The Productivity Value of Templates

As a Virtual Assistant, I have many repetitive projects – things that happen over and over again for a given set of clients: formatting a client’s email newsletter; adding it to the blog section of their website; posting it to LinkedIn. When I first started out as a VA, it was simple and I could remember all the steps. But over time, as my client list has grown and many of them began having unique requests, it became difficult to keep track of what was required. In this episode of The RocketGirl Show, I'm going to talk about the use of a "template" or a checklist and some keypoints to remember when using templates.

TRANSCRIPT 

Hey, everybody. I'm Belinda Wasser, also known as RocketGirl. Today, we're going to talk about the productivity value of templates.

As a virtual assistant, much of my work is repetitive. Let's take, for example, email newsletters. I probably have, oh my gosh, maybe 15-plus clients that produce email newsletters every single month. And while the task of creating the newsletter and putting it into Constant Contact, your Mailchimp, is pretty similar, each client has a little bit different nuance, a little bit different spin on how they want me to handle their particular job. So that's why I have templates.

I want to tell you a couple of high-level things about templates, and then I'm going to show you an actual template that I use all the time. Here are the key points. You want to be thorough. One of the things is that my templates are in a project management software. I use Teamwork. When I create the template, I really think through the whole job, from start to finish. What it's going to take to get to the result, which in this case would be the email newsletter is published and, on her website, and all the different steps that she's asked me to do.

In order to do that, I need to think small. Small, bite-size chunks, and I'll show you exactly what I mean in a minute. Some people might have a to-do list, and on their to-do list, it says, "Publish Michelle's newsletter." And they just sort of wing it from there. However, I've just found that that doesn't work. I can't remember everything, so I want to just break it down into small, small chunks. Then the last thing is to hold yourself accountable and to assign a due date by going backward in the project. So, if Michelle is going to publish at 6:15 AM on Friday morning, I need to make sure that I work backward in choosing the dates for each step in the process.

All right, I'm going to switch this so you can see. Okay, so these are the individual actionable steps. Critical that you do it like this. You'll notice the first one: Create, test, and constantly contact. Personalize the subject line. Now, Michelle is the only client of mine that asked me to do that, so that is a part of her template so that I remember. Review the newsletter test. Make any adjustments. Send test to Michelle. So you can see step, step, step, how I work my way through this project. Post the newsletter to WordPress, all sections. All of my clients have sections in their newsletter. However, all of them don't want all of the sections published. So that's really critical that I note that. And you can see going on and on and on.

Now, right here, you'll see the word "more." Now, I'm going to post her newsletter on LinkedIn as an article. At the bottom, I always publish her bio, just a couple of lines and an invitation to subscribe to her newsletter. That is in my template, so I don't have to go looking for that. While I'm stepping my way through the template, I click the word "more." It's right there. And I just drop it right into LinkedIn.

So templates are a way, like I said, to think through the process, have everything at our fingertips. The result, really, one of the key results, is that we have consistency. Fewer mistakes. I don't have to remember that Michelle wants me to publish on LinkedIn the following Wednesday if I'm looking at my template. It's all right there.

So I wonder how many of you use templates. I'd love to hear from you, and you can just put your thoughts in the comments section.

Before we go, real quick, I just want to invite you to my free online classroom. It's on Facebook and it's called The Virtual Assistant Connection. Last time I counted this, we had 47 countries represented, which is really exciting. It's an online community for VAs who are interested in either starting or growing or expanding their VA business. Lots of videos, lots of community, lots of fun. So I invite you to come over there. You can find us by typing "The Virtual Assistant Connection" in the search bar at the top of Facebook. I hope to see you over there.

Everybody have a great rest of your day. Until next time, I'm Belinda Wasser, RocketGirl, signing off. Bye bye.