourcing disadvantages are not much of a problem?

In reality, hiring virtual assistants is easy, fun and effective for almost everyone. Just that many people don’t even consider doing this.

The disadvantages of outsourcing listed on this page are there to help you profit the most from a freelancer when you do hire him. If you keep them in mind, as well as using your common sense, you will be fine.

Francis

Awareness of Your Productivity Increases Just By Keeping a Program Running In The Background

Comments for Awareness of your productivity inceases just by keeping a program running in the background

oDesk Interview Answers from Real Freelancers

Case Studies:

The interview questions

Send Us Your oDesk Interview Answers

Outsourced Email List Building

Why is an email list important?

How a Virtual Assistant can help you with tasks within your email marketing service

Put to work an email list building ebook with a VA

What are some steps to start?

What Experiences Did You Make With Using Viral List Builders?

What Is Effective Outsourcing And How To Master It

Summary:

Start of the Interview:

Effective Email Communication With Your VAs From Day 1

Summary:

Start of the Interview:

Disadvantages of Outsourcing – What You Have to Know

Language barrier between you and your virtual assistant

Outsourcing is not effective if the freelancer

Notes to Virtual Assistants having trouble with English:

Finding the right VA needs experience

Outsourcing work costs you money

What tasks can’t you outsource?

Managing your VA needs time

You can’t simply fool around. You now have responsibility for your VA

Those Outsourcing disadvantages are not much of a problem?

Do You Know Of Other Disadvantages About Outsourcing?

About

Francis

Comments for Awareness of your productivity inceases just by keeping a program running in the background

Case Studies:

The interview questions

Send Us Your oDesk Interview Answers

Why is an email list important?

How a Virtual Assistant can help you with tasks within your email marketing service

Put to work an email list building ebook with a VA

What are some steps to start?

What Experiences Did You Make With Using Viral List Builders?

Summary:

Start of the Interview:

Summary:

Start of the Interview:

Language barrier between you and your virtual assistant

Outsourcing is not effective if the freelancer

Notes to Virtual Assistants having trouble with English:

Finding the right VA needs experience

Outsourcing work costs you money

What tasks can’t you outsource?

Managing your VA needs time

You can’t simply fool around. You now have responsibility for your VA

Those Outsourcing disadvantages are not much of a problem?

Do You Know Of Other Disadvantages About Outsourcing?

Footer

About