36 Ways a Virtual Assistant Can Save Your Life

If you agree that your time really IS your life, then a virtual assistant can be a lifesaver. I’ve been working with a rockstar VA to get help on personal as well as professional tasks, and when friends about that, their first question is, “So what does she do for you, exactly?”

My VA can figure out how to make pretty much anything happen. Here are some of the ways she has saved me oodles of time and mental bandwidth so I can do more, better, less-distracted work, and have more, better, less-distracted time with my loved ones. Maybe this list will spark ideas for you.

THE PROFESSIONAL STUFF

1. Coordinating meetings/calls and getting them on everyone’s calendars with phone numbers, location, etc.
2. Travel planning, logistics, and ticket purchases for work travel. Sending options, booking transportation, and getting all the information on my calendar. Helping with visa stuff for international trips.
3. Making sure I have everything I need and the hosts have everything they need for all the events I travel to. All travel details, the right microphone and software, airport pickups, my headshot and bio, etc.
4. Coordinating meetings during my business trips and making sure these, along with the flights, etc., get on my calendar in the correct time zone. (It seems simple but is not; I easily screw it up.)
5. Tracking work-related expenses. We share files in a Google Drive folder.
6. Helping me file expenses and following up to check on reimbursements.
7. Pre-meeting prep. Before important meetings with new contacts, she checks Google, LinkedIn, news, Twitter, Google Scholar, etc., to create a mini-dossier including mutual contacts. It helps me connect better.
8. Kindly turning people down.
9. Building and updating my website on SquareSpace (here).
10. Sending some emails on my behalf (not personal ones) from a shared Gmail account.
11. Hiring and managing freelancers for specialized help with graphics, etc. She’ll post an ad, sort through responses, send me a short list of candidates, and manage the project and payment.
12. Posting to social media (sometimes).
13. Problem solving. “How can we share an electronic calendar that will sync with my Exchange server Outlook account?” “What newsletter service should we use?” Done.
14. Basic video editing, and posting clips to YouTube.
15. Basic graphic design, including Photoshop.
16. List building help.
17. Newsletter help.
18. Curating Spotify playlists I use for teaching. Like collecting upbeat love songs in a variety of languages.
19. Event planning. Researching event spaces, reading reviews, getting pricing information. Making reservations, tracking RSVPs, coordinating everyone.
20. Coordinating other people’s travel to meet with me. Giving them the information they need, scheduling dates, transportation, getting this information on their calendars.
21. Finding images for presentations and purchasing the rights. Keywords don’t always get you what you need, and it takes time and esthetic sensibilities to track down an image that has the right feel.
22. Tracking time on all our tasks so I can separate personal from professional ones for accounting purposes.
23. Sending or filing forms for me. I send her a screenshot, pdf, or photo and she takes care of the rest.
24. Catching my errors. Like when I ask her to double book my calendar. Or when I have the wrong date for an event.
25. Catching other people’s errors. Like when she realized as I was on my way to the airport that Delta hadn’t sent a confirmation. She called to discover they’d been having computer problems and hadn’t actually booked my ticket. By the time I arrived at the airport, she’d smoothed everything out.
26. Managing our check ins. She calls me & goes through our list of tasks so that I don’t have to keep track of what she’s working on.

THE PERSONAL STUFF

1. Paying some of my bills. Parking tickets, medical bills, summer camp, etc. Anything that I can snap a picture of and ask her to pay online.
2. Online research with a human touch. Birthday present for my daughter. Restaurant for a meeting. Flowers for a thank you gift. She looks for matches to my taste, checks reviews, and offers great suggestions.
3. Hiring and scheduling domestic service providers. Electrician, appliance repair, cat sitting. She’ll find well-reviewed providers, schedule appointments, make payments, and post reviews.
4. Calling for reservations and appointments, both professional and personal. Restaurants, dentists, hairdressers, plane tickets, you name it.
5. Communicating with customer service reps so that I don’t have to spend hours on hold or get frustrated. (This alone is worth it :-))
6. Keeping me accountable/checking in on specific important tasks.
7. Online shopping, including finding discounts, so I don’t get distracted and spend a stupid amount of time on it.
8. Hunting things down. I can send her a picture of the piece of my refrigerator that’s broken and a picture of the fridge info/serial number, and like magic, the replacement part arrives in the mail.
9. Hunting other people down. Sleuthing an unlisted email address for a famous author. Finding photographs of a relative who had passed away and I wasn’t sure how to spell his name. Not just online research but calls and reaching out to her own social network for advice.
10. Hunting me down when I’m hard to reach.

That’s my list; yours will be tailored to you. An experienced and talented VA should be able to do anything a smart, entrepreneurial person can do — often better and faster than you can. Especially if they’re familiar with the country where you work and thus know how things really get done.

How can you find a VA?

When I was desperate for help, I interviewed a few firms before realizing the most talented VAs are freelancing. Some ways to find them:

> You’re welcome to reach out to my rockstar VA, Kerris Harvey, here. She manages a team and is brilliant, professional, and creative.
> I found her by posting an ad on Upwork, doing phone interviews of the top-rated candidates, and then hiring my favorites for a 2 hour gig, giving each the same task. Picking Kerris was then easy.
> I hired another rockstar VA through a personal referral, by posting a Facebook request. Your people may know people.

You don’t need to have enough tasks and money to hire someone full time. I hired my first VA for 3 hours a week.

Here’s to you finding the VA who can save your life too!