Booking haircut appointments, ordering groceries, and finding flights is a waste of time.
First, you want to find out what tasks can you delegate.
Here's how:
If you make more than $100k per year you should have a Virtual Assistant.
If you don't, you're wasting your time on stuff that doesn't matter.
Here's the process I've created to find, interview, and manage great VA's after doing this for 5 years:
Booking haircut appointments, ordering groceries, and finding flights is a waste of time.
First, you want to find out what tasks can you delegate.
Here's how:
1. Do I like doing this?
2. Is it repeatable?
3. Can it be delegated?
If the answers are No, Yes, Yes -- you've found tasks to delegate!
We'll jump back into these tasks later.
1. Individual Freelancers (Low cost & High cost)
2. Agency VA's (High cost)
My experience has been with low-cost VA's (under $6/hour). I've gotten the same level of quality that I would with most US VA's.
Also ask for a screenshot of their computer specs & internet speed results and a 2 min video of their background & why they want the job.
To do this, you’ll go search for VA’s and apply the following filters to find the best ones. These are the Upwork filters:
- $10k+ earned
- Located in Philippines
- 100% job rating
- Native English speaker
- No Agencies
Invite the people that have the highest number of $ earned and have worked the most hours with a 100% job approval rating to join and your time slots get filled
- 8 people won't show up or have good enough English skills (Immediately eliminated)
- 8 people will be considered.
Here’s the questions that I ask the 2nd group:
1. Basic requirements – examples: tell me about yourself, why you want this job
2. Thinking on your feet questions - examples: won't you burn out working U.S. hours?
3. Culture fit questions – examples: tell me about your worst boss
You’ll tell them that the 1st 60 days will be a pilot where you both are testing each other out.
This is where most people screw up. Because they don't CLEARLY give instructions to their VA's.
Remember, your VA cannot read your mind. Over time, they'll learn how you like things done.
1- How you like to Communicate (Slack, Asana, Text, etc.)
2 - How your VA should keep you up to date on tasks
3 - How often do you meet
Here's a snippet of mine:
1 - Your business entity info
2 - Your Meeting invite preferences (Zoom, days you like meetings, etc.)
3 - How to do research
4 - Personal info (address, phone #, TSA Precheck #.)
You should create Loom videos for each one showing how you perform each task.
Your VA will then start doing these tasks and ask any questions.
This helps make sure that you're capturing each task in the future for any new VA's you hire.
This mindset shift is important.
You're beginning to give up control. It's small, but important.
1 - Outline the vision
2 - Share resources
3 - Describe your Definition of Done
https://t.co/BlG0ytJp0U
If you ever need to delegate a task, follow these steps.
— David Perell (@david_perell) April 2, 2020
1) Outline the vision.
2) Share resources.
3) Describe your definition of done.
Done right, this system will save you hundreds of hours. pic.twitter.com/k3ipGxe4y4
@ramit has good examples of email templates to communicate with VA's on the @tferriss blog:
https://t.co/FjOHF44D76
Use these templates with a virtual assistant to get spectacular results (a guest post I did for @tferriss): http://t.co/3Hm7wGZfhE
— Ramit Sethi (@ramit) September 24, 2013
More from Business
Should we go into the details of these 125 years?
SA is built on the exploitation of labour. That labour has functioned on alcohol unfortunately. Very few people consume liquor purely for enjoyment unfortunately. When SAB opened its doors 1895 workers were paid in alcohol- the dop/tot system. 2 years into SAB's establishment
The Prohibition Act is introduced. This means black people are barred from buying your wines, beer etc. So SAB's products are exclusively for white people. But during this period beer brewing by Black women is the norm. Ayinxilisi ncam ke this type of beer. Apparently it had some
Nutritious elements to it. Now some of the context around drinking culture during this time is migrant labour to the mines, further land dispossession, the Anglo-Boer Wars, Rhodes corruption (our first state capture commission if you will) which leads to his resignation.
This context plays a role in how our cities and small towns are constructed, how they lead to the confinement and surveillance yabantu. Traditional beer brewing is identified as a threat because buy now mining bosses have identified that there's money to be made here.
SAB has formed part of the fabric of SA for the last 125 years & we've stood behind the nation through its triumphs & challenges. After much consideration,SAB has decided to approach the Courts to challenge the Constitutionality of the decision taken to re-ban the sale of alcohol pic.twitter.com/40rWpJSW5b
— SABreweries (@SABreweries) January 6, 2021
SA is built on the exploitation of labour. That labour has functioned on alcohol unfortunately. Very few people consume liquor purely for enjoyment unfortunately. When SAB opened its doors 1895 workers were paid in alcohol- the dop/tot system. 2 years into SAB's establishment
The Prohibition Act is introduced. This means black people are barred from buying your wines, beer etc. So SAB's products are exclusively for white people. But during this period beer brewing by Black women is the norm. Ayinxilisi ncam ke this type of beer. Apparently it had some
Nutritious elements to it. Now some of the context around drinking culture during this time is migrant labour to the mines, further land dispossession, the Anglo-Boer Wars, Rhodes corruption (our first state capture commission if you will) which leads to his resignation.
This context plays a role in how our cities and small towns are constructed, how they lead to the confinement and surveillance yabantu. Traditional beer brewing is identified as a threat because buy now mining bosses have identified that there's money to be made here.
A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.
Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.
Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.
But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.
Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.
Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.
The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.
V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.
V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?
Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.
There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.
But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.
Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.
Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.
But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.
Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.
Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.
Useful concept: the media stack for content creators
— balajis.com (@balajis) January 20, 2020
- Spotify, iTunes for podcasts
- Descript for podcast editing
- Figma, Canva for graphics
- YouTube for video
- Twitter, FB for distribution
- Substack for newsletters
- Makerpad for nocode
- Ghost, Medium for blog
What else?
The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.
V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.
V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?
Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.
There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.
But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.
