Stop Treading Water and Swim!

When you work as a virtual assistant, you naturally focus on getting done what needs getting done. That’s the right approach – it keeps clients happy and keeps the money flowing into your bank account.

But if you never stop to take a breath, pick up your head, and see where you’re trying to go, you may always feel like you’re treading water.

Since time is tight, try these tactics on for size:

• Know what you’re doing. Decide what changes or improvements you want to make in your business. Keep a list of the things that you know would be better if you could spend some time on them.
  
  This serves two purposes. One is that the list is no longer in your head, using up valuable brain cells that could be used for something else. The other is that when you do take the time to work on your business, you’ll have a list in hand.

• Take back some time. I prefer to sleep until 8 a.m., when it’s time for me to let out the chickens. If I do this, though, I find myself on a day-long hamster wheel, from the moment that my feet hit the floor.
  
  On the other hand, if I get up at 7 a.m., I have an entirely different day. I take 15 minutes to look at e-mails from the night before and get centered. Then, I can work on my top-priority project for another 45 minutes without interruption. This is a small difference that makes a big impact on how I feel about my work and productivity for the day.  What can you do to take back some time? Block it off on your calendar and use it.

• Give away whatever you can. We virtual assistants tend to be good at lots of different things. But just because you can do it doesn’t mean that you should. For example, I know how to make graphics in Canva, but it’s not a superpower. It’s much better for me to ask my graphic designer, Mark Tatro at Rotate Graphics to do them for me.
  
  As a result, I am not stressed out about my graphics, I’m not wasting time trying to get them right, and I can spend time doing client work that I’m good at. And by the way, my graphics are much better than anything I could do on my own.

Doing the work that’s in front of us is natural and often easy. If that’s all you do today, though, you’ll still be doing the same thing tomorrow, next week, and next year.

The only way to improve your business is to find time to plan and implement new strategies. Why not start today?

If you’re not already a member of our Facebook Group, The Virtual Assistant Connection, and would like to join, here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thevaconnection/