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.

Here’s how I organize my calendar to make sure I don’t miss a beat.

1. The purple boxes represent meetings and commitments that don’t move. These are the anchors of my week and everything else fits in around them. In the case of client meetings, I include the topic of the meeting in the calendar, so at a glance, I am prepared. Notice that my time on the treadmill is in a purple box – it’s important to prioritize exercising!

2. The orange boxes are meetings out of the office. I do this so that they will stand out, since I’ll need to be ready to leave the office. I block off travel time on my calendar as well so that a meeting doesn’t get scheduled when I need to be in the car.

3. The green boxes represent chunks of time for work requests that I need to fulfill. The notes or the tasks are not included here (they are in my email or Evernote). As each piece of work comes in, either from an email or a phone conversation, I immediately add a block of time on my calendar with my client’s name. Sometimes the tasks take more or less time than scheduled, but they are there as a reminder.

By adding each client request to my calendar, I can manage my day by moving the client blocks around as work is finished and new requests come in, prioritizing as I go. Sometimes a block will move to the next day, but it’s never out of sight and forgotten.

Try it and see if this same simple system works for you!

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/