The life of a Virtual Assistant: Part 1 – coping with urgent work

The life of a Virtual Assistant: Part 1 – coping with urgent work

 

More often than not we do urgent work for clients. To meet the work deadlines we have to work long hours, public holidays and weekends. As VAs we have to be here for our clients and we often need to work our schedules around our clients, if we don’t the client can simply move onto another VA, who will work the hours they want.

As I work from home, I don’t mind working extra hours/time. I am safe in my own environment and don’t have to travel to and from work, my office is a minute away. I can schedule my family around the hours I work. When I put in extra hours I can also take that time off when I am low with work, or take an hour off here and there to suite myself.

Some deadlines can be negotiable, often a client does not know how long a particular task will take to do, it helps the client by you knowing how long tasks take, therefore, you can negotiate your time sometimes.

If you cannot do an urgent task, talk to your client, explain that you must finish what you are doing first and then you will attend to their work next, explain you want be long and give the client a rough estimate of when you can start their work and when you can have it ready by.

If you are organised you should be able to handle urgent work with your normal scheduled work and be able to cope. If you know what work you have for the day and know your deadlines, dealing with urgent work should be easier.

You can also ask for assistant from other VAs that you know who are not as busy.  Subcontracting the work out can be another way of coping with urgent work.