Buried in Tasks

Have you been spending too much time on administrative tasks? Not enough time generating new business? Has your personal/family life been reduced to a few hours on the weekend? Does your to-do-list includes hundreds of tasks and many of them don’t seem to accomplish your goals? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need to read further. You cannot let the tasks rule your life, it is time to take control of your life.

One solution to this problem is partnering with a virtual assistant. This will allow you the luxury of spending more time in front of your clients and less time behind your desk. It will allow you more time in the planning of your business and the generation of money. Because virtual assistants are independent professionals they come equipped with their own office, their own equipment, the latest software programs, and the know how of running a successful business. They don't, however, come equipped with added expenses like payroll taxes, expensive benefit packages, paid vacations, holiday pay, or "free time" (that you pay for) spent talking to co-workers. They're only there when you need them. Sometimes they're even there when you don't think you need them!

A virtual assistant, or VA, can help you with many of the administrative tasks that we tend to take care ourselves and add to our task list ,like:

o Manage your email
o Manage your calendar
o Tweak or create your presentations
o Make travel arrangements
o Be your own personal concierge
o Write letters
o Transcribe notes and interviews
o Follow up on trade show leads
o Handle literature fulfillment

The possibilities are endless once you start to see how many tasks you really can delegate.

Another problem why we get buried on tasks has to do in the creation of the lists. See using a big, long to-do list (even if you do it in Outlook) makes it harder to manage and use effectively to figure out what are we going to do next. Just the mere fact of looking a long list of tasks all of them being considered “urgent” is overwealming. It can freeze you and frustrate you.

One way to avoid this problem is the creation of master project lists (“MPL”). This should represent the major projects you are working on right now, this list needs to be smaller than your task list. Your MPL represents your outcome, what you want to achieve. Once you have your project list or “outcome list”, decide what will be your action steps you need to work on at the project level to complete each of the projects, this will be your task list.

The advantage of doing it this way, is that when you sit down to think about the projects and the action steps you already have place where to store them instead of keeping them in your head or simply creating a list of tasks with no order and by the time you get to it, you wonder “why am I doing this?”. Another advantage is that you can focus in one specific project and you will know exactly what you need to do to move that project forward without getting distracted with tasks for other projects.

Another step that you need to take anytime you are working on your project planning is the prioritization of the tasks. Otherwise we wont know where to start. This is critical, since it will help you spend your limited time on the most important tasks. You should do the same with the projects, so you can allocate properly your time among them.

While the techniques and tools are constantly being refined, at the “end of the day,” project management is simply the art of organizing tasks in a logical sequence and according to a schedule. By following these basic steps you will give structure and order to your to-do-list so you can use your time wisely, get things done and live a life with less stress.