Virtual Assistant Case Studies: How We’ve Bought Back Time

by Conrad Ruiz | Oct 13, 2021 | Time Management

It is strange how surprising it is for people to hand off tasks to someone else. The first surprise tends to come in the form of this question:

“So what should I even ask for you to do for me?”

Our first response tends to go something like: 

“Well, what would you like to not be doing anymore?”

But that doesn’t always work.

Our clients often haven’t had the time to think about what they no longer want to do, or shouldn’t do.  They also don’t often think completely through how they’re even going to delegate a task. Moreover, they’re not yet aware what the most time-cost-effective tasks they can outsource are.

This is where we come in.

With Well Aware as a time management partner, our job is to pay close attention to the time and tasks of our clients. Through our 3rd person perspective, we spot actions our clients can delegate. From there, should the client approve, we can help delegate the task with them if not for them. This way we can then get our clients to focus on more valuable options for their time.

The following are 3 examples of tasks we’ve identified and performed for our clients. Each example covers a different focus on our clients’ time-task.

The first is a health-based task focused on our client’s nutrition.

The second is a wealth-based task focused on our client’s business development.

The third is a self-based task focused on our client’s review of their time.

Our goal in sharing these is to spark awareness of the time you can delegate to a virtual assistant. Be that with our help, or through someone else. Enjoy.

Note: Names used are different from our actual clients for privacy reasons.

Case Study #1: Delegating Meal Planning & Grocery Ordering.

Our first example brings us under the umbrella of health.

A client of ours was finding themselves despising the time it took him to decide what to eat each week. They also hated grocery shopping. Our client was willing to cook. In fact, he enjoyed time making meals, so long as they weren’t too complicated. This sparked an opportunity to delegate:

“Mark, why don’t we come up with a meal schedule for you every week?”

Mark highlighted: “Look, I don’t plan on cooking EVERY meal.”

We responded: “Not a problem. Based on your schedule, we can make sure you make enough food for leftovers.”

Mark lamented: “Okay, but then I’ll have to make sure I buy enough ingredients.”

To which we replied: “Oh no, we’ll grocery shop for you. Once you approve the meals, we’ll get the right amount of food delivered right to your door.”

It helped that Mark was already used to ordering groceries to his home. 

He’s never had someone else order those groceries for him though.

“What about security? Your VA would need my credit card to make the order, wouldn’t they?” – Mark asked.

“That’s easy to address. There’s this feature within our recommended password manager LastPass. It allows you to share necessary credit card information for specific sites only. It also autofills that information without letting the VA (in this case, April) see it or use it elsewhere. We’ll show you how to set that up. Your information is safe and always in your control.”

—

Mark got to experience weeks where his meals were not only planned for him, but ordered. Within that time, Mark would share which meals he enjoyed and which he didn’t. The former would end up returning to his meal schedule for future weeks. We played around with the style of showcasing each meal and ended up with a Kanban board. Within each card of the Kanban, April, Mark’s fractional VA, would include an image of the meal. As well there’d be a stripped down checklist of ingredients needed. We included a checklist for recipe instructions along with a link to the source article.

This first example highlights a nutrition-focused scenario of time-task delegated. We also make time suggestions for exercise as well as sleep. In Mark’s case, we got to talk about timing his food schedule to when it made the most sense for him to exercise. We also considered his sleep schedule which needed a change so that he could get more of his professional work taken care of in the morning. 

On that note, let’s move on to the next case study.

Case Study #2: Delegating Outreach within a Prospecting Strategy.

Our second example brings us under the umbrella topic of wealth.

Cue our client who’s job is as a fractional VP of sales – Carla knows very well how to run her own prospecting campaigns.

The problem for her was manual outreach via direct message. It didn’t make sense, for her time, to send out pre-scripted messages herself. What did make sense for her was getting cued when to step into a stage of the prospecting where the lead became warm.

This was our opportunity to help Carla map out her prospecting strategy. By this mapping, we could identify all the touch points that a VA could perform on her behalf. Then, given a positive response by a lead, the VA could notify Carla to step in. If not, the VA would provide a report of what happened with failed prospects.

We started out by diagramming the prospecting strategy. Carla sat with us over Zoom after preparing her scripts. We talked through each of the steps and their decision trees. It then became clear when the VA, Mavie, would send a message to a prospect, and on what channel(s).

From there it was a matter of giving Mavie access to those channels. Again we used LastPass to share credentials in a secure way for Carla. We kept organization of all the prospects’ information and progress via Google Drive. This was also where we housed the scripts provided by Carla. Through the Drive, Carla could make changes to scripts, add new contacts, or make comments that would guide Mavie based on her feedback.

Carla not only benefited from the virtual help for her prospecting. LastPass saved several minutes each day just by filling out passwords for her online tools.

Through her prospecting work, we also needed to organize Carla’s existing contacts. This data cleaning project served to bring all Carla’s contacts under one address book.

—

Now in this particular case, we also highlighted security concerns. See it turned out Carla was saving passwords to her address book for recall. IT security consulting is not our primary function, but it has played an important role for our work. That said, we explained the dangers and reiterated the value of good password management. Progress to her address book by the VA halted until she deleted all password-related data.

I digress: You can read more about how we make our clients aware of better IT choices in those case studies.

With that, this second example highlights a prospecting-focused scenario of time-task delegated. We also make time suggestions for networking as well as creating & delivering value in your business. In Carla’s case we analyzed and discussed time-cost ROI with each of her networking groups. And when it came to her creating value, we made sure she had enough time each week to deliver on her client’s needs. 

From there, let’s shift over to the last case study on reviewing one’s own time.

Case Study #3: Delegating Calendar Activity Review.

Our third and last example ends us under the umbrella of the self.

In this case, our client was actually… me! I wanted to look back on all the meetings I held this year as part of my review. This is something I like doing for clients to address their relationships. I figured it was good practice I perform it on myself.

Though I knew where to find the information – all on my calendar – I didn’t want to scan back from January 2021 to now the start of Q4. It didn’t make sense for my time. I also knew that at the time earlier this year, I wasn’t documenting every interaction well into my CRM…

As such, this was an opportunity to catch up with myself before I was even as organized as I’ve become today! I gave Geilord, my VA, access to my calendar (but not my whole account). I then instructed him to create an excel sheet of all invitees on my calendar. I asked for the date met, and each invitee’s email. He himself included the name of the calendar event – a small thoughtfulness I hadn’t considered – that ended up really helpful.

After reviewing his report of my interactions, I immediately started recognizing tasks. Contacts to catch up with, old projects to reflect on, strategies to revise…

And now due to the way I’ve now set up my CRM, I can have Geilord set those follow ups for me. I can also have him enter data about each of my contacts’ social media profiles, and have me follow them. Old projects and strategies are up to me to reflect on. But the actions I generate from there, I don’t also have to do! That is unless I’m looking to get my hands dirty with something new that I don’t know how to do yet – therefore, I can’t simply delegate it, as Geilord may not be able to do it well! An important principle.

With that, at this point, I’m able to create an agenda item with my advisors about what I’m seeing from this review of my time. In this practice, I aim to preach a similar call to action for you.

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This third example highlights a review-focused scenario of time-task delegated. We also make time suggestions for studying as well as resting. Yes, we even have suggestions for how you can study smarter given your time. As well how you can rest smarter given the same. With that, our main principle which makes all that possible stands on this simple message:

Review your time, and focus. There’s only so much you can do in a day. 

You more than likely have tasks you can pay someone else to do. When it comes to the costs of that, you can pay as low $3 an hour for a VA. With that, you are more responsible to train and educate that VA. For $5 to $10 an hour, you will have less of that responsibility, but still have to manage the administration aka hiring & payroll.

Whereas for $12-15 an hour and above, there are plenty of agencies that will handle all things for you. That can include walking you through how to delegate. Well Aware is among these parties, and we partner with an agency to hire our VAs. And yet with that, our effort goes beyond identifying how to outsource for you.

We analyze your time in life as a whole. We are your awareness partner, highlighting opportunities that best buy back your time. If you could complete a task with even less cost through, say, automation, that’ll be our suggestion. If we should streamline a process only you can perform because of the time benefits, that’d be our focus for you.

With that, I hope the time you chose to invest in reading this found you well. If you want to open a discussion with me about your time, please feel free to schedule 30 minutes with me. Until next time, be well on your way.

– Conrad Ruiz

Founder | Well Aware

“The decisions you make and the actions that follow are a reflection of who you are. You cannot hide from yourself.” – Robert Greene, Mastery

P.S.

One consistent highlight I want to address is my mentioning of LastPass. LastPass is a great password management tool. That said, it’s not the only one out there. Nor is it the only one we’ve tried. For instance, we tried out OnePassword, but found the UX/UI lacking in intuitiveness. That ended up costing our clients a lot of time and frustration. We also have used Keeper as that was an IT client’s existing password management tool. I like it about as much as I would LastPass for having not gotten too involved with it – point being it’s simple and it works, and that’s what you want out of a tool like these.

All this is to say that I do have an affiliation link available to anyone who’s interested in using LastPass. Using this link gives you (and me) one free month of LastPass Premium (valued at $3). With that, I welcome you to explore LastPass without consideration to my affiliation. For your convenience if so, here’s an unaffiliated link to their site.

Again, thank you for your time. – Conrad

Ways to destress: Why is it hard to rest after a stressful workday?

by Roldan Campuso | Jul 31, 2021 | Time Management

Work and rest are partners, not competitors. The better “rested” you are, the more energy and creativity you’ll bring into your work.

But why do so few of us really know how to rest and recharge at the end of the workday? 

The devil is in the details, but it’s important to define rest here. True rest – the type that makes you feel energized, inspired, and ready to take on the world – requires three key elements: relaxing your mind, body, and expectations.

However, with the overwhelmingly crazy nature of our workdays, accomplishing each of these three is a rather daunting task. And the truth is, many of us take our job stresses home without even realizing it. 

From the minute we clock out until the next morning when we punch in – when we are supposed to be resting and enjoying our non-work lives – we often let job stress seep in and take the most out of our time.

In this article, we will walk you through how you may have been unwittingly magnifying job stress and help you gain a clearer understanding of how to leave work at work. We’ll also identify quick ways to fight off stress and have a relaxing rest after a workday.  

In what ways do we take work home? 

After a long day at work, many of us find ourselves taking our job stress with us as we interact with our friends, children, or significant others. 

If we’re not careful, we inadvertently allow our work stress to become home stress…often at the expense of our relationships or our health.

Here are (often subtle) ways that we do it:

• We think about stress during our commute. Driving home from work could be an exciting time to enjoy the freedom of being off the clock, but all too often, we choose to take it as a time to ruminate about the stresses of the day and think about our frustrations at work and everything else that’s weighing on our shoulders.

  The problem is that this can exaggerate our stress levels, making them seem higher after the commute home than they were at the end of the workday.

• We vent about our work stress to our loved ones. Complaining about work to a loved one may feel good at the moment, but it can take a toll over time. While bottling your feelings up isn’t any good for you either, when you spend what could have been quality time with loved ones just focused on all the stresses of the day, you lose more of your day to job stress. The more time that you focus on work off of work, the less time you are being mindful and present, hence, enjoying the moment.
  

• We worry about work instead of relaxing. Working in a job that requires constant troubleshooting or facing a heavy load of stress makes it difficult to shut off your “brainstorming” mind when you leave work. This is especially true for those working from home: our brains are always in the “finding solutions mode” that it can become hard for us to enjoy our personal lives.

Now that we have identified some of the common ways we take our work stress home, it’s imperative to ask ourselves…

How do we leave work at work?

Picture this: You’ve finally gotten into bed (and your back is thanking you for it), but all of a sudden your mind races with all the unfinished tasks, to-dos, and conflicts at work. You know you have to just shrug them off, but how?

It’s impossible to simply tell yourself to “just relax and sleep it off.” These are the thoughts you push aside when watching TV or eating dinner with family or friends but always seem to pop up as soon as you try to fall asleep. 

There are ways to help you detach from work the moment you clock out.

• Tie up loose ends before you leave. Prepare yourself before leaving work. Try preparing a to-do list for yourself for when you get back the next day. 

  This allows you to leave with the comfort of knowing that things are taken care of as much as they can be until tomorrow, and it also helps you come in the next day and feel focused.

• Create a post-work ritual. Routine tells the body what to do. This is the reason children need to have a bedtime ritual before falling asleep. We may be too old for bedtime stories, but setting up a ritual can make a huge difference in our day.

  For instance, consider your commute home as a ritual to separate work from personal time. You may make your own ritual to turn your “work brain” off too. It can be by changing clothes (even if you’re changing from one set of pajamas into another), playing specific music (to end the day), or even taking a warm shower. Try out new things and see what suits you best. If a specific routine works for you, keep doing it.

• Enjoy your commute home. With some planning, you can make your commute home a relaxing (read: rewarding)  experience rather than just another hurdle to leap from before you can relax. If you’re into it, listen to audiobooks, either fiction (for fun) or nonfiction (in an area where you’d like to grow).

  Let your favorite Spotify playlist entertain you. Or better yet, take this time to mentally count everything you have to be grateful for. This can help you get into a more positive frame of mind and prime you to be more appreciative of the little things in life that come free of charge.

Ways To Make Your Home A Place To Relax

Your home is your haven from stress. With deliberate planning and mindset shifting, it will soon become easier to let your job stress melt away just by getting home.

• Create a soothing home environment for yourself. Your home should feel like a retreat away from the stressors of the world. One of the best ways to have a home environment that soothes your stress rather than making you feel more tired is decluttering.

  Studies have shown that clutter has a subtle but very real effect on our stress levels. Make your bed every morning before leaving your room. Make sure the dishes are washed and laundry is put away before starting work. If you’re working from home, set up a designated work zone that’s reserved just for work and make another space to be used for relaxation (like your couch or bed).

• Give in to small pleasures. Treat yourself by getting more of those little things in life that can draw a smile on your face. These are those “small pleasures” that instantly help lift your mood. It can be a cup of tea, watching your favorite Ted Talk, playing with your furry friend, a warm bath, or anything else that can raise your spirits.

  Go on, indulge — you deserve it.

• Cultivate mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness exercises, such as meditation, can increase your ability to maintain an “at this present moment” perspective. In turn, this can help relieve post-job stress as well as build your resilience toward stress in the long run.
  

• Sleep tight. There’s still no better way to recharge your energy than to get a good night’s sleep. Though this might be challenging for many of us, its benefits are enormous. Turn off your gadgets at least half an hour before bedtime and ensure that your bedroom is free from distractions that prevent you from sleeping. When you’re in bed, be there to sleep.

• Find support. If you need to talk stressful things out before you can let go of them, it helps to have a supportive person who will make you feel heard and help you to let go of the stress. Also, if you are someone who finds it hard to organize your schedules and or stick to them (which can highly contribute to stress), find a time management partner.

  A time management and accountability partner can be someone who gently reminds you to refocus your thoughts and energy if you start getting bogged down by stressful thoughts of work.

  Ultimately, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by job stress, or you are experiencing chronic stress, consulting a professional — a counselor or mental health provider — should be your top priority.

Take a Break from Tech, Give Time to Your Passions

As reflected from the above-suggested activities, going on a mini daily tech detox may just be what you need to shed some of that work-related stress. 

Spend time on something else that can help you get your mind off of those worrisome workday woes. 

It may sound cliché, but there are still more important things in life outside of your work!

Take that long walk, return that call to your brother, book that weekend trip with your significant other, and most of all, leave that work stress at work.

Don’t worry, when you come back — it’s still there.

Have a stress-free life!

The real cost of multitasking (5 ways to rebuild your focus at work)

by Roldan Campuso | Jul 29, 2021 | Time Management

Think about the things you are doing right now. Obviously, you are reading this article, but chances are, you are also doing several things at once. 

Perhaps you’re also listening to music, DMing a friend, checking your email in another tab, or thinking about where to spend your weekend.

If you often do several things at once, you are a “multitasker.” And you probably think that you are fairly good at this balancing act. But numerous studies have shown that you may not be as effective as you think you are.

In this article, we’ll shed some light on the real cost of context switching, aka multitasking, on your productivity at work. Also, we’ll give you 5 simple ways to help rebuild your focus.

What is multitasking?

We often think of multitasking as performing more than one thing simultaneously: Watching Netflix series while scrolling through Facebook feeds, or driving while talking on the phone.

Multitasking refers to a) doing multiple things at once (like driving and talking on the phone) and b) jumping to another task without finishing the other first (like responding to emails incrementally while working on a larger project). 

But what is it that makes multitasking such a productivity killer? 

Doing multiple tasks at the same time or switching from one task to another will give you the illusion that you are accomplishing multiple things at once. But what you are really doing is quickly shifting your attention and focus from one thing to the next and jeopardizing the quality of your overall work. 

3 types of multitasking

The most common example we see on the Internet when we search multitasking is texting while driving. While this kind of double-duty (read: risky) attention split deserves a major callout and should be heavily frowned upon, this is just one of the many ways we try to force our brains in multiple directions simultaneously. 

There are three types of multitasking:

1. Doing two tasks concurrently. This includes talking on the phone while driving or chatting with friends on Discord during a webinar.
2. Switching from one task to another without finishing the first one. We’ve all experienced being right in the middle of focused work, and then our email notification pops up and demands our immediate attention.
3. Accomplishing two or more tasks in rapid succession. It may not seem like multitasking at all, but our brains need time to change gears to work efficiently.

For the record, none of these three is necessarily worse than the others — they can all reduce our efficiency and can cause mental fatigue. 

Watch out for all these types of multitasking so you can regain control of your “work brain.”

What is context switching?

The short answer is: The time it takes to switch between two or more complex activities.

Context switching happens when you’re distracted by someone or something else in the middle of an important task, or when you interrupt your own focused work to prioritize another task (task switching). 

This situation, for instance:

You’re on a Zoom call with your team. But as soon as the conversation shifts away from something you’re responsible for, you check your inbox or jump back into the document you were working on — all while trying to keep one ear on the discussion.

Or what about this:

You’re working on a challenging project that requires your utmost focus. But you know your client usually asks for an update at this time so you constantly check your Slack to make sure you don’t miss it.

In reality, it’s hardly possible for most of us to achieve deep focus while continually switching back and forth from one task to another. If you are aiming to accomplish a difficult task, you need to reach a state of flow where you give your complete attention to that single activity. 

This is why context switching impedes you from being truly efficient. It can lower your overall work quality by stopping you from reaching your optimal state of focus.  

What is the real cost of context switching?

The more tasks you tackle at once, the more context-switching productivity loss can become an issue.

Studies show that it can take more than 25 minutes to resume a task after being interrupted. This is because distractions actively break down your concentration.

While the direct cost of context switching — task switching, or multitasking in general — might seem negligible, its lasting effect on your focus can be overwhelming.

It will :

• Lead to anxiety: Research shows that multitasking can drain your mind’s energy reserves, causing you to lose focus and become more prone to anxiety.
• Inhibit your creative thinking: Once you become more anxious by trying to juggle several things at once, your ability to think “outside the box” and be creative will likewise decline.
• Stop you from working “in the zone”: When you enter the state of flow, your mind becomes so focused on a task that your productivity skyrockets. But when you’re constantly interrupted by other tasks, your brain will not be able to enter its flow state.
• Cause more mistakes: Multitasking can exhaust your brain as if you had a restless night’s sleep; thus making you more prone to mistakes even with simple tasks.

5 simple ways to minimize context switching and rebuild your focus

Reducing the amount of context switching in your day requires deliberate planning on how you approach your daily work. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but these 5 quick tips have been tried and tested to help rebuild focus and improve work efficiency:

1. Follow the one task approach

Choose a single task to work on and dedicate all of your attention to it. Make sure that this is the only thing you plan to accomplish in a particular time frame.

It’s also beneficial to make a to-do list that includes every single task that you have for the day. This enables you to organize and prioritize the work to focus on at any given hour. 

And while the modern workplace is making it harder to focus on one thing at a time, you can rebuild your focus muscle with these two simple habits:

• Remove as many distractions as possible.  When it’s time for your “focus work,” put your phone in another room, close your chatbox, and block distracting websites or apps if you need to. 
• Start small. After years of context switching, your focus muscle is probably pretty wimpy. This is why you need to start small. Set aside a short block of time — even just 5 minutes — to focus deeply. And then build from there.

2. Time block your schedule to create clearer “focus boundaries”

Time blocking is a systematic approach to managing schedules where you break your day up into “blocks” of time. 

In each block, you set a specific task to be done. This way, instead of trying to cram work into the eleventh hour or in between meetings and emails, you know exactly what needs to be done at any given time. 

Time blocking isn’t just about scheduling your most time-sensitive work; it’s about scheduling everything —from phone calls to coffee breaks — so you can focus on one thing at a time while still giving you time to stay up to date.  

3. Add in routines and rituals that remove “attention residue”

Even if you finish a task during a dedicated “chunk” of time, when it’s time to move to other tasks you’ll still be thinking about the previous one. This is what researchers refer to as “attention residue.” 

Luckily, there are a few ways to reduce, if not get rid of,  the attention residue that happens when you context switch. 

One piece of advice is: Build routines and rituals that signal to your mind when it’s time to switch gears. 

This could mean grabbing a cup of coffee, closing your laptop, stretching, or walking around the office.

4. Use regular breaks to recharge

While deep focus is a vital tool in your fight against context switching, spending too long in a focused state can actually boomerang. 

You likely can’t stay in a high-energy, high-focus state all day long, but you can help sustain your energy reserves throughout the day by taking short breaks to recharge. 

Aside from your normal lunch and coffee breaks, you can also make use of micro-breaks to get a quick hit of rest between focus sessions. 

During these short, voluntary breaks, you can do breathing exercises to combat stress, stretch, or watch a funny video to help you relax.

5. Make sure to enjoy your non-work hours

If you’re unable to disconnect at the end of the workday, you won’t be able to give your mind the rest it needs to recuperate from the stresses of the day and be able to focus deeply the day after.

So leave work at work. Spend time with your family or friends. Take a relaxing rest. 

Wrapping it up…

The modern workplace is getting even busier, and there’s no stopping it. 

But the more you let yourself fall into the illusion of “accomplishing more with multitasking,” the harder it will be for you to hit your goals and feel good about the work you do. 

It’s time to tell it how it is — multitasking is a myth.

The only way to do more in less time is to focus on one thing at a time.

Have a productive, more focused (work)life!