To think these Superwoman Virtual Assistants can't possibly be real?

[Rapunzathepenguin]

I work from home on various projects, and I've got around 30 years of experience behind me in various areas. I always used to think I was fairly efficient, but I'm now doubting my abilities - can anyone enlighten me as to how it's possible to do most of the tasks listed at this site in an hour?

And no, this is not an ad, I have no connection with this company whatsoever, I was just doing some research for something I'm writing and came across this link.

www.virtuallysorted.com/how-we-work/50-tasks-a-virtual-assistant-can-complete-in-an-hour-or-less/

Or are these mythical assistants robots, or some kind of superman/woman?! As I really want to know their methods, if they can genuinely whack out most of these tasks inside an hour!

Yes I could do most of those things in an hour or less, some in 15 mins or less.

I think you may have misunderstood. Are they not suggesting things that individually take less than an hour.

I’m assuming it means they couldn’t do all of those tasks in an hour.
You could do some of them, but I think there would Some prep beforehand or they are using more than one person.

Or create a LinkedIn company page, takes 5 minutes so long as you already have the logo, all the copy written, know where all the links are going.

Mail merge 100 people, no problem if you already have a contact list in excel, copy for the letter, a quick printer and a post box five minutes away.

Seo for a website - probably a disclaimer on the number of pages and you have to brief them on who and what you’re targeting.

My last job we used a VA for admin, she was under utilised for admin tasks so assigned to me for marketing. Usually explaining what to do took me 5 minutes less than doing it. Having said that, I might be a little bit of a control freak.

They're not suggesting that you can do ALL of them in an hour, but they ARE suggesting that you can do each one individually in an hour or less.

I can see how you could do SOME of them, but as others have said, not without some preparation in advance. Which by definition, isn't an hour!

It's saying each of those tasks would be an hour.

Some yes, some no. I imagine they work on the law of averages.

So those of you who could do these tasks in 15 minutes or less, with no preparation, which ones would you say you could do in that time? I'm genuinely curious about the methods used.

1 Mail merge, print, envelope stuff and post 100 letters.

Open word document, type letter template, go to mail merge setting, import excel list of names and addresses, check auto fields are correct, print, stuff, stamp, post. 30-60 minutes depending on speed of printer and how quickly you can fold the pieces of paper.

2	Create and send an <a class="break-all" href="https://www.virtuallysorted.com/services-costs/marketing-using-a-virtual-assistant/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">email campaign</a> to prospects.

Presumably they will have the content and the email list, so they'll use a tool like mail chimp with pre-done templates and just populate the relevant sections, proof read, import contacts list and send.

3	Data entry – type all your business cards from a networking event into a prospects database.

Even if you got 100 business cards, typing name, company, email and phone number into a spreadsheet would be a quick piece of work.

Yeah 8 think all of these tasks individually would an hour or less work by the point they got to the PA, bear in mind, the set up would all be done in advance and information provided to them to then process.

It depends, OP. I might be able to review and approve Twitter followers in 15 minutes, or it might take an hour. Depends how many there are. Likewise, I might be able to find you a venue for an event in 15 minutes, or it might take an hour. 🤷🏻‍♀️

4, 5, 6, 13, 17
From a quick glance at first half of the list I could do each of the above in 15 minutes.

I'm not convinced all of that prep would have been done "by the point they got to the PA", though. Or maybe that's just the bosses I've worked for....

4,5,6, okay, those I can see, maybe 17, if it's just in Word; are you including the content for 13, or just the setting up/importing of addresses/mailing list?

@Rapunzathepenguin that will be the difference between using a pay per task PA and a PA hired full time by the company.

If you are paying for a specific activity to be completed eg a letter printed and posted to 100 people, then the virtual PA firm will cost it out based on specific information being provided in a certain format.

If you were given:

• excel list of contacts
• wording for letter
• letter head template

It would take 5-10 minutes to set up the letter and mail merge, the rest of the time is just printing, folding, stuffing and stamping.

Some of those I could (and have before) bang out fairly quickly definetly under an hour, for some it depends on the quantity you'd be dealing with such as how muchbig is the website, how many followers etc to say how long it would take.

Seriously, I'm in awe of those of you who could do all of these in under an hour and I really want to know where you got your training. ;)

(And yes, absolutely to those saying, "It depends" on things like finding venues, information about products, whipping up a Powerpoint etc.)

I think what this has shown me that in practice a lot of my work is what those of you who've been kind enough to respond would describe as the "pre PA/VA" work, so the setting up of the content, databases, spreadsheets etc, and that definitely takes me more than an hour, mostly, no matter how familiar I am with the subject.

as long as you don't spend most of the hour on MN
and are used to do most of these things

I am confused why you'd think you'd spend more thank 1 hour?

Take 29 - write a blog entry. Technically you can spend 3 weeks researching and writing it. If you are running a business, you won't want to spend more than 1 hour to make it cost efficient. 1 hour is enough.

I'm getting clearer on the "task" thing, I guess on this one. (And no, I don't spend all my time on MN, it's lunchtime and I'm waiting for a builder to turn up... ;)

Most of the blog posts I write (as an example) are in fairly specialised areas though (health; education are a couple) and require references so you really don't want to get it wrong. If they're just very short blog posts on something like, I don't know, the best way to train a cat, then of course I wouldn't spend more than about 45 minutes, but that's because I've got lots of experience of (not) training cats.

I've been thinking until now that you'd be doing the prep AND the actual tasks on that list, so all the clarifications have been invaluable. (In most roles I've had, I'd do both, not just the printing, folding, and envelope stuffing, as it were. Though if the hourly rate for envelope stuffing, folding, and printing is £30 an hour on average, I'm definitely in the wrong job!)

Should add, that 45 minutes also includes uploading, sorting out the HTML, and swearing at Wordpress. As an example.

@Rapunzathepenguin when I did blogs in html I always use a free online tool like the one below to write the content and format it then just copied across the html code into Wordpress. It made things a lot easier and quicker

html5-editor.net/

I agree op. Some of them are short jobs but anything involving research and/or quotes I would expect to take longer.

The audio transcription and proof read seems off on its timing- it would probably need to be a very "clean" audio clip and probably not what I would call a proofread.

@dolorsit Thank you, I really did hope it wasn't just me! I also presumed that 15 minute dictation must be in perfect RP, recorded in a studio, with a list of jargon and abbreviations to hand...

I don't do much transcription work any more but I had a spell a couple of years ago when it was all I could get. In between the different accents (mainly US), garbled speech, background noises, and having to check various health-related terminology that I didn't already know, it was very different from the times I did it years ago when it was the same voice or couple of voices and you had file notes and a pre-prepared specialist plug in Word dictionary to hand.

@FatGirlShrinking useful site, thanks.

I'm not a pa but all of that looks very straightforward. I might take longer on some of the things I've never done before (mail merge) but once the skill is learnt the process will speed up. If I can teach myself to code in excel with YouTube then I could teach myself to mail merge. I've had no need to do it yet though.