Based on the popularity of my earlier article, 10 Tips to Leverage Your Personal Assistant to Get More Done in Less Time, here is a list of 27 things you can ask your assistant to do.
1. Organize your travel (including learning your travel preferences). This includes making all your travel arrangements, organizing all your flight info into your favorite travel app, and even remotely monitoring your travel to be ready to deal with any missed flights or oversold hotels.
2. Handle billing disputes.
3. Help setting up bills onto auto payment on your credit card.
4. Address and mail cards, letters, and packages. Sure you may still handwrite the thank you, but do you really need to look up the address and post the letter?
5. Update your contact manager (or CRM database).
6. Screen your e-mail and handle low-level responses. This includes deleting or archiving things you don’t even need to see.
7. Update your blog and social media accounts.
8. Organize and manage your filing system, both paper-based and scanned e-files.
9. Take dictation (either live or via recordings, perhaps using Voxer, one of my favorite apps).
10. Set up appointments and hold your schedule.
11. Gather all the needed data and prep information for all your appointments. For example, I ask my personal assistant to put to the memo of any appointment she posts to my calendar any recent email exchanges and the contact information of the person I’m meeting with. This saves me untold time when you compound this service over 15-20 meetings I hold each week.
12. Daily clean-up of your office, including refilling items.
13. Screen phone and e-mail so you don’t get the interruptions.
14. Take notes at key meetings and follow up with attendees on key deliverables.
15. Keep a master chart/list/calendar of your projects and deadlines and set reminders.
16. Tickler all birthdays and anniversaries, holidays, or other important dates, and even arrange for gifts, cards, or phone calls that make you look good.
17. Update his or her own “Project List” so that all the tasks and deliverables they are responsible for in one place for you to review.
18. Get, open, sort, forward, handle, and if need be shred your mail.
19. Coordinate with outsourced vendors when you have an IT issue. You just work from a back-up computer for the day and let him or her trouble shoot it with your IT vendor.
20. Order things online for you and handle any product returns or service issues.
21. Handle any personal errands or schedule any household repairs. Yes this is perfectly reasonable as it saves you time that you can reinvest in creating value for your company.
22. Notarize your documents by becoming a Notary Public in your state.
23. Help you to streamline your office—filing, sorting, and systematizing work flow.
24. Basic updates to your Web sites.
25. Create and continue to refine the “expert system” for how to be your assistant (this one should be part of their job function right from the start). This way if you promote your assistant they have created the core system for your next hire. If they leave you to work elsewhere, the transition is much less painful.
26. Dealing with tech troubles on your phone or tablet computers. They can do this during the day when you’re in the office doing other more valuable work.
27. Any parts of your projects that he or she is capable of doing for you. Constantly be on the lookout for things to try them out doing. For example, my personal assistant helped expand the syndication reach of my business articles by over 100,000 annual readers.
Also, to help you grow your business and get your life back, we just put the finishing touches on a powerful free toolkit which includes 21 in-depth video trainings on how to intelligently scale your company. To access this free toolkit click here. Enjoy