Weekends are often misconstrued as the time to catch up on life admin, work admin, and any other things that didn’t get completed during the week. It really shouldn’t be that way though. Weekends – and any other time that should be your downtime, should be that time you need to relax, reboot and get closer to that elusive work-life balance that is so many people’s goal.
At Pearl Lemon Outsourcing, we have someone who can help you if you’re still sweating the minor details and nagging small stuff at 5 p.m. on Friday, or at 9pm on any given night. A virtual personal assistant.
Having a personal assistant is nothing new. People have been hiring them for centuries, although they have had many titles over the years. However, the advent of the Internet changed the face of the personal assistant niche again, adding a virtual personal assistant into the mix, allowing people to take advantage of all the benefits of having a private personal assistant without having to find room for them in their home or office.
There are lots of benefits to working with a virtual PA. Some are fairly obvious, others not so much (until you think about it.) While Pearl Lemon Outsourcing’s virtual PA staff can lean into all kinds of tasks and responsibilities, here’s a look at some of the most common ways our clients say they benefit from having a virtual PA in their life.
We’re not sure when life admin became such a bothersome thing, but we do know that a “day off” may easily be consumed by waiting on hold with all kinds of businesses and contractors or looking for a holiday destination that will accept your kids and your dog.
Unless you enjoy this bothersome life admin, there is unquestionably a better way. One of the major advantages of hiring a personal assistant is that they can handle both your personal and professional lives. A personal assistant can do everything from scheduling hair appointments, doctor visits, and sourcing gifts to doing research on trips, buying tickets and much more.
A virtual PA, also known as a remote personal assistant, manages your life from afar. Like a fantastic fairy godmother for whom you never need to make a cup of tea. If you’re a one-man or woman band, don’t have a physical office to place them in, or don’t want to be responsible for holiday, sickness, and other HR headaches, this is a tremendous benefit.
Adults’ short-term memory capacity is limited, according to studies. This means you may usually remember between 5 and 9 items in your short-term memory at any given moment, with each “piece” lasting about 15-30 seconds.
If you ask any business owner, entrepreneur or busy parent (and people are often all three of those) how many things are on their mental to-do list right now, you can bet it’s more than this. It’s also worth remembering that the longer you’re required to retain information, the more difficult it becomes.
Imagine having an external brain, or a hard drive, to which you could easily send your to-do list. No, there’s not a robot to do that (yet.) We’re suggesting that you hire a virtual personal assistant. They’ll keep track of everything you need to do, remember, or return so you don’t have to.
A personal assistant serves as a second set of eyes in addition to helping you keep track of your to-do list. It’s the type of forward-thinking that will prevent problems before they arise, whether it’s double-checking your calendar to make sure you haven’t double-booked anything or planning ahead to book transport transfers. When trying to keep numerous balls in the air, working with a virtual PA is how you set up a safety net underneath to catch any that may fall.
No matter how important a task is, if you experience a mental block, it will remain unfinished on your to-do list. Another benefit of hiring a virtual personal assistant is that you can select one who possesses the skills you lack. A personal assistant can help you translate data into a PowerPoint doc if you’re good with numbers but not so much with creating presentations. They’ll catch any grammatical issues if you don’t spell-check well.
They can do the things you hate too (like PowerPoint) and leave you free to concentrate your focus on the big picture stuff you love (or just on your kid’s school concert.)
You get to set the hours with a virtual PA, such as the ones we assist supply at Pearl Lemon Outsourcing. So it’s fine if you want to start with just five hours per week, but it’s also fine if you suddenly need to increase this to 20 hours per week. This serves two purposes: you get the help you need without having to pay for hours you don’t need.
You might elect to hire a PA that works (virtually) beside you every day in your timezone. However, thanks to technology, you can also engage a PA in an entirely different timezone, allowing work to be accomplished while you sleep. This lets you set activities as you think of them throughout the day, and then wake up with a completed to-do list. This enables entrepreneurs that are unable to plan ahead of time the time and space to assign responsibilities and make the most of their virtual PA.
A virtual PA isn’t the same as a full-time employee. There is no real emotional aspect involved if you need to switch PAs or even use a couple of different ones for different jobs. We match entrepreneurs with the ideal PA for them at Pearl Lemon Outsourcing, but your changing requirements can mean that a different PA is more suited to certain tasks. We can help you make that switch, or addition, quickly and seamlessly.
Focusing on your life’s goals and your company’s big ideas while being drowned in busy work is a surefire way to lead to dissatisfaction and burnout. Outsourcing these responsibilities to a skilled assistant is a sensible solution. Further, a virtual assistant is better from a convenience standpoint for you, as they’re always on call to service your needs. No more chasing lost secretaries. With a virtual personal assistant, you can have all your needs taken care of by a professional and capable partner.
A virtual personal assistant is a valuable resource that allows you to care for your personal and professional life.
Here are some of the services a virtual personal assistant can help you with:
With a virtual PA, you can achieve new levels of productivity that you’ve never seen before. Thanks to the added help and information of a virtual PA, you can better manage your schedule, complete your daily tasks, and achieve a new work-life balance that will do wonders for your productivity and mental health. A virtual PA allows you to truly juggle all your responsibilities and take care of your large tower of tasks that have stressed you out and left you feeling overloaded.
Pearl Lemon boasts a skilled team of professional assistants that are located all across the globe. By hiring one of our virtual assistants, you can be sure that your needs are taken care of 24/7 and that you achieve a new work-life balance. Our assistants have experience working with clients from various personal and professional backgrounds, and their experience will allow them to tackle your problems and tasks easily. If you’re interested in utilising our virtual PA service, book a call with us today!
These are just some of the benefits of working with a virtual PA from Pearl Lemon Outsourcing.
Contact us today and we can tell you about lots more, as well as help you find the perfect virtual PA for you fast.
