A Tip for Virtual Assistants: Batch Your Work

The question I am asked most often in my practice is, “How do you manage 45 clients?” The answer is a really easy one for me to answer: I batch my work.

In Tim Ferriss’ book, “The 4-Hour Work Week“, he actually talks about this very work tactic. I’ve been doing this for ages so when I picked up his book, it was nice to have that affirmation that what I was doing worked for others too.

Here’s the lowdown – each day when you set out to do your work, don’t get frenzied and spastic. Don’t do work for client A, then client D, then client B, then client A, etc. Instead, look at your to-do lists and work your way through them, one client at a time.

Now, if I have important deadlines, I certainly take care of those first but once that is done, I work my way through, batching one client at a time.

Why does this work so well? If you think about it, we’re bouncing from one company to another all day. It’s exhausting if you don’t do it systematically. By batching your work, you can think about one client at one time and not get overwhelmed by everything you need to do. Overwhelm = work paralysis. I’ll talk about work paralysis at another time.

So, try it. See if it works well for you. Batch your work and stay focused on one client until you feel you’ve accomplished enough to move on to the next. Let me know if it works for you!