Diary management is one of many challenging tasks that the busy entrepreneur must juggle. With so much going on, taking the extra time required to optimise your diary is almost impossible. Ironic really, given that this is the primary activity that will actually help you streamline your activities and work more effectively. It’s not a core business activity however, so it often gets little attention. But these are the kind of activities that are perfect for a virtual assistant to help you with. These detail orientated tasks, don’t effect the bottom line, but by outsourcing them instead it ensures that you can.
Any experienced VA will be able to help you with virtual diary management. Juggling your appointments, meetings, presentations and personal life can make for a labyrinthine diary that requires serious brainpower to make sense of. But, with our diary management skills you can start to regain control of managing your executive diary.
The first thing you can do to help yourself out is contract a VA service. As mentioned before virtual assistants are experts at this, and will make use of the most diary management software to keep you in the loop about your appointments and to make sure that your daily diary journal isn’t too complex.
Secondly, we’d suggest investing in a smartphone and signing up to a cloud-based diary service, such as Google calendar or Apple’s iCloud. This will mean that when your virtual assistant updates your online business diary, the information will automatically sync across all your devices. Your VA can also update your diary management system with notes, link you to maps for locations and attach documents, such as minutes of previous meetings and action lists.
What are the benefits of letting a VA deal with your daily diary journal?
1. Advanced planning
Your diary and calendar time management will greatly improve when you have a virtual assistant to organise your time management diary. For instance a virtual assistant could confirm all your appointments for a week in advance by text, which only takes two minutes and can save a lot of confusion. Your VA can also collate all the paperwork and information you may need and send it to you, or even to people that you are meeting with. Hypothetically they can arrange your diary as far in advance as the information you give them allows for.
2. Seamless updates
One person cancels last minute, another has to rearrange and your 3 o’clock meeting is unreachable – this is the kind of stress that small business owners don’t need, but have to deal with on a daily basis. It’s also the kind of daily diary journal drama that a virtual assistant is experienced at handling. They can rearrange meetings, cancel reservations and then rebook them quickly and efficiently. What’s more they can keep you firmly in the loop with email, text and telephone updates while you focus on keeping your business running. This kind of seamless organisation is priceless when it comes to keeping your business competitive and efficient.
3. Your diaries will be lean and mean
Perhaps one of the best things about getting virtual assistance with your dairy and calendar time management is the increased efficiency. A virtual assistant will be able to look at what needs to be done in a day and ensure that your diary is lean. By this we mean cutting out and/or minimising travel time and dead time, all whilst ensuring you have time to stop for lunch and dinner. They will do this by clustering meetings in the same geographical area, or even within walking distance if possible. The result will be that you have more time to work, network and take care of your clients. For more on this subject read our blog on how to run an effective time management diary.
Well, we trust that our blog answers the question ‘what is diary management?’ and demonstrates that good diary management procedures can be the key to business success. We also hope that our virtual diary management tips and explanation of how a VA could take care of your daily diary or journal have been useful.
If you would like to know a little more about our virtual assistant diary management and business meeting planning services you can check our website. Or to see if our time management virtual assistant services can make a little more time in your working day you can call 0800 994 9016 or use our contact form in the menu above.