Delegate Buffer Projects to Your Personal Assistant

1 Prioritizing Work

Part of prioritizing the work is to be able to identify and differentiate between the pebbles and the big rocks. For example, the assistant should ask to fill in your downtime with local meetings when you’re traveling. Similarly, the assistant should be able to divide her own tasks into rocks and pebbles or, as we call them, real-time work and buffer projects.

1. Real-time work: Work that needs to get done urgently, including projects and processes on which a member’s business is dependent.
2. Buffer projects: Non-time sensitive work that has some goals associated with it, but which can be pursued in batches during downtimes.

While the categories might be different for different people, there are a few things that generally fit into one or the other.

2Real-Time Work

This type of work includes (1) fire drills; (2) work that requires quick responses; and (3) work that may have been previously set up but has a looming deadline. For example:

• Scheduling: Responding quickly to key contacts is important since delays will prevent the executive from growing his business and will reflect badly on him to his contacts.
• Time Sensitive Reports: Most recurring reports that executive requests are needed at specific times for particular meetings or presentations.
• Call Management: Picking up the phones and managing voicemails, messages, and call-backs for an executive is the most basic benefit of having a personal assistant. Just as the calls are real-time, so too should the response to these calls be timely.
• Travel: Most travel is time-sensitive, but regularly occurring trips may not fall in this category.
• Email: Organizing and responding to emails in your inbox quickly.

Related: How To Delegate to Be a More Impactful Leader

3Buffer Work

This is the filler – the pebbles in the jar, if you will. This type of work should be recurring, pre-defined, and broken into batches and processes. Any given week might include a few of these tasks, or even none at all if the big rocks have taken over the jar. This type of work can include any or all of the following:

• Contact Management: Updating contact information by adding new contacts, de-duplicating contacts, updating addresses, and emails, etc. in an executive’s CRM can literally close or break a sale. And while contacts should be fairly clean, this work does not always have to be done in real-time. When a personal assistant gets new contact management work, she usually puts the task in a separate email folder, set aside to enter in batches when there’s some downtime.
• Prospect Research: Prospect research is exactly the type of task that every executive would love to have done, but never has time to complete on his own. Since it’s usually a backburner effort, it’s also a great buffer project.
• Expense Management: Compiling and submitting an executive’s expenses is secondary to growing their business. So while it’s important not to miss the deadlines for reimbursement, this is another job that can be batched to a separate email folder and dealt with on slower days.

Training your assistant to tell the difference between the big rocks and the sand is the key difference between hiring a managed service like Quickskill and training someone yourself. Which do you prefer?

4What You Should Do Now

f you need help delegating, here are a few options to help you:

1. Download our ebook “How to Use Delegation to be a More Impactful Leader” and get a better understanding of what tasks to delegate, how to delegate effectively, and how to create processes that save you time in your delegation.
2. Book a free consultation call with Quickskill. We can help you regain more of your time by offloading repeatable tasks to a fully managed virtual assistant. One of our experts will help you create a plan to delegate your tasks and we will even train your VA for you.
3. If you know someone else who’d benefit from being a better delegator, share this post with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.