Hi, everyone! My name’s Paula Burgess and I’m from Beyond the Maze. We are a Virtual Assistant practise based here in Brisbane, Australia.
Today I am here to talk to you about what keeps us organised as a virtual assistant.
As you can imagine, when you’re a virtual assistant assisting other businesses with their administration and marketing and events and all that sort of thing, there is a lot to manage and there’s different tasks we have to do for different clients.
We’re looking after multiple clients at one time, so there’s a lot going on in our day.
What programmes though do we use to keep us organised?
There are so many programmes out there that you could use as a business owner. Generally the ones we use, obviously, we have email and we’ve sorted our email into different areas.
So we might have, for me, for example, I’ll have different colour coded emails, which are things that need to be looked at right now, or things that are for particular clients that then I know anything that’s marked in a certain colour, they’re all the emails to do with that client.
Once I’m done with them, I’ll file them away into a folder, or I will print them to a PDF and save them into the client’s folder, so I’ve got it there for later reference in case I need it, or I’ll just archive it if it’s not all that important. I’ve action it.
I’m somebody that likes to keep my emails quite down quite low, and it actually does my head in if my emails are over, and there’s quite a few in my inbox. I like to keep my inbox nice and clean.
So generally what I do is I do that colour coding. If I find it sitting there too long or I need it bunched into other tasks, I’ll send it over to our task-based software.
Now there’s a number of Software programs out there that can help business owners with their tasks and the one I generally recommend, which is not the one we use at the moment, but we did start out the one I do recommend to most of my clients when they’re first starting out with a task-based software, is Asana.
The reason I recommend Asana is, it’s easy to use. You get a lot of usage out of it without having to pay for their subscription. If you want a few more technical details with it on what it’s going to do, then you’ll have to pay for a subscription for it. But generally it’s a good place to start, and it’s nice and easy. You can join, invite people in to collaborate with you, and then you can see what they’re working on as well.
Here in the office, we use ClickUp. The reason why we use ClickUp and not Asana is basically ClickUp was sort of a level up for us. It was more technical. I call it the Beast because there’s a lot of levels to it and what you can use, and it integrates nicely with other things.
It helps us automate a few more things than basically being a manual process.
So it’s more reliable than human, sometimes not all the time, because you have to watch it, but that’s just not ClickUp. That’s just any automation that is set up in your business.
ClickUp is great. We have everybody on ClickUp and we can collaborate in there. It’s very, very similar to us. And that’s how we keep our task going and we in our task.
We also have our processes in our tasks where if we want someone to do something, the process is there in that task, particularly and we’re getting to be more and more processed in our business.
So there’s just a couple of things that we use in our business.
Obviously, emails.
Everybody has emails.
Then we use ClickUp.
We also use Slack.
So Slack is our internal chat channel because we all work remotely then that is a good way for us to stay as team and be able to communicate with each other on what’s happening.
We can also set up channels for our clients. So we’re communicating in real time for our clients where, as you know, emails can be a little bit slower. Where Slack is an instant message, just like messenger on Facebook, you can set up Slack for more of a business type focus.
Now, we also use this as a bit of a fun thing in our business where we’ll give reward systems with people where they they’ve done a great job, or they’ve got great feedback from a client or they’ve helped somebody or things like that.
So it’s a bit of fun for us as well. And we also can put up silly memes or silly things that have happened to us and things like that to keep the vibe and the culture flowing in the business.
They would be our three key things to help us stay organised in our business.
There is obviously a lot more programmes that you can use, and we use as well to keep us organised in our business.
I just wanted to touch on those top three to help you understand how a virtual system might keep things going and keep your task intact to make sure that things can stay up to date and that workflow is flowing for you.
If you’d like to have a chat with us about how to use a virtual assistant service, please click on the link below and book in a time to meet with our Client Concierge. Shay can go through everything with you on how you could get the best out of using a virtual assistant.
Paula from Beyond the Maze.
Bye for now.
