I am really bad in doing administrative tasks. I don’t think I’m lazy (probably I am) but I simply don’t get motivated getting small things done. I’ve read many how-to books about this subject but nothing seemed to work.

So what do I do? For the past 4 years, I’ve been working with a virtual personal assistant (VPA) living in the Philippines to do those small tasks for me. Kathrina, my VPA, has made my working life much easier. I cannot praise her enough. Here’s just a couple:

1. She never makes mistakes.
2. She’s very responsive.
3. She never misses deadlines.
4. She does work much faster than I do.
5. She does this all for $5 per hour.

For example, I read a lot of books. I like to highlight the places I find important with a marker and keep it in a WORD document so I can come back to it any time. So before I hired Kathrina, I was typing out the highlighted part myself. It didn’t make sense to hire a part-time to come into the office to do this for me.

But now, I just photo-copy/scan the book and have Kathrina type it into text and nicely format so I can document into my book folder. Even when I’m reading through Kindle, where you can pull out the texts you highlighted by connecting to you computer, you have to get rid of the clutter since in every highlight (book title/location). Removing that and putting that into WORD and formatting it takes time.

This is one small example (Kathrina now works for me at least 5 hours a week helping me with admin tasks for large projects) but I hope you can get the image of how VPAs can really make your work life, or even your private life (having them do your daily chores) much easier.

What small task(s) can you think of that you can ask a VPA to do for you to boost your productivity?