3 Tips for Assigning Work to Your Virtual Assistant

One of the more difficult things to learn when you’re working with a virtual assistant is how to assign her work.  I want to share three tips with you that can help keep things sailing smoothly in your work relationship together.

Last Minute Work Doesn’t Work
It’s 4:59pm on a lovely Friday afternoon.  Your virtual assistant is shutting down the office for the weekend.  “Ding”  She gets an email from you, asking her to do a laundry list of tasks.  And they all need to be done before Monday morning.

Don’t do that.  That’s just cruel.

Virtual assistants are working on time tables and schedules and have developed excellent routines to fit in all of their work daily.  If you send an email at the end of the day, or right before a weekend, or a holiday, or vacation (you get the point), you’re putting your virtual assistant in a corner.  She wants to help you, but she has a life outside of work.  A family.  Friends.  Laundry to do!

Plan your schedule and tasks so that she can get things done at your deadline, but while not infringing on her off hours time.

Know What You Want
You fire off an email to your virtual assistant.  Maybe it says “look up some flights to New York for me.”  No.  Take that email back immediately!

It’s so important to give your virtual assistant all the details she needs in order to do her best job for you.  Looking up flights to New York is generic.  From just that one task I can ask:

• When do you want to leave?
  
• When do you want to return?
  
• Do you need a direct flight?
  
• First class, business class, coach…?
  
• Do you have an airline preference?
  
• And at least 10 other questions, and you haven’t even landed in New York yet!
  

Details are key.  We know you’re in a rush and you’re doing a million things.  But if you can take an extra minute to think about what it is you actually need, your virtual assistant can get right to work for you with little to no questions.

Change is Bad
You’ve got your task.  You tell your virtual assistant to create a landing page for you and she gets to work on it.  Twenty minutes later, you tell her that instead of the images you gave her, you decided to use different ones.  She removes the old images and adds the new ones.

Then you change the text.  Then the images again.  Then the coloring and call to action.  Then the images again.  And more text.

And your virtual assistant is now pulling out her hair.

If you’re changing things that much, you’re not ready to assign the task.  And this goes back up to tip #2 - you have to know what you want before you can assign a task to your virtual assistant.

Keep these three tips in mind and your virtual assistant will greet each task you assign with a much happier attitude!