Hire a Calendar Management Virtual Assistant

Manage Your Schedule with a Calendar Management Virtual Assistant

As a busy leader, you have a lot of plates to spin. 

Whether it’s organizing meetings for next week’s industry conference or setting up sales calls, there are multiple demands on your schedule. People and tasks constantly compete for your attention. But missed meetings can mean missed opportunities. Lost deals. Headaches. 

The more you grow, the more you have to juggle. 

Many business owners overextend themselves to handle their administrative tasks. They work 60-hour weeks, stay late into the night, or give up weekends.

What you need is a scheduling virtual assistant. 

How to outsource calendar management 

A managed VA can assist you in prioritizing people and tasks in your business. Start by identifying the key individuals you need to spend time with. Determine the high-priority activities and meetings you must attend. Then, identify the activities and tasks that you don’t need to be involved in. 

Divide your priorities into four categories: 

• Urgent and important: Priorities that only you can handle and need immediate attention. Examples include board meetings or investor calls. 
• Important but not urgent: These tasks need your attention, but you can schedule them for later, within about a week. You can set up a meeting request from a direct report or a check-in with a critical customer for a later date.
• Urgent but not important: These are tasks that others can do, so you delegate them to someone else. Your VA can manage scheduling meetings, planning travel, and preparing documents. 
• Neither important nor urgent: These are priorities you should avoid entirely. You can save hours by removing busy work from your inbox and calendar. If you find yourself asking, "Why am I in this meeting?" skip the next one.

Once you have a clear understanding of your priorities and the activities you need to handle, you can delegate the remaining tasks. Clearly document your essential priorities and identify the tasks that can be outsourced. 

How to optimize your work hours

Once you’ve recorded your working hours and meeting preferences, it’s simple for your virtual assistant to optimize your schedule. 

In reality, this could look like your VA: 

• Scheduling meetings during your preferred time of the day. 
• Taking incoming calls and only putting you through when it fits your schedule.
• Ensuring your schedule doesn’t become overbooked or overloaded. 

How to make meetings more productive

Everyone has different preferences for meetings. So, document your meeting preferences. Then, let your VA schedule meetings when it suits your schedule and preferences. 

Here are some meeting preferences and how your VA can put them into practice: 

• Times of day: What times of day do you like to meet?
• Meeting duration for diverse types of meetings: Not all meetings need to be an hour long. You can save a lot of time with shorter sessions.
• Buffer time between meetings: Frequent back-to-back meetings often cause executives to fall behind schedule. Transitioning from one call to another takes time, and a break between sessions can greatly improve focus and attention. Five to 15-minute buffers between meetings are very effective.
• Restricted times: An effective way to make sure you can focus on key projects is to block off time for "deep" work like strategy and planning.
• Meeting preparation time: Do you need to schedule time before certain meetings to prepare? Your VA can add it to the calendar.

How your VA can coordinate with contacts

Prialto assistants can coordinate with your contacts to arrange meetings and appointments in your calendar. VAs can utilize scheduling tools like Calendly to set up 1:1 calls with your contacts. They can also work with these tools to schedule and reschedule group calls. If you'd rather handle communication with certain contacts yourself, your assistant can still assist quietly in the background. 

Here are a few examples:

• Your VA could use BCC on emails to contacts so that when an invitee confirms, they can handle the calendar scheduling side of things. 

• They can coordinate large meetings with multiple participants by using the BCC feature.

• They can add all scheduled meetings to your calendar and schedule reminders.