Everyone needs help managing their time and maximizing their productivity. Whether you are a busy executive or a stay-at-home parent, your email, voice mail, and text inboxes are overflowing with demands for your time.
Remote executive assistant services have changed how busy business leaders work by taking on administrative tasks and allowing executives to spend more time on high-value initiatives like strategy and planning. But the work remote assistants can deliver doesn't have to stop with business tasks. Virtual assistants (VAs) can also serve as remote personal assistants, taking care of executives' personal tasks.
A remote personal assistant is someone you hire to handle important but time-consuming, administrative tasks that distract you from higher priorities. For an executive, that can be scheduling business meetings, planning travel, and filing expense reports. Those same tasks apply to your personal life—scheduling appointments, planning vacations, and paying bills, for example.
With the work-from-anywhere revolution, the lines between personal and professional productivity have blurred. Letting someone else schedule a dentist's appointment and a meeting with a customer will both save you time!
You might have a long list of office tasks to offload. Let's look at some of the personal tasks you could add to that list for a remote personal assistant.
It takes 12 hours to plan a business trip. Family vacations might take longer. Finding flights, cars, hotels, transfers at the right times and that suit your budget can be agonizingly complicated. Tell your remote personal assistant where you want to go and when, and they can do the research, present you with options, and book the trip that works best.
You can give your assistant access to your preferences (and loyalty program info) for:
Your assistant can take care of everything.
Executives use virtual assistants to shop for business supplies. They can also shop for personal items—especially hard-to-find products that can take a lot of time and research to find. Say you are looking for a specific type of mountain bike. A remote personal assistant can search online to find the best prices. Or maybe you want to research reviews on mountain bikes and their key features. Your assistant can compile the reviews for you.
A remote personal assistant can shop for anything orderable online or by phone—from gifts to groceries.
Most people have a lot of non-work appointments—especially if you have a partner or a family. Personal appointments include:
Gym classes
Healthcare
Pet care
Meals with friends
Accountants
Attorneys
Children's activities
Sports and entertainment
Not only do these meetings need to be scheduled, but they also often need to be rescheduled due to conflicts that arise. Your remote assistant can schedule the appointments, add them to your calendar, and shuffle them around for you when your schedule changes, whether for work or home conflicts.
Keeping up with housework can be a full-time job. It's not just cooking and cleaning. Most homes need recurring maintenance and upkeep that needs scheduling, such as:
Landscaping
Cleaning
Appliance repair
Home repair
Pest control
Window washing
Snow removal
Pool and spa maintenance
Pet care
Car care
Whether an appointment involves you visiting a vendor of some kind, or the vendor coming to you, they need to be scheduled and coordinated with the rest of your calendar.
Planning a party? The coordination can be daunting, and the complexity grows with the size of the event. Need to get those invitations out? Don't know everyone's email or phone number? Remote personal assistant to the rescue. Your assistant can:
Build invitation lists
Send invitations
Order catering
Find a venue
Request estimates
Track costs and budgets
Hire entertainment
Purchase decorations and gifts
Confirm attendees
Create seating charts
Send thank-you notes
Pay bills
Your life just got way easier.
Assuming you trust your remote assistant with your business credit card, you can trust them with personal finances too. A remote personal assistant can track your finances and make sure every bill gets paid on time. Financial tasks a VA can perform include:
How many of these tasks you delegate will depend on the level of access you give your VA to your financial accounts.
Read More: Do you need a virtual assistant?
You hire a remote personal assistant the same way you hire a remote executive assistant. The roles are very similar, and most virtual assistants assist with office and individual tasks. There are four ways to find and hire a remote personal assistant:
These methods of hiring a remote personal assistant are ordered based on the level of risk and effort involved.
Your personal and professional worlds overlap like never before. There's always too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it all. We all outsource mundane work that we either don't like to do or find that it's not worth our time to do it. Think car washes and dry cleaning. Yes, you can wash your car and press your shirts, but it's just not worth the time and effort for many of us.
Ubiquitous internet, cloud-based applications accessible anywhere, and the gig economy make it possible to hand over more tasks to a trusted remote assistant. As the working world gets more comfortable with remote support for office administration tasks, it's an easy transition to add personal projects to the list.