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productivity and organization

Your VA Mentor: Clear Your Brain Fog - and Bump Up Your Brain Power!

Clear Your Brain Fog – and Bump Up Your Brain Power!

I have been in ‘clean up’ mode lately. Part of that is due to the fact that I just rolled out a new program (my 50K VA Bootcamp). When I am building content for a program, I tend to grab all of my old notes from things I have taught before, as well as my ‘swipe’ file that contains new ideas that I want to implement in the program. In short, I kind of pull a lot of papers and books out of their hiding places. Once you do something like that, you can see just what it is you have been holding onto, and you can make the decision to use it or lose it. I made the decision… Read More »Clear Your Brain Fog – and Bump Up Your Brain Power!

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Your VA Mentor: Simple Tips to Help You Manage Multiple Clients

Simple Tips to Help You Manage Multiple VA Clients

This week I received an email from a VA who said that with all the training that people offer for Virtual Assistants, she hasn’t found anyone who teaches how to work with multiple clients. She had some specific questions about how to manage her client work. I understood that she was asking how to collaborate with clients and make sure that you had boundaries and procedures in place to ease the flow of work back and forth. She replied that it wasn’t what she was looking for. So we dug a bit deeper, and that’s when we got to her real question: how do you put systems in place to manage your workload during the day? Her specific example was… Read More »Simple Tips to Help You Manage Multiple VA Clients

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Your VA Mentor: Schedule Your Work

Get More Done, Make More Money

At the IVAA Live Summit I spoke about organizing & prioritizing your work. One of the pieces of my presentation was about organizing tasks so that you get more done each day. When you are working as a support professional, it is easy to try to multitask and do many things at once, but there are all kinds of studies out there that show that multitasking is simply ineffective. It’s much more efficient to focus on one task at a time, and complete it, and then move on to the next thing. The way I handle multitasking in my daily routine is by batching my work – that is, collecting tasks that will done at one time and doing them… Read More »Get More Done, Make More Money

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3 Steps to Organizing Your VA Business

When you start to work virtually, you quickly realize that organization is a key skill that will become very important in your daily schedule. If you have come from a corporate background, you are generally working under one supervisor or ‘boss’, and priorities can sometimes be set by the individual you report to. Once you own your own business, this completely changes. You are now responsible to each and every client – and you are the one who has to be able to juggle the tasks and priorities of each of them. It can be difficult if you don’t have a system in place to keep things organized. Here are three keys to getting and staying organized in your business:… Read More »3 Steps to Organizing Your VA Business

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10 Tips to Help You Include Down Time in Your Life

One of the places that many small business owners get trapped in is the ‘working all the time’ syndrome. It is a big job to run your own business, and there is no question there is always something that needs doing. But if Jack Nicholson taught us anything, it’s that all work and no play is not a good thing. You can’t bring your best brain and your best attitude to your business unless you are certain to make time to step away from it to recharge. By taking time for yourself – whether it’s to physically care for yourself, or just to do something that inspires you and lifts your spirits, ‘down time’ is a great thing to be… Read More »10 Tips to Help You Include Down Time in Your Life

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The Never Ending Balancing Act

As a business owner, no doubt you have had some experience trying to balance your home and work lives at some point. The key to doing this well is to put some rules in place that you follow, and that others follow as well. For work-life balance there can sometimes be a fine line that needs to be amplified – so you don’t lose sight of what’s important at that time. On the one hand, you want to be sure that you don’t immerse yourself in work every waking hour of the day. My son has seen me using the laptop while we watch TV at night and he asks, ‘Mom are you working?’ but I’m really just on my… Read More »The Never Ending Balancing Act

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Are You an E-Hoarder?

I was recently reading a blog post from Leslie Shreve, of Productive Day.com http://productiveday.com/ about E-Hoarding. As a virtual business owner, I’m always trying to find new ways to keep myself organized and to tame the various forms of clutter that I seem to collect. And while I am admittedly a collector of many things that I probably don’t need (my husband would laugh at that one!)  one of the things I actually do have good control over is my email. I have a system in place to keep my email clean and clear, and although I still probably have more ‘on file’ than many people, I am confident that my system works for me. What do I do? First,… Read More »Are You an E-Hoarder?

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Wow, what’s that?

I don’t know about you, but I like to learn new things. When something comes along that I think might be valuable in my business or my clients’ businesses, I usually stop and have a look. It can be a new tool for organization or collaboration … something that maybe will help us automate something a little bit better … or maybe it’s just something cool. If I am really conscious of what I am doing, I can figure out when would be a good time to check something out in more detail. But sometimes … okay most of the time … I am not that present … and I become the victim of Shiny Object Syndrome. You know what… Read More »Wow, what’s that?

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