To increase your productivity is always the goal, isn’t it? As business owners, you feel like you should be at your most productive during all hours of the day, utilising your time to the max and creating endless opportunities for business growth.
But what happens when there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to be as productive as you’d like? With so many tasks to take care of on a regular basis, workload can feel overwhelming, and you may begin to notice things are being left unfinished or constantly moved across to tomorrow’s to-do list.
Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone! In fact, a productivity study found that professionals spend an average of 552 hours a year on repetitive admin tasks, limiting their time to work on business-growing projects and thus reducing productivity. No wonder you’re left feeling frustrated!
If you want to increase your productivity by reducing the number of back-office tasks you need to complete, it may be time to invest in a Virtual Assistant. Here’s why:
Increase Productivity with a Virtual Assistant
Virtual Assistants Save Time
One of the most significant components of successful productivity is time. If you have plenty of it, you’re able to spend it thinking through strategies carefully, getting creative with ideas and giving the project at hand your undivided focus and attention.
When this is the case, tasks are completed quicker and to a higher standard, increasing your productivity levels.
The issues begin when time is tight.
This is where a Virtual Assistant comes in. They can step in to take repetitive, admin-style tasks off your hands. With your back-office to-do list reduced, you’ll have plenty of time to spend on more pressing aspects of your business, increasing levels of productivity and satisfaction.
Virtual Assistants Reduce Stress
One of the biggest productivity killers is stress. We’ve all been there. Faced with a to-do list longer than our arm and not enough time to complete it, we tend to go into fight or flight mode. Some may fight through it, firing off tasks as quickly as possible just to see that list reduce a bit. Others may become paralysed with the dread of it and put it off for as long as possible.
Either way, productivity is reduced, and you’re left feeling frustrated that your business isn’t running as smoothly as it could.
Again, Virtual Assistants can step in to eliminate the issue. Delegating to a Virtual Assistant not only means reducing your workload, but it ensures work is completed to a high standard. VAs come with a vast range of knowledge, experience and skills that mean work is always completed to the highest quality and with the minimum input from you.
So, now that we’ve pinpointed the two main components of reduced productivity and how a Virtual Assistant may be the solution, let’s think about the ways in which a Virtual Assistant can support your business:
Virtual Assistants can increase productivity by:
- Managing your inbox – a time-consuming task but a vital one for keeping on top of projects and managing business relationships, both in-house and externally. Virtual Assistants can respond to emails that don’t require a direct response from you and flag those that do. This way, you won’t have to scour your inbox for the important stuff – it’ll all be taken care of for you.
- Managing content creation – your marketing strategy is vital when it comes to giving your business the exposure it deserves online. But creating content also takes time that you simply haven’t got. Virtual Assistants can create, schedule and publish strategic content across your social media channels to ensure they’re always up to date and engaging for your audience.
- Handling general admin – we’ve already learnt that general admin tasks take a considerable amount of time away from other important aspects of your business. Virtual Assistants are able to handle these tasks quickly and effectively, ensuring your business can continue to run smoothly without taking more time away from you.
- Handling credit control – another vital but time-consuming back-office task, credit control can be incredibly difficult to keep on top of. Virtual Assistants can dedicate their time to chasing late payments, overseeing cash flow and reducing aged debt so that you don’t have to.
- Handling data entry – data is the centre of every business, and without it, you lose out on valuable information and potential opportunities for connection. But, again, it’s incredibly time-consuming because of the level of accuracy it requires. Virtual Assistants are experts in data entry and can take it off your hands not only to ensure that it gets done, but to give you peace of mind that it will be done to the highest standard.
Increase Productivity with The Edwards Company
Increased productivity doesn’t mean doing more work; it means having more time to do your work in. Here at The Edwards Company, our main aim is to make this your reality.
The fewer back-office tasks you have to worry about, the more time you’ll have to focus on other, more important aspects of your business, thus increasing levels of productivity and satisfaction. Our goal is to ensure you never feel bogged down by workload or frustrated about not being able to give important projects your full attention.
To ensure that this is the case, we offer services in:
All our support packages are 100% flexible and affordable, and they’re all designed with businesses like yours in mind.
If you’re looking for a Virtual Assistant to help you increase productivity so that your business can grow, please do not hesitate to get in touch.