Our Ultimate Guide to Keeping on Top of Admin is all about making life easier for yourself. Admin tasks have a tendency to build up and can be difficult to keep on top of. Especially if your business is going through a busy patch, you may find yourself with a bit of a daunting admin backlog.
With this in mind, here are a few steps you can implement to make admin (and your life!) a little easier.
The Ultimate Guide to Keeping on Top of Admin
Create a schedule
Firstly, one of the most important things you can do to make your life easy when dealing with general admin is to create a schedule for the day. You should put the essential tasks of the day at the front of your schedule. If then you run out of time to complete all of your tasks, you will have the most important and urgent tasks done. Less important tasks can be put forward without consequence.
A schedule also gives you a clear idea of what you need to be focusing your attention on throughout the day. You’ll be less likely to get distracted with a schedule to work to.
Organise your inbox
Organising your inbox may seem like massive task in itself. However, getting it done now will make a huge difference in the long run.
Start by creating folders in your email and separate your emails into them. Doing this will save you time. You’ll know exactly how to locate the email you’re after and you’ll eliminate the time you’d usually spending scrolling through your ‘unread’ list.
Once you have cleaned up your emails, you need to keep on top of them. Every time you read an email; it would be best to put it in the designated folder. Of course, this means that you will have to check your emails regularly. Set allocated times to check and organise your emails. For example, Louisa (who works in our digital marketing team) checks her emails first thing in the morning and then periodically throughout the day.
Fitting in daily inbox organisation can be a struggle, no matter how much you want to do it. Time is tight and you may find it constantly gets pushed to the bottom of your to do-list. To combat this, it may be worth considering the support of a Virtual Assistant.
A Virtual Assistant can step into manage a busy inbox, flagging emails that need your attention and handling those that don’t. You’ll be surprised at how much time a VA can save you!
Follow up on your emails
To follow up on your emails means to follow up on any potential leads you get. There could be a new potential customer lurking in your sea of unread emails, looking to invest in your services. Also, this jumps back to organising your inbox because if you have a messy and untidy inbox, you may have a hard time locating those leads in the first place.
Yes, this may cost valuable time. However, it doesn’t have to be done all at once. You can make time throughout your day to read and organise all of your unread messages.
Your inbox will go from 1000 unread emails to 900, to 700, to 400, to 100, and then finally, you will receive that glorious bit of text that says, “No new mail!” that you haven’t seen for years. All you have to do is keep on top of it, which is the hard part. But don’t worry, stick to the rule we told you before. Give yourself time to check up on your emails throughout the day. You may even find some emails that catch your attention—for example, an old friend or a past customer looking to reinvest in your services. You never know what you might find!
Use scheduling tools
We went through this earlier, but we didn’t explain what you can use to help you schedule your time more efficiently. The first thing you could do is use a scheduling tool. An example would be Facebook Creator Studio; this tool will help you schedule your posts for the day, week or even month. When you use this tool, you can choose what you want your caption to be and what you want your picture to be. Just make sure that you schedule them for the right day and time.
Invest in a Virtual Assistant
If out Ultimate Guide to Keeping on Top of Admin isn’t quite enough, investing in a Virtual Assistant is a great way to keep on top of day-to-day general admin tasks. Doing this will help you focus on other aspects of your business without having to worry about an overflowing inbox or piles of untouched paperwork.
While you are doing all of that, our The Edwards Company virtual assistants can help you with your admin tasks by organising your inbox for you. As you already know, doing this can take an extended amount of time (time that you don’t have to spare). Instead of wasting 1-2 hours of your day, you could get one of our virtual assistants to do it for you. If you are interested in this, visit our services page, and look at what package will suit you the best. We have lots to choose from.