Why?
There are currently engineers in India that are willing to work for what a waitress earn in the United States. Someday, this will surely be taken advantage of in a very real way in the near future. For now, we’ll just use it to hire ourselves our very own personal assistant for just $10 a month.
Why would you need your very own virtual assistant? Well, simply put, your time is very likely worth more than what you could pay a virtual assistant to do for you. Things that require time – cancelling a phone contract, booking a car in for a service, booking haircuts, compiling shopping lists and recipes for the week, online research for work, or finding the cheapest but best quality holiday venues in Zanzibar that are self catering and also within a kilometre of the beach and are also near a Brazilian Ju Jitsu school – are activities you could be leaving to someone else while you get on with literally anything else.
How do I hire one?
Hiring a V.A. that works well with you is obviously important. Here is the simple method I use:
- Sign up for upwork.com
- Visit this link
- Post a job – be verbose with your job spec.
- Browse freelancers – you’ll see that people’s fee’s vary. Find someone that charges $3.33 an hour. For most, 3-4 hours a week of admin is probably enough.
- Interview – interview the top couple of applicants over skype. Find someone you like and can get on with.
Empowering your virtual assistant, safely
Some of the questions I naturally get asked are with regard to your privacy and security in your relationship with your new V.A. How much information do I give them about myself? I want them to be able to purchase things for me, but do I have to give them my credit card? I'd love to hand over some emailing responsibilities to them, but do I have to give away access to my whole email account to a (virtual) stranger?
Here are a couple of steps I take to ensure that your V.A. is empowered enough to do useful stuff, but you've taken enough security precautions to put your mind at ease.
- Phone calls – One of the best things about having a VA is the ability for them to make phone calls on your behalf. The simplest way to do this, is to use the Skype calling option. In order to do this, you’ll need to topup your Skype account with credit, but you’re also probably going to want to keep your own personal Skype account separate. I recommend that to do this, you should setup a new Skype account. Create credentials for this account that are different from your own personal one, and topup the account with some money. Skype rates are pretty cheap, and I find that most of the tasks that I don't want to do myself involve sitting for hours in call centre queues, so this is an awesome win.
- Email – Create another email address. I setup another gmail account. This is great for long winded email conversations that you don’t feel like having – cancelling a rewards program, finding out why you can’t log into a forum that you used to be able to et cetera. This doesn’t expose your super personal emails to someone on the other side of the world but gives you all the advantage of having the really boring emails you don’t want to deal with sorted out.
- Document Everything – If you’ve ever programmed, you know that computers are dumb. Tasks that you find easy, like opening facebook and logging into your account need to be explained in meticulous detail when you create an algorithm to do this in code. While programming a simple algorithm can be frustrating, it’s also reliable once done. It’ll run in the predetermined manner indefinitely. I see tasks that you give to Virtual Assistants in the same way. Document everything – write it out verbosely as though you were designing a computer algorithm. This way, you leave no room for misinterpretation and everyone is on the same page. Doing this also has a second great benefit – if you ever want to change Virtual Assistant, you already have documentation for how you like things to be done. An example of this is shown below:
- Credit Card – Get a prepaid credit card and put a couple hundred bucks on it. Giving limited access to some finance greatly extends what your Virtual assistant can help you with – buying flowers for your significant other, paying a bill you had forgotten about.
And that's it! Be sure to let me know how it goes and if there is anything else I should add to this document!