How to Prioritize Your Work Day
As Virtual Assistants, we juggle tasks and deadlines constantly, re-prioritizing our work all day long. It can be overwhelming without a good system to manage it. Even worse – you can overlook something important. In this episode of The RocketGirl Show, I'll show you how I organize my calendar to make sure I don't miss a beat.
TRANSCRIPT
Hi everybody. My name is Belinda Wasser, also known as RocketGirl, and today we're going to talk about how to prioritize your workday.
As a virtual assistant, I have information and requests for work coming in at me all over the place and all day long. While a 'to-do' list might work for a lot of people, I found that using my calendar as a way of tracking what I need to get done is much more efficient for me. Today, I'm going to give you some tips on how to do that, so how to prioritize your workday using your calendar.
The first thing I do is Sunday night, I take the long look of my week. I look at what's coming up. Some things take longer to prepare for, so it might be that I have a big presentation on Thursday that it's going to take me a few hours versus a meeting where I'm just going to show up. I take a few minutes to really see where the holes are, see where I'm going to have time to do that work, and I'll block some time off to do that.
The next thing I do is time block, but in a very specific way. This is an ongoing kind of a time block, which is a little bit different from looking at that long view and I use colors to do this. The color code for non- negotiable meetings is purple. A non-negotiable meeting is a client call, a webinar I need to facilitate, something that can't be moved easily, can't be re-prioritized without getting in touch with people and changing plans.
The second block is when I have to leave the house, and that's yellow. That's for a very simple reason. I could get up at the crack of dawn and be working all day and then all of a sudden I realize I have to be somewhere else and I haven't blocked the time to drive or I haven't taken a shower yet or I'm not dressed. Those stand out prominently on my calendar as yellow, where I need to be. Like I just said, I also block the drive time because I don't want to schedule a meeting from 11 to 12 when I have to be 15 minutes away at noon, so I'm very careful when I review my calendar to make sure all of that drive time is in there as well.
Then comes my work. This is a system that I only developed a couple of years ago and I think it's because my workload has increased and I want to make sure that I don't miss anything. Where writing it down in the past had worked but with the number of clients I have now and the speed at which the work comes in, it's just way too hard. When a request comes in that I'm not going to handle immediately, I'll put a sliver of blue on a layer called 'to do' with my client's name. It doesn't really represent the amount of time I'm going to need, it's more just a reminder of there's work sitting there for this client because it's easy for it to, definitely slip my mind. What I do is I just put that sliver, I might put a couple of notes, but mostly it's just their name. What that allows me to do is really prioritize my work. While a to do list works really well for a lot of people, in a way, my calendar is kind of my to do list. When I get overwhelmed or I'm not sure what to do next, I really just take a deep breath and I say to myself, "Just look at your calendar. Your calendar knows what you need to do next."
Those little blue bars move all over the place and as I get the work done I push them to the top of the day, and that feels like checking off a box, which I really like. I know most virtual assistants, we like to check things off, right? Anyway, that's what I do and that's how I use my calendar to do that.
I want to tell you about our Facebook group, in case you don't know about it. It's my free online classroom and it's called the Virtual Assistant Connection and I'd love to have you join. It's a great place for people who are thinking about being virtual assistants or who've been a virtual assistant a long time like me. I've been a full-time virtual assistant now for nine years. Come on over, you can find us either by typing 'The Virtual Assistant Connection' in the search bar at the top of Facebook or you can follow this bit.ly link, bit.ly.vaconnection.com.
We are very close to having 1500 members. Member number 1500 is going to get a prize so now's the time to join and we'd love to have you. I hope you all have a great rest of your week. I'll see you in the Facebook group and, until then, I'm Belinda Wasser signing off. Bye bye.
