Establish Regular Working Hours
In this episode we'll explore why working from home is great, and why you have establish some ground rules for yourself to make it work.
TRANSCRIPT
I'm Belinda Wasser, also known as RocketGirl and today we are going to talk about why it's important to establish regular working hours.
Establishing regular working hours when you are a Virtual Assistant is very important and today we're going to talk about why.
The first thing is that routines generally help us be more productive. When we can structure our day and know what's coming next, we're more productive. And frankly, it's more soothing, it's more calming to know how my day is going to unfold.
One of the tricks to this is decide ahead of time when you're going to be working, because imagine, you get up in the morning, you go down to the kitchen, you might be having a cup of tea, looking at a magazine and before you know it, you look at the clock it's 10 o'clock. And this is especially true now that a lot of us have friends and families working from home and the day can really get away from us. And as a Virtual Assistant, at least I get paid by the hour and I want to be billable as I can during my work day. So decide ahead of time when you're going to work and mark it on your calendar.
Setting boundaries with friends and family. Very important. And the reason is that you know if you're working from homebased, they see you walking down the hall, they see you in the kitchen and that's sometimes, a cue to have a conversation with you. However, if you're trying to be billable and stay on the clock, you really want them to understand that there's a time to talk to you and then there's a time when you're working. So, set the boundaries with them and you'll have to train them a little bit. If a friend calls in the middle of the day and you're working, you might pick up the phone and say, "Hey, can't talk now, I'm just making sure everything's okay" or "Let it go to voicemail and check it there. But you will have to set boundaries of your friends and family.
And now lots of us are working from home, this is more important than ever.
Your clients will really appreciate knowing when they can count on you. This is so important especially if you're working part-time because imagine, if you work Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday or only in the morning, if a client emails you, Tuesday night, or Tuesday at 1, and you're not going to the office until the next day maybe at 10 o'clock in the morning. They might wonder where you are. So by establishing regular working hours and communicating them clearly, you're going to have a much much happier clients and you'll be much more productive.
Before we go today, I just want to invite you all to join me in my free online classroom, The Virtual Assistant Connection over on Facebook. Find it, just type the virtual assistant connection in the search bar at the top of Facebook and click the Join button. Over there, you'll find all kinds of trainings, a blog post, huge community. We have over 8,000people right now. And they are supportive, and wondeful. It's just a great place to be, so I hope you'll join me over than and I'll see there. So until next time, I'm Belinda Wasser, RocketGirl. Signing off.
