HOW TO DO YOUR BEST WORK

In 2017 I set up my own company offering virtual assistant services and I am now successfully providing business support to Chief Executive Officers, Managing Directors and Consultants in a variety of companies across the UK.

As a Virtual Executive Assistant, I have a role that gives me the one to one working relationship with senior executives that I enjoy, the variety of work that I thrive on and makes the very best use of my skills.

But it took me a while to get to this point. 

After university, my first job was as a PA to the Managing Director of an international FMCG company and my second was as PA to a Senior VP Sales for a global IT company where I was then promoted to a presales role.  I then moved into an international recruitment career for another global technology organisation.
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These roles have given me a wide variety of skills and a few years ago, I did a career audit and drilled down to identify the ones I enjoyed using the most. We all have a variety of skills but there is a world of difference between a list of the skills you have and a list of the skills that you really enjoy using. Once I had identified the skills that brought me the most satisfaction, I simply put those front and centre and so Integral Resource came into being.
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I have found that when clients tell me they are overwhelmed and not enjoying the role as much as they used to, it’s “all the other things I have to do” that are getting in the way of the “actual work”.   Strip a role back to its core and people often love the fundamental parts of it – after all that is why they started doing that kind of work in the first place.
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So how do you do more of that core role you love and less of all the other “stuff” that slows you down or overwhelms you? 

Ask yourself 3 core questions:

1. What can you delegate?  If you have colleagues, make sure you are making the most of their skills. Something that it is not essential for you to do yourself may be a great stretch assignment for someone in your company.  Yes, it does require some upfront effort on your part to train the person but it will save you much more time in the long run. Delegation is a very effective retention tool too.
2. What can you outsource? If you don’t have colleagues with the right skills or any colleagues at all, then consider outsourcing.  There are companies that can perform their niche better and faster than you can, whether that’s HR, content marketing, bookkeeping, lead generation or your administration, leaving you free to focus on the strategic activities that grow your business.
3. Where can you drive efficiencies? Are you making the best use of your time and doing things in the most efficient way or are you reinventing the wheel each time? Creating standardised processes for common tasks can save so much time. These don’t need to be lengthy, just capturing the key points reduces errors and speeds up completion next time you need to repeat the task.  Email out of control?  Set up categories, rules, quick steps or filters to get on top of it and set up standard responses for common queries.  Finally, ask yourself whether what you are doing manually, could in fact be automated.

Use your answers to these questions to put in place the tools and strategies that will enable you to start enjoying what you do all over again. 
​Then you can go and do your best work.