Establish Regular Working Hours

Working from home and making your own hours are part of what makes being a Virtual Assistant so wonderful.

Working from home is great, but you have to be careful – those freedoms and others like them can come back to bite you if you don’t establish some ground rules for yourself.

With no boss or coworkers, it’s very easy to get distracted at home with laundry, house cleaning, personal phone calls, social media, and that shows you’ve been binge-watching for the past week!

To solve this, decide ahead of time when you’re going to work – which days of the week and which hours of the day. That’s your workday, during which you focus exclusively on, you guessed it, work. Create a routine and stick to it.

You’ll also need to train your clients. Let them know the days and hours you work. Very important: If you don’t want them looking for you on the weekend or in the evening, for example, then don’t email them during those times.

What if they email you on a Saturday morning? That’s fine; just because they are working it doesn’t mean you need to be. As long as you communicate clearly when you are “open” and when you are “closed,” they will quickly fall in line.

The same goes for friends and family – mine know to leave me alone when I am working!

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/