“I find that many entrepreneurs are trying to do everything when it would be cheaper and more time-efficient to delegate, even if there are monetary costs associated with that.“ James Altucher

Over the past 11 years we've helped thousands of entrepreneurs to achieve more - here are the top five tasks we recommend offloading to your Virtual Assistant.

Picked for their time consuming but unimportant nature, you'll feel the benefit quickly once you delegate these tasks to someone else.  

Delegate them all and you could free up as much as two months every year to spend on achieving more or simply doing more of what you love.  What would you do with an extra two months?

1) Schedule Management

Scheduling your time, arranging meetings and booking travel are often time sensitive but whilst an important meeting might be critical to your future success, finding the venue and making travel arrangements are not. 

The trick with schedule management is to understand just how much of your time it uses.   Just a few minutes spent managing your schedule every day can add up to two or three days of lost time over a year - time better spent on more important things.  

Offloading schedule management is easier than it sounds - just start copying your assistant into your correspondence and indicate that she (or he) will take care of making the arrangements.

Delegate schedule management now

2) Research

As entrepreneurs, the ability to research products, services, suppliers, competitors and topics is an essential part of our daily business life - but it's also extremely time consuming.    Research can be a 'black whole' into which several hours or even a whole day can disappear, as we search for the elusive best product, service or supplier.

Thanks to it's nature, delegating research is straight-forward and has the potential to free up several days per year on which you can focus on your goals. 

Delegate research now

3) Content Marketing And Social Media

Hugely successful entrepreneur and author Gary Vaynerchuk says: "Everybody in the world is a media company. Whether you're an entrepreneur or a business, everybody's in the media business. They should be doing content marketing."

The challenge for us entrepreneurs is that whilst many of us know that content marketing and social media are a vital way to reach and engage potential customers, it's also very time consuming and hard to keep up on an ongoing basis.

Delegating the creation of your content and the posting of social media updates can be a double win - freeing up an estimated average of twelve working days per year whilst boosting the profile of your business and engaging potential customers on a regular basis with useful content.

Delegate content writing and social media now

4) Making And Returning Calls

As Mel Kettle says answering the phone is a 'huge distraction' - Mel estimates that it takes at least 15-20 minutes after a phone call to get back into the "zone" after hanging up - and on top of that most of the time we don't know whose calling or what they're calling about.

In addition, making calls to suppliers, clients, job candidates, service providers, restaurants, venues and airlines is a LOW importance task with a HIGH tendency to interrupt our concentration on tasks that really matter.

The biggest benefit of delegating phone calls, enquiries and call-backs is reduction of interruptions you'll face during your working week, but the time saving can really add up too.

Think of a call or enquiry you've been putting off making and try delegating it now...

Delegate a call or enquiry now

5) Email management 

The McKinsey Global Institute found that the average person spends 28% of the workweek reading and responding to email - that's at least 13 hours every week.   This equates to 650 hours a year spent on completely reactive, low-value work - and it's getting in the way of us achieving our goals.

According to SaneBox’s internal data, the average inbox contains only 38% important, relevant emails. This means 62% of the emails in the average inbox are not important.

This combination of time consuming but largely unimportant mean that email is an excellent candidate for delegation - with an immediate and powerful benefit to you.

We'd suggest that your Virtual Assistant does the following with your email:

• Deleting and archiving unimportant emails
• Sorting emails into priority folders for you to read later
• Replying to basic messages
• Handling meeting and call requests

Delegate email management now