Top time-saving tips for email & diary management
Did you know that the average entrepreneur spends about 68.1% of their daily time working “in” their business, handling daily mundane tasks and deadlines with unexpected hiccups? In comparison, only 32.9% of their daily time is spent working “on” their business, i.e., strategic planning and long-term goals.
In a recent survey, business owners were asked about the tasks consuming a significant portion of their time. The resounding response? “Emails and administrative tasks.” Astonishingly, 56% of those surveyed expressed a pressing desire to offload administrative responsibilities and delegate them to streamline their workflow.
These figures are somewhat surprising, aren’t they?
Luckily, there are ways through which you can save time on daily, repetitive tasks that consume most of your day and dedicate it to strategic activities.
As an entrepreneur, you juggle numerous responsibilities. From nurturing customer relationships to evaluating finances to keeping up with daily operations, you may need more time to focus on the larger picture. Yet, amidst many responsibilities, two tasks consume too much of your precious time: email and diary management.
Here are a few timesaving tips that help you optimize your workday and manage your email and schedule:
6 Ways to Optimize Email Management:
1) Schedule email responses: Regularly refreshing your inbox and checking emails can be frustrating and time-consuming. The impulse to haphazardly check your inbox in anticipation of new messages may bar you from focusing on other tasks and projects that are of greater urgency. It is recommended to schedule an email response time daily and eliminate the habit of constantly checking your inbox.
2) Clean up your Inbox: You might often receive many unwanted, promotional, or purely spam emails. Deleting such emails and unsubscribing yourself from unwanted lists is often helpful in making your inbox look cleaner and more manageable.
3) Use email list management options: You can also use appropriate filters and email labels to streamline your inbox further. With this practice, you can also help you prioritize emails based on their urgency, response deadline, and senders.
4) Automated and pre-written responses: Imagine how much time you can save using automated responses to certain emails. For a business owner like yourself, the good news is that you can use pre-written email templates and automated responses to repeating emails, such as those for meetings. Instead of manually writing a response for every email, you can use automation and pre-written templates to save time.
5) Use the two-minute rule: Respond immediately if an email requires two minutes or less of your response time. Otherwise, consider deferring, delegating, or deleting the email.
6) Consider virtual assistance: If emails take too much of your valuable time during the day and prevent you from focusing on broader, strategic aspects of the business, consider hiring a virtual assistant to whom you can outsource tasks such as managing your inbox and answering emails.
5 Tips to Improve Diary Management:
1) Use one calendar app: Consider using a single calendar application that can be integrated with other work apps. Avoid using multiple diary management tools simultaneously, which may result in overbooking or missing essential appointments.
2) Allocate time to everything: The modus operandi for most business professionals only schedule calls and essential meetings in their calendar without explicitly allocating sufficient time to other vital activities, such as administrative tasks, responses to emails, different messages, and even breaks. You can prevent overbooking and enjoy a more structured routine by allocating appropriate time to all activities.
3) Utilize the option of recurring events: For calls, meetings, and other appointments that are repeated at regular intervals, create recurring events to prevent manual reentry into the calendar for each instance. This practice will save you the time manually entering every meeting, scheduled email, or other repeating event.
4) Remove calendar chaos: If you are getting inundated with setting up appointments, responding to inbox messages, and keeping up with reminders about upcoming meetings, consider delegating these tasks to a virtual assistant, who can help answer emails on your behalf, take care of bookings and meetings, and ensure that you never miss an appointment.
5) Enjoy uninterrupted time: When you assign most of your daily administrative tasks to a virtual assistant, you will have more leeway to focus on work without interruptions, which will make you more productive and creative.
Beyond email and diary management:
There is a myriad of evidence that indicates that companies can utilize virtual assistants in many ways. For many businesses, irrespective of their industry and niche, virtual assistants can be highly valuable assets and help their companies grow significantly.
Now that we have established that virtual assistants can be your best long-term prospect for email and diary management, it is pertinent to consider a few statistics that will give you further insight into exactly how much difference to the bottom line can VA make:
- If you’re a small or medium-sized business owner, you might consider reducing your operational costs. One of the most successful measures in this regard is using virtual assistants instead of office workers. It is reported that virtual assistants can, on average, save about 78% of the operating costs compared to a traditional office employee.
- Businesses often lose quite a significant amount of money on hiking. This cost can increase further if the position is specialized and complex. This is where virtual assistants can help you save costs. A study conducted by Stanford University suggests that firms hiring remorse assistants can reduce their attribution rates by 50%.
- It is estimated that an executive spends about 16 hours of work per week on tasks that can be outsourced to a virtual assistant. Imagine how much more a business can achieve if its executives spend 16 more hours weekly on strategic initiatives instead of managing tedious, repetitive tasks.
Yet, it must be reiterated that a virtual assistant can help a company beyond email and diary management. A few of such benefits include, but are not limited to:
- Enhanced efficiency: While ordinary administrative tasks seem a tad too menial, they still require skills and experience for effective management. A virtual assistant, especially one who is relatively experienced, is likely to know many tips and tricks with regard to handling repetitive administrative tasks that others might not know. Therefore, you can expect a VA to be more adept and efficient at handling your daily tasks than an ordinary person.
- Enjoy more affordable talent: Virtual assistants can be hired at a fraction of the labor cost, with little to no compromise on quality. Moreover, offshore talent is not entitled to fringe benefits, healthcare, and paid holidays, which further cuts a business’s labor costs.
- Greater creativity and innovation: When your workforce consists of people from different cultures and backgrounds, you are more likely to generate fresh ideas and look at things from different perspectives. Hiring virtual assistants from various parts of the world can help you overcome some of the creative myopia when it comes to innovation and creativity.
- Get rid of mental overload: Another vital way to ignite your creative spark is to have more time and greater flexibility. Being innovative and developing new ideas is challenging when a significant part of your workday is inundated with administrative tasks. By outsourcing some of those tasks to a VA, you can dedicate more time to your creative pursuits and come up with new ideas for your business.
- Scalability and access to specialized skills: Depending on your business needs, you can hire full-time or part-time virtual assistants. On the same note, you can also hire based on the specialized skills you seek to outsource, such as bookkeeping, email management, and social media management.
Email and diary management are essential to the daily operations of any small business. Using appropriate tips and techniques can significantly reduce administrative overload and optimize their workday. While these tips above certainly alleviate your burden, hiring a virtual assistant can be the ultimate long-term solution to such issues. By implementing the timesaving and cost-cutting tips mentioned in this article, you can save valuable time and resources for your company and achieve better results.
Mind that virtual assistants are a long-term asset, so don’t cut corners by working with companies or freelancers who seem to oversell.
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Whether you need help with email management, diary scheduling, or other administrative tasks, we are here to help you outsource these tasks to reliable, experienced VAs, giving you more time to focus on strategic activities. With an average client satisfaction rate of 99% and a 5-star client onboarding rating, our pedigree signifies an unwavering commitment to addressing your needs and offering you the best virtual assistance possible.
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