Essential Strategies to Unleash Your Productivity

Today’s work environment is substantially different than it was just a year ago – and, for many, it shows no signs of returning to ‘how things have always been done.’ Now, more than ever, productivity is measured by results, whenever and wherever the work happens.

 

Productivity can soar for a hybrid workforce – the key is for you as a leader to learn how to equip your team to maximize their productivity to maximize results.

 

So let’s get started!

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CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS THIS PRODUCTIVITY YOU SPEAK OF?

Employee or workforce productivity is how employees – whether in-office, remote or hybrid – are assessed as to their efficiency in the performance of their jobs.

It is a particularly important consideration for businesses as most of an organization’s success relies directly upon the productivity of its workforce.

How this is evaluated will depend upon the job requirements and industry, but generally it’s based on the output of the employee within a specified period of time. Often, an employee’s productivity is evaluated based on a related average of employees performing similar work.

Simply put, productivity increases the overall efficiency of an organization. Typically, this reflects that all resources are being leveraged for optimum performance levels. In business, increases in product output will result in lower overhead and in turn provides a higher profit. Conversely, when productivity is overlooked, the result is often higher costs for production and reduced sales and profits.

What does this mean for profit?

Focusing on productivity – rather than solely on profits and revenues – often results in a more successful company. The importance of this should never be ignored. While the main goal of the business is profit, productivity extends beyond profits. If tasks are being completed as efficiently as possible, payroll will decrease, employee morale will increase and customers will recognize – and appreciate – that your company is well-run.

Today’s work environment is substantially different than it was just a year ago – and, for many, it shows no signs of returning to ‘how things have always been done.’ So now, more than ever, productivity is measured by results, whenever and wherever the work happens. Productivity can soar for a hybrid workforce – the key, then, is for leaders to learn how to equip their team to maximize their productivity to increase results. This then begs the question: How and where do we start in order to establish productivity?

The first place to look is right under your nose.

CHAPTER 2

WHAT YOUR DESK SAYS ABOUT YOUR STATE OF MIND

We all want to feel like we have everything together – that we know what our personal and professional goals are while leveraging to-do lists, project management software, and other organizational applications to help keep us on track.  

But how many of us organize our desks, cars, offices, and more like we do our task lists? Dave Ramsey once spoke on this. He said, “Your physical desktop represents the organizational condition of your mind and maybe even indicates the organizational condition of your whole company.”  

Having read that – and likely having nervously assessed your desk as you did – what message do you think your desk conveys? Because every day in business, we’re inundated by incoming projects and tasks and if we’re not good at delegating and organizing, it can be overwhelming – and we may lose control of our workspace.

Most simply put, your desk represents your state of my mind. Maybe you’re running to tasks and projects reactively, instead of being intentional and proactive about processes and long-term project goal completion. Granted, there are certain things you likely need at your desk: a computer, headphones, pen and paper. What you decidedly don’t need? A hat, 10 magazines, a stack of bills, car keys, a pocket knife, a cold cup of day-old coffee, a Starbucks napkin, a JBL bluetooth speaker, a kitchen towel, the Zappos Culture Book, Dial hand sanitizer, a remote control, and four books.

All entirely hypothetical items, of course. We digress … But if, by chance, you have any, all or some of those items cluttering your brain, err, desk, it’s time to make a clean sweep.

  • Dedicate five minutes at the end of each day to cleaning your desk
  • Don’t leave any dishes, cups or wrappers over night
  • Leave only essential items out
  • Keep a planner accessible
  • Have – and use – trash and recycling bins
  • Keep it simple
  • Put away everything when you’re done using it
  • Use a whiteboard
  • And last – but certainly not least – delegate when needed

Phew! Now that some of the housekeeping is done, let’s find some other productivity black holes.

CHAPTER 3

HOW YOU’RE WASTING 70 PERCENT OF YOUR DAY

Whether you lead a team of high performers or you’re the high-performer in question, there’s a pretty good chance you’re spending too much time on activities that are less than the best use of your time.

That’s what venture capitalist and former CEO of three companies Bill Trenchard shared with Inc. magazine in this article. His work with dozens of CEOs showed that a full 70 percent of their time was spent on what he called ‘sub-optimal’ activities. 

But he did find a few superstar time-managers among his coaching clients, and found that those leaders did the same things consistently. We’ve seen these same techniques used – in combination with the services of a virtual executive assistant – to completely change the way people spend their days and set their organizations on a path for increased productivity and results.

What do these leaders do?

  • They use email templates. Turning over your email, at least in part, to a virtual assistant will free nearly six hours on average everyday, without sacrificing timely responses. Work with your virtual assistant to figure out the most common requests you’re getting via email, and craft email templates your assistant can send on your behalf. Some of the most important responses will be the ones that decline a request for your time and involvement in something that isn’t the best use of your resources. A well-worded response in an email template, and an in-depth discussion with your virtual assistant about what requests you want to accept, will keep you from spending hours involved in a project that you didn’t really need to be a part of in the first place.
  • They have an email management strategy. Leaders who optimize their workdays have a strategy for managing their email. Hint: It’s not monitoring email all day, every day. Effective leaders batch their email and check their inboxes two to four times a day, and leaders who’ve handed off their email management to an assistant report that it’s revolutionized their workdays.
  • They write playbooks. Leaders shouldn’t spend their time writing step-by-step instructional manuals, but if there’s an activity you find yourself doing more than three times and it’s not something that only you can do – like strategic planning, business development, and similar – then someone else should do it. Spend some time documenting how you do those things and hand that document – and the responsibility for results – to someone else.

Now, take a deep breath because this next topic will go against your instincts. We’re going to discuss some of the dangers of multitasking. Breathe … just breathe.

CHAPTER 4

WHAT EXACTLY IS KEEPING YOU FROM BEING PRODUCTIVE?

Dangers of Multitasking

‘Uh, excuse me. Danger? Multitasking? Isn’t that what we’ve been told to do to be more productive, to be more efficient?’ you – understandably – counter.

Fair. We have been indoctrinated with the belief that multitasking is the only ‘-tasking.’ But multitasking may cause more harm than good – especially if you’re bad at it.

Multitasking requires focus – more specifically the ability to focus on the execution of multiple things – and we’re just not wired to do that. Consider the cognitive science findings of David Meyer, Director of the Brain, Cognition, & Action Library at the University of Michigan:

  • “You can’t do two cognitively complicated tasks at once.”
  • “Multitasking is … very often highly inefficient and could be dangerous to your health.”
  • “Even the most adept multi-tasker will crash and burn trying to resolve simultaneous conflicting demands.”
  • “Too much access to the cerebral grid shuts down critical thinking.” 
  • “The conflicts triggered by incessant multitasking can set off chronic stress and slow you down.”
  • “If you’re disciplined enough, you can map out the usage of your time in a way that minimizes your exposure to interruptions.”

What Should Be On Your Zero-tolerance List

What are the things you need to stop doing so you can devote more time and focus to things you really want to focus on? Here’s a possible list:

It’s easy to lose yourself and your daily momentum with things that take you off focus. So put them where they belong: your Zero Tolerance List.

So now that you know some of the things you should stop doing, let’s move right along to how you can start accomplishing more.

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

Youtube

Instant Messaging / Texting

Streaming Services like Netflix

Games like Candy Crush

Instantaneous email replies

Reading/watching news sites

Badges or notifications on your phone

CHAPTER 5

5 STEPS TO START GETTING STUFF DONE

Executives, team leaders, and individual contributors of companies of every size, shape, and industry can benefit from what we’re about to tell you …

If you want to complete tasks in a relatively short period of time, there’s an easy way. Here’s how.

Decide how long you will work.

Don’t plan based on, “I’ll work as long as I can,” or “I’ll work as long as I feel productive.” Set a specific target. Carve time out on your schedule to do your action items – and stick to it.

Tell everyone your plan.

Communicate this to everyone. Interruptions are productivity-killers so people important to you need to know what you intend to accomplish.

Start really early.

Have you ever taken a long car trip for a vacation and left really early in the morning, like at 2 a.m? Those first few hours on the road fly by because you’ve stepped outside your norm. It works with work stuff, too. Don't believe us? Just try it.

Take productive breaks, not rest breaks.

Momentum is everything. Don’t take a walk, watch a little TV, or goof around on the internet. You’ll need breaks, but breaks should not compete with your desire to keep going until the job is done.

Don’t quit until you’re done, even if finishing takes longer than expected.

Stopping short is habit-forming. Start finishing and stop starting. Get stuff done. People are watching you in more ways that you realize. There's a significant difference between a starter and an executor.

CHAPTER 6

PRACTICAL TIPS TO SAVE YOU TIME

At BELAY, we work with organizations of all sizes across the U.S. and Canada and see countless people who could be better at time management. Over the years, we have seen a lot of interesting habits and decisions that waste their time and kill their productivity.

 

Here are four tips we share with new clients to save them valuable time.

1

Invest the extra time upfront to train someone else to help you.

It’s always faster to do something yourself than to teach someone else to do it. However, if you take 30 minutes upfront to train someone how to do something that you do in 15 minutes every week, in just two weeks, you’ve made up that time. Trust us: It’s worth the long-term time savings.
2

Don’t be afraid to ask.

If someone is hired to assist you, they want to be able to help. They will not tell you that you’re crazy for asking for help making dinner reservations, researching flight options or typing notes from a meeting. If it will free you up to do what only you can do, they’re happy to help.
3

Set proper expectations.

The more information you give on the frontend, the more likely someone else can just ‘run with it’ going forward. When you ask for help with something, tell that person when you need it, where it falls in the list of priorities, and who needs to receive the completed project to make sure you've set them up to succeed.
4

Look for ways to automate.

Save contacts, documents, notes, and any other key information electronically – especially if you think you’ll ever need to find it again. Set recurring appointments, use document management systems, use electronic task lists. Embrace the technology that is out there. It makes it easier for you to delegate tasks to someone else for completion.

Protecting your time is not rocket science. It’s about the willingness to let others help you.

It’s about you trusting someone to come alongside you and help you protect your time as a leader. If you do these four things, your capacity and results will increase. We’re saving you time, cleaning your space and crushing your beliefs about multitasking, and you’re still with us – that’s fantastic!

Now, a question. Are you the type of person who feels it’s easier and faster to do things yourself? If so, let’s discuss delegation …

CHAPTER 7

I KNOW I NEED TO DELEGATE: SHOULD I OUTSOURCE OR DO IT MYSELF?

DIY or DFY

 

At some point, when a high-performing employee – maybe like you since you’re reading this – is excelling, they come to a place where productivity reaches a crossroads: The intersection of ‘Do It Myself’ and ‘Done For Me.’

The former protects your money, the latter protects your time. So, what will you protect?

Many high-capacity go-getters can just task away without needing help. They blow through tasks, and they think it would take them longer to teach than just to do it themselves.

The fallacy in this notion is that when you sum up the time of the task(s) over an extended period of time, it ends up being way more time than it would take to train someone qualified to do it for you. Having someone help you do things, execute tasks, and get a job done is not a luxury. It is just plain smart. Chances are, they can do the job better than you, quicker than you, and better than you have done it all along. Your pride – not your budget – prevents you from yielding up tasks so you can focus on only what you can do. To put it in the clearest perspective, money is fluid; it comes and goes. But your time? Time is finite. Precious. Protect it at all costs. Always choose to protect your time.

We’ve thrown a lot of information at you, but you’re doing awesome!
You’ve cleared your desk, learned some tasks to save you time and gotten some great resources to help you delegate. Thing is, tools can help you be more productive with your teams, too.

CHAPTER 8

5 ESSENTIAL COLLABORATION TOOLS

Research has shown that virtual teams are just as, if not more, productive than their in-office counterparts.

And good thing because today’s work environment is substantially different than it was just a year ago – and, for many, it shows no signs of returning to ‘how things have always been done.’
So whether your workforce works from home or in a brick-and-mortar office – or both – now, more than ever, the tools with which we equip our teams in order to maximize their collaboration prove paramount.
Inarguably, there is a slew of novel technologies developed to support this endeavour. Overwhelmingly so, in fact.
Here are the top five virtual collaboration tools we use:

Zoom

There’s no replacement for face-to-face interaction. But video conferencing applications like Zoom are allowing virtual teams to maintain intimacy from anywhere on Earth. Zoom also allows meeting participants to share presentations, screens, and other content in real-time. Another of Zoom’s extra perks is the ability to send official email invites to clients for a more professional appearance.

Google Docs

There’s a ton of document collaboration tools out there, but Google Docs remains the gold standard. It’s a streamlined, no-nonsense platform that allows team members to work on a document together from anywhere. Docs also provides ample cloud space in Google Drive to share and exchange files. And did we mention it’s free?

Slack

Slack claims to be ‘ … a collaboration hub that connects your organization – all the pieces and the people – so you can get things done.’ And we’re here to corroborate those claims.
With Slack, you can collaborate online – just as you would in person – by bringing the right people and information together in a one-stop shop where you can communicate efficiently, stay connected, and get things done – faster. Fast, efficient and communicative? That’s (productivity) music to our ears.

Asana

Asana is a cloud-based software that facilitates colleagues within an organization to track and manage the progress of projects. Simply put, tasks are created to monitor individual contributions to a larger, collaborative project.
Teams can add tasks, assign them to colleagues, set due dates, comment, and share relevant documents while notifications on the status of each task – and their approaching deadlines – are sent to your inbox.
Best of all? It’s customizable to the way you want to work. Want to work in a way that is driven by conversations? Asana can do that. Prefer to work in a way that’s driven by tasks? Asana’s got you covered, too, so every team has the opportunity to work in a way that is comfortable for them.

Grasshopper

Grasshopper is a small-business phone service, designed to work on top of your existing landline or mobile service. Like many virtual phone systems, Grasshopper offers a mobile app that lets you make and receive calls from your business number—even when using your personal mobile devices.

There are literally hundreds of websites, platforms, and applications designed to help virtual teams connect and collaborate. We couldn’t possibly cover all the ones we think are worthwhile, but these five are a great place to start.  Another thing to keep in mind is that which tools are right for you will depend on your organization’s unique needs. For tech-related companies, for example, coding collaboration applications like Github are indispensable.

But whatever your business, it’s bound to benefit from some form of virtual collaboration tool. Remember: Don’t work harder when you can work smarter! We would be remiss, however, if we didn’t point out that all of these changes we’re proposing might impact your company culture. So how exactly do you delegate and be more productive without messing up the status quo you have going on in the office?

CHAPTER 9

HOW TO KEEP COMPANY CULTURE HEALTHY WHILE INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY?

Healthy Growing & Company Culture

If you’re finding that there’s more work to do than there are hours in the day, it might be time to increase your headcount. It’s normal to feel apprehensive when you’ve grown faster than you anticipated or to feel unprepared for leading a hybrid or dispersed staff.

We want to help alleviate some of your concerns by giving you a few tips for how the landscape has changed in the workplace.

Did Someone Say TPS Reports?

Building your business from an idea you came up with in the middle of the night to an actual operating long-term success is no easy task.
While growth is always the goal, growing too quickly can lead to your inability to keep up with employee needs, but grow too slowly and you might not make payroll. As we mentioned, today’s new work landscape is substantially different than it was even a year ago.

Dispersed teams notwithstanding, benefits such as in-house daycare, paid paternity leave, flex-time, working remotely and hired contractors are the new-new. Gone are the days when an employee clocked in at 9 a.m. and clocked out at 5 p.m. We’ve become a society where people’s jobs often bleed over into their personal lives. Where once there were endless rows of cubicled employees typing away at their desks all day, now if an employee is at their desk even 50 percent of the day, it’s unusual.

Know why? Because at long last, organizations are realizing that productivity no longer needs to be measured by how long you sat at your desk – or if you came into the office at all; it’s really about their results.

Tech For The Win

Technology has revealed opportunities for businesses to truly show how much they value and respect their employee’s needs. Experts have seen impressive increases in productivity when workers are given flex-time and remote access. 

According to a ConnectSolutions Study, “Seventy-seven percent of remote workers get more done in fewer hours thanks to fewer distractions like meetings, conversations, and noisy coworkers.” 

It allows employees to work at the times they are most productive and an environment in which they are most comfortable. Individual or team check-ins can be done with the latest video, phone or messaging technology and apps. Given the chance to meet the needs of their life outside of the office, most employees become even more invested in the company that places such value on their personal needs.  This is, however, contingent upon the individual, their personal discipline and the policies stipulated by the employer. Additionally, it cuts expenses for the employer who has a dispersed workforce. People working remotely don’t require employers to pay for office space, equipment, heating/cooling, electricity and certain types of insurance. 

According to Global Workplace Analytics, ” … employers can actually save over $11,000 per half-time telecommuter per year, which is a lot of money when you think about all 3.7 million employees who currently work from home at least half the time.” Sick and personal time off decreases as well. These studies seem to show that while the productivity argument can be manipulated, the decrease in overall expenses to the employer are without dispute. By giving employees the freedom to work remotely, productivity increases, expenses decrease and you’ll have a much healthier team to work with. 

Admittedly, we already knew that remote work can work but thankfully, other organizations are finally recognizing that hybrid models may be the new way forward.

It’s Not Flying Cars, But This Is The New Reality

As you grow in numbers, approach your plans for scaling your workforce by thinking of what you want your culture to be five years down the road.
Be careful to not get stuck in the past with how you approach your employees and their needs. Stay on top of the new trends in business models, technology and employee benefits. Do your best to bring new employees into the conversation and you will be rewarded with reminders of why you hired these amazing people to begin with.

A team that works and plays well together is your most profitable asset.

CHAPTER 10

HOW CAN VIRTUAL SPECIALISTS HELP ME BE MORE PRODUCTIVE?

Many of our clients come to us because their businesses have outgrown their available time.

These leaders are finding themselves buried under all the details that go along with a successful venture, and are in danger of drowning in those details. Fortunately, that’s exactly why BELAY is here! Here are some ways our BELAY Virtual Assistant can help you manage your time more effectively.

A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT CAN:

Protect Your Calendar

With a BELAY Virtual Assistant, you no longer have to be the bad guy when it comes to saying “no” to appointments you really don’t have time for. By working with your assistant to establish what times are reserved for which projects, you’ll accomplish that much more. Your assistant can handle all the back-and-forth of scheduling necessary appointments, and help you remember that you’ve committed to that t-ball game/soccer clinic/violin lesson/date night at a time when someone else might want to schedule a meeting.

Manage Your Inbox

According to some estimates, workers spend more than six hours a day checking emails. Other studies show that it takes up 28 percent of an employee’s time. Virtual assistants shoulder the burden of email, acting as air traffic controllers of clients’ inboxes. A Virtual Assistant can organize your inbox so you can better see, manage, and store everything, and will help streamline communication and create efficiency for you to guard your time and energy.

Push Projects Forward

Rather than spending hours of your week following up on vendors, contractors, and unpaid invoices – have your BELAY Virtual Assistant do that for you. Your assistant can keep your projects moving towards deadlines, and do all the time-consuming follow-up with everyone involved so you can focus on your portion of the project. BELAY Virtual Assistants can solicit proposals, send out post-project surveys, manage project-related expenses, and any other tasks that need to be done to successfully finish whatever projects you have in the works – while you’re focusing on brainstorming the next one.

Deal With The Details

BELAY Assistants deal with thousands of details every day for our clients – seriously, thousands! Confirming flights/hotels/car rentals, scheduling dentist appointments, recording mileage expenses, making phone calls to potential vendors or customers, researching new productivity tools, transcribing meeting notes, posting social media updates, proofreading documents, writing documentation, creating PowerPoints, updating project software or task management applications, and the list goes on. If you ever catch yourself wondering, “Why am I doing this task?”, that’s a task a BELAY Virtual Assistant can do for you.

Businesses of all sizes – and at every tenure level – are at risk of making bookkeeping mistakes.

Keeping the books and preventing blunders are a financial equalizer among organizations of all types. It’s just par for the course of doing business. But, do you have to be the one doing your book? No, a virtual bookkeeper can help keep you in the driver’s seat of your business while they tackle the daily crunching of numbers.

A VIRTUAL BOOKKEEPER CAN:

Handle Your Bank Reconciliations

BELAY Bookkeepers love numbers. They choose to spend their day deep in your books looking for any potential problem that might be lurking as they reconcile your various accounts. Bookkeepers can serve as a strong spoke in the overall wheel of organizational financial accountability. They can initiate conversations about identified concerns, clarify and reinforce policies, help develop newer, better practices, and perform reviews of legacy data to spot gaps and opportunities.

Compile Tax Documents & Work With Your CPA

Let’s be honest, no one likes receiving a phone call from their CPA (sorry to any CPAs reading this). Their phone call usually ends with having to search for a missing document or reciept. Depending on how many times they find missing documents, you could spend more time than you should hunting paper. This is where having a dedicated bookkeeper can be a tremendous timesaver. Your bookkeeper will own this communication and provide any needed documents to your CPA in a timely fashion. Better yet – your bookkeeper will keep your books so organized your CPA doesn’t find any missing documents.

Deal With The Details

Though bookkeepers are not necessarily tax preparers and aren’t IRS-Certified Tax Preparers, through experience they may have developed an eye for applicable business deductions. These could include professional development classes, matched funds contributed to employees’ retirement savings accounts, home offices, hardware, supplies, repairs and more. This is one area where their know-how as finance generalists brings added value.

Keep Your Books In Tip-top Shape

Business owners, new and veteran alike, may inadvertently blur the lines between personal and business finances. They blend expenses, pay bills out of both accounts and build a case for writing off a personal discretionary expenditure as a business deduction. Bookkeepers can help keep small businesses and entrepreneurs on target, on task and more accountable. Plus, bookkeepers can recommend apps and software to maximize and segment expense tracking.

A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST CAN:

Develop A Social Strategy

As with most things on your to-do list, those you don’t enjoy or understand are often relegated to the way bottom – like a social strategy. However, it’s virtually impossible to gain traction in your social presence without proactive execution of a well thought out strategy. Your Social Media Strategist can create a social media plan upfront to ensure that all your social efforts support specific business goals.

Create Content Calendars

Your Social Media Strategist can schedule posts, planning out the upcoming weeks’ content to include any events to promote, holidays or other reminders. They can also gather resources for your content calendar from a variety of sources from web searches for industry news to interact with clients to get their updates. They mine content straight from other social profiles to reshare on your channels, work with the graphic design team or design corresponding graphics to material that was sourced, and edit any photography to match your brand.

Provide Reporting

You have to inspect what you expect, right? And you can’t do that without cold, hard data. Your Social Media Strategist can run a competitive analysis, measuring the success of your social media campaigns, and tracking and analyzing your results to provide effective solutions for content optimization by leveraging measurement tools to provide progress reports and mine insights for you.

These three service lines are great, but what if you need just a little more? Maybe some help with your website, perhaps?

ENTER: A BELAY Website Specialist.

So unless you’re a webmaster, we can confidently say that not outsourcing your site’s creation and maintenance is decidedly not the best use of your time. Those tasks are, inarguably, a productivity-killer. But listen. We get it – you can’t just take our word for it. We need to put our money where our mouth is. 

We’re going to do exactly that! Once you’re done reading this success story, we’ll be ready and waiting for that call to get you set up with your very own BELAY Virtual Assistant, Virtual Bookkeeper, and Social Media Strategist.

WE CAN PROVE IT

Improve Your Productivity, Improve Your Work-Life Balance

The Challenge

Since 1994, Knapp Business Solutions, Inc., has been a family-owned firm and Nick Knapp trusted his co-workers fully – as in keys-to-his-house trust. Then again, they were family.

So when the business continued to grow, so did the number of tasks and unread email threads in his inbox. And as a husband and father of a one-year-old, Nick was constantly faced with missing bedtime, something he cherished. Something needed to change.

Nick attended the EntreLeadership Master Series, and went to BELAY’s breakfast session with Chris Hogan on delegation. But delegation wasn’t his problem. As he worked through his tasks, and those that he delegated to his team, he realized that all their plates were full, too. He was the lid on his own business.

It was time to find help – but how could he find help that he could trust like family? He decided to give BELAY a try.

The Solution

Within a few weeks, he had a new BELAY VA, Cindy, and an inbox that slimmed down “…from several thousand untouched emails to about 40.”
The relief was almost instantaneous, and he knew he had made the right decision.

The first few meetings, he would screenshare his inbox with Cindy via Zoom, and he quickly learned that she was competent and could be trusted. He could let go. “I could spend hours dealing with my inbox or I could work on the company,” Nick says. “Why force myself to do something that I hate that is not anywhere close to what I need to be doing?” After giving his VA the reins to his email, he knew he’d never be able to go back. Not only was he able to see only the emails he needed to see, but she was now responding better to those that were formerly either buried or given a rushed – and stressed – response.

Now with breathing room, Nick was able to focus his energy on being strategic with the business. But then life threw Nick a curveball – as it so often does – as six months into their partnership, his VA was given a full-time opportunity with another client. Nick was happy for her, but worried that all the progress they’d made would be lost.

Much to his relief, she had taken incredibly detailed notes on his preferences, processes, and more – and even trained his new VA, Diane.
“It was probably the easiest transition I could have imagined,” he says.
Diane jumped right in, full speed ahead.

The Results

Within a month of having a BELAY VA, Nick’s family and staff could see a difference. And because his VAs were both proactive, he was able to be proactive.

“I didn’t have this nagging in the back of my head,” Nick shares. “I used to need to sit down and take a weekend to deal with my inbox or deal with all these other things. “Now, my response to the actual emails I have to deal with are so fast because I only have to deal with a very small subset and everything else she handles for me. People love the fact that I’m super responsive, and for my family, it has made a huge difference.”

His inbox – and stress – were minimized, and his limitations recognized. Diane jumped in at every opportunity to take things off his plate, and to the finest detail, completed with the care that was due. The spreadsheets that used to steal all his time? “That’s Diane’s world,” Nick says. Now, his attention could focus on what truly matters, like being home in time to tuck in his one-year-old.

“That was something that happened really, really quick,” he adds. “Within a month, I had enough stuff off my plate that I was able to meet my goal of being home by 5:30 p.m. – that’s been absolutely huge.”

IT’S YOUR TURN

Keeping your company productive is no simple task – perhaps further complicated by the uncharted waters of a dispersed workforce – but hopefully, we’ve provided you with plenty of help on how to go about doing it. For you to successfully lead the charge to maximizing productivity from wherever you work, you simply need to change the lens with which you view – and even measure – your productivity.

You’ve got this but if, at any point, you get stuck, we’re always here for you!