Even the most successful and well-known entrepreneurs develop bad habits in business – whether it’s trying to do too much at once or procrastinating in the face of a challenge.
Sometimes these bad habits can develop gradually, and sometimes they were there all along, but you just happen to notice them later. You might be well aware of the things that you do that prevent you from being your most productive, or you might be unsure about the bad habits that are getting in your way. Either way, you don’t have to let them rule your life!
Hire a Virtual PA and you might just find it to be the perfect antidote to getting rid of your bad habits. Virtual Assistants make your life easier, saving you time and getting you on the right track to success.
What Is A Virtual Assistant?
A Virtual Assistant can be seen as a personal assistant (aka a Virtual PA), who simply does their job virtually. Instead of working in your office, they work remotely to provide you with the services that you need from them.
Tasks any single VA can do will vary based on their skill set, background and experience. If they’re from a PA background, they can help with managing your diary, booking travel, carrying out research, preparing for meetings and even supporting you in certain aspects of your personal lifestyle.
If a Personal Assistant can do it, a Virtual PA can do it too – they just don’t sit in the room next to you!
Hire A Virtual Assistant And Fix Your Bad Habits
If you have bad habits, both in-person or online Personal Assistants can work with you to help stamp them out.
1. They’ll Help Minimise Procrastination
Procrastination can be a real problem for just about anyone. There are many different reasons you might find yourself procrastinating, from being distracted to just disliking a certain task and not finding the energy to complete it.
Sometimes you might procrastinate on tasks because the scale of them is too large and you can’t figure out where to start with it.
A VA will help you get better organised, take some of the strain and therefore minimise your procrastination as you’ll feel less overwhelemed. They can break down large projects into more manageable tasks, tackling the admin and leaving you with more headspace to focus on the things that matter most in your business (and the tasks you most enjoy!).
2. They’ll Make You Prioritise
Prioritising your time and deciding which tasks are most important is vital if you’re trying to achieve success – whether that’s in your business or your personal life.
There are only so many hours in the day, and it’s difficult to use your time wisely if you’re bogged down by smaller and “less significant” tasks. Even working out what you should do first can be a struggle, but a Virtual Assistant can help you with this.
They can pull together a project tracker (like Asana), mapping out everything that needs to be completed in order of importance. They can even assign pieces of the project to other people, taking all the stress out of delegating. A Virtual Assistant can keep an eye on the tracker and nudge those that might be missing deadlines, ensuring that the project delivers on time.
3. You’ll Move From Reactive To Proactive
Spending your time putting out fires or trying to react to things as they happen is unlikely to lead to success. Working on a reactive basis means you’re just waiting for things to happen, with no headspace to focus on being proactive.
It’s the proactive work that moves a business forward and to keep innovating, not the reactive tasks that clog up your day.
When you hire a Virtual Assistant, they will help take care of the reactive items, like responding to customer enquiries and monitoring social media channels, leaving you to focus on the big picture items that directly feed into your goals and objectives.
4. You’ll Kill Off Your Inbox
Reading, sending, and responding to emails can take up SO much time. In fact, professional spend the equivalent of 30 days a year on email!
It distracts you from other tasks and means you can’t get your head in the game for the important work that “moves the needle” in your business – work focused on business development and client management, for example.
A Virtual Assistant can help break you out of this bad habit by taking over the management of your inbox. Let them flag your most important emails, respond to any urgent messages that can’t wait (and those they can easily handle themselves), and act as a single point of contact for anyone in your business too.
When you aren’t bogged down in emails, your day will immediately improve.
5. You’ll Add More Value
When you’re a business owner, your job is to drive the growth of the company. You shouldn’t be spending your time doing busywork.
It’s easy to waste time on tasks that aren’t actually making you any money, especially if they’re easier to do than more challenging tasks. While these lesser tasks still need to be completed, they certainly don’t need to be done by YOU. A VA can pick these items up in no time, so why not stop and delegate?
6. You’ll Stop Micromanaging
The urge to micromanage and watch over everything can be tough to resist. We all like to feel in control! Your business is your pride and joy, and you’re invested in its success. But whilst you can’t help hovering over your employees, this has a profound impact on the work they produce. Not only does it crush autonomy, but it stifles new ideas and innovation.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant can help you to learn to let go and start trusting more in your team. By handing off some work to your VA, you’ll start to see that you don’t need to do everything yourself. Trusting your VA can help you to trust your employees too.
7. You’ll Get A Better Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is a key goal for many who start their own business. They want to be in charge of their schedule and avoid working all the time. Unfortunately, new business owners can often end up working even more than they did before. Yes, it’s a funny old journey!
But if you still want a better work/life balance whilst running a business, hiring a Virtual Assistant will help you to achieve it. They can help you to fit everything into your schedule, from business meetings to personal appointments. Your VA can schedule appointments for you, make sure you book time off, remind you of special events coming up, and more.
8. It Will Help You Budget
Every business owner needs to be able to budget well, but many people – business owners or not – have a bad habit of not really paying attention to what they’re spending.
Although you might have a bookkeeper or accountant to look after your business finances, sometimes you need a little extra help to keep you on track and ensure you stick to a budget.
Virtual Assistants can take care of financial tasks like paying bills, staying on top of your expenses, and gathering useful information for your bookkeeper or accountant. They can give you more financial control so you can stick to a budget more easily.
9. You’ll Be A Better Communicator
Keeping up solid communication with everyone from clients to staff can be difficult. You might develop a bad habit of forgetting to reply to emails or not having time to answer the phone.
Even if you’re a good communicator in general, staying on top of all of communication and maintaining relationships might not come naturally to you when there is so much to do. A Virtual Assistant can make sure you reply to emails, respond to messages, update your CRM, and improve the flow of communication in your business. They can help ensure everyone is kept up to date as the business moves forward.
10) You’ll Organise Your Time
Maximising the use of your time is essential when you run a business. Even the most organised business owners can waste time when there are so many distractions.
If you tend to let time get away from you or you’re not very good at organising your day, you need a Virtual Assistant who can help you with scheduling and organisation.
Take control of your time by having a Personal Assistant who can manage your diary, book travel for you, and help you with all of the general admit tasks that can take up a lot of your time.
In Summary
Bad habits can prevent you from getting work done and get in the way of your success. Changing these habits is hard, but it’s easier with the support of a Virtual Assistant who can carry out a large variety of tasks for you.
Virtual PA and marketing support services like ours can take over the things that distract you and prevent you from getting any real work done and help you to get organised. You can start to focus more on growing your business instead of allowing your bad habits to continue.
Virtalent offers Virtual Assistants with an average of 15 years of experience. Our Virtual Assistants are all carefully vetted, and we match your needs to the right VA to ensure you get the expertise that you and your business deserve. Book a free consultation today to find out more!
Psst! Looking for a Virtual Assistant job? We have plenty of those too! Take a look at our application page here.
Recent Comments