You know how the saying goes – if you want something done right, do it yourself. This attitude probably served you well when getting your business to take its first, tentative steps. Now that it’s hit its stride though and you need to bring in external help, it can be an attitude that harms more than helps.
You will feel this way with each and every new staff member you bring on board and the feeling is especially intense when hiring a remote support staff member from outside Australia, like a Virtual Assistant. You should be aware though, that your inability to delegate work to your Virtual Assistant can have negative consequences – some of which you may already be experiencing.
If you recognise any of the signs below, then you know that you’re not delegating your work to your Virtual Assistant the way you probably should be:
- Your personal life is suffering. According to research undertaken on the work-life balance of managers across Australia to Asia, Bloomberg reveals that over 50 percent of them work over 40 hours a week. Even worse, those with children often end up working more hours than those without children, to compensate. Delegation can give you back crucial extra hours to your day. You need this to relax, recharge and spend time with the people you love.
- You’re getting bored. While we all have to spend time in the day doing tasks we don’t really enjoy, if you find that you are spending more time on tasks you don’t like than those you do, it’s time to delegate these to someone who can and will do them with aplomb. Besides, when it comes to your health, motivation and productivity, researchers say that being bored at work has the same negative effects that being overworked has.
- You’re not growing, and neither is your business. The reason that your business is where it is today is all thanks to your strategizing, creativity and decision making – all things you cannot offer if you are spending all your time on menial tasks that could very easily be done by somebody else. This allows you to lead and grow your business, the way you were always meant to.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant can change your life in so many ways, but only if you can get out of your own way and let it happen. When matching our clients with their perfect Virtual Assistants, we’ve found the biggest challenge they experience is not that their Virtual Assistant isn’t performing up to scratch. It’s that they have difficulty trusting the Assistants to do the task in the first place.
There is a long list of tasks that a Virtual Assistant can do for you. Most can manage calendars and email accounts in their sleep, not to mention process documentation, work with data mining and balance the books. Even more are trained in niche tasks, such as blog posting and management, social media management and event co-ordination.
The longer you put off delegating, the worse it will be once you get to the point where you cannot cope with your workload. In the time you wasted, your Virtual Assistant could have already hit an established 
rhythm with you – learning how you work, and how to anticipate your thoughts and actions. In other words, the longer you stick with one Virtual Assistant, the more valuable they become to you, the sooner you get started, the better.
If you need more convincing, then look out for our next post, where we will share the personal experiences of one of our clients and how delegating to their Virtual Assistant saved the day…
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