Productive is Not the Same as Busy

When you’re a Virtual Assistant (especially if you work from home), it’s easy to get distracted from work and wonder by 5 p.m. where the day went. That happened to me more than once when I first started. During this webinar, I'll share some tips on beating the wasted day syndrome!

TRANSCRIPT

Hey everybody, my name is Belinda Wasser also known as RocketGirl, and today we're going to talk about how productive is different than busy. 

Welcome to The Rocket Girl Show. I want to talk about productivity today and how it's different from being busy. We've all had days where we're at our desks for hours and hours and at the end of the day, we think, “What did I accomplish? I'm not sure what I accomplished.” But, when you're a Virtual Assistant, time literally equals money. We can't afford to have days where we are not as productive as possible. 

So, what I want to do is talk about what does productivity actually means? I love this definition because it talks about useful outputs. And, in the case of a Virtual Assistant, that equals billable hours so we want to make sure that when we're at our desk we're not just organizing things or getting something ready. We are ready to go and counting the hours that were billable towards these useful outputs. 

Let's talk about some productivity tips that help you want to make your workspace as efficient as possible. What I mean by that, is if you can have at least two screens and possibly three. It makes me much more efficient and it makes me able to produce those outputs much faster. So, that's a really great way to do that. 

My desktop, meaning, my physical desk is clear of clutter. It doesn't have piles of paper piles of post-its. You know, everything I need is right at my fingertips - my favorite kinds of pens, my scissors, you know, any tool that I  need. I don't go down the hall to get. I have a little basket with post-its because I like to write notes on post-its. So, have everything that you need at your fingertips and have a dedicated workspace where you can sit down any time you want and take care of what needs to be taken care of. 

In addition to having a physical space that's organized, you need to make sure that your digital files are organized as well. The reason that this is important is that looking for stuff you can't find on your hard drive is not a billable activity. So you don’t want to waste zero time doing that. So, I suggest that you organize your work on your hard drive or Dropbox or wherever it is you know google drive by the client. So, I have a folder for each client and then subfolders to organize their information, very important, that you do that so you don't waste time. 

Use calendar blocking. What I mean by that is block out chunks of time when you're going to work and assign tasks to that time. Now things change and priorities change but at least if you start with the plan you're in a much better place than if you spend time trying to figure out what to do first or next.

Time tracking. Okay so let's talk about this. This is a piece that I think a lot of people miss. I hear people say I want to make, you know, 50 000 a year. I want to make 80 000 a year. However, they haven't figured out how many hours per week at their billable rate it will take to produce that amount of money. And so, I think people are working really hard and maybe not being as productive as they should. But, they're at their desk a lot but they don't realize that that billable number is critical. 

So what I want you to do is I want you to figure out how many hours you want to work a year. So, whatever the hourly number is, per week and multiply it by 50 or 52 or 48 depending on how many weeks a year you're going to work. Then, divide the salary, the revenue that you want to make by that number to see what your billable hours, your billable rate is. Your job then is to make sure you're charging that rate and that you have enough work to hit that number every single week. I watch my number all week long because if I have a day where I can't build a lot of hours, I need to make sure that I make that up or I'm not going to hit my target at the end of the year. So, keep an eye on that all the time even if you're working on retainer just to really know how much you're getting paid. And if you're going to be able to achieve the revenue that you want for the year.

Prioritize your tasks. So, the last thing you want to do is every time you sit down at your desk, I mentioned this a minute ago, is to try to figure out what you're supposed to do. So, I have a list on my calendar, in order of priority, what needs to be done now. Something else might come in, it might shift my priorities but in between each task that I do or a lump of work I do for a client, I look at the priorities again. I look at what has come in since then and I make a decision of what I'm going to do. 

Batching your work is critical. Here's what I mean. I don't go through my email inbox and say, “Okay I'm going to do this for this client but I'm going to do this for this client. And now something else has come in from the other client. I literally batch my work by client. So, I might say okay I'm going to do all of Martha's work. I'll open Evernote and see if there's any notes there. I'll sort my email inbox according to what's in my inbox from Martha. And I'll begin working on her projects. When I finish, I'll look at the time. I'll put it in toggle and I'll take a second. And then I'll choose the next priority. And then, I'll do all of their work until I'm finished. That way, I really have closure for each client and I'm not scattered when I'm trying to work which also makes me much more productive.

So before we go, we have a couple of comments I want to check on. Oh, Anne-Marie hello yes yes The formula is key. Tight I think you're probably talking about figuring out how to how much money you want to make.

And Isabelle, she says, great lesson I struggle with digital file organization. I'm working on that now. Love how much you explain how to manage your revenue down to the day. Thank you. Yes, it took me a while to figure that out. It really did but once I did I just kept nailing those targets because it's hard to know, you know, if you don't know where you're going and how to get there with that map, it's very difficult to get there and to know where you are along the way.

So, thanks for those comments. I appreciate that.

Before we go, I just want to let you know about my free online classroom it's called The Virtual assistant Connection. It's on Facebook, and you can find it by typing “The Virtual Assistant Connection” in the search bar at the top of Facebook. We have almost 6 700 members. It's a vibrant community filled with people who are either thinking about being a Virtual Assistant or have been one for a long time like me. I'd love to have you come join us. We are represented in 47 countries at last count and we're really committed to educating and connecting Virtual Assistants all over the world. So, come on over, click the join button we'd love to have you and once you're there you'll find lots of videos, tutorials, information on how to start and grow your Virtual Assistant business. So, until next time I'm Belinda Wasser. Signing off. Bye-bye.