Well, I just completed my first month of using a dedicated personal assistant through Zirtual, and let me tell you, it was awesome. I’m going to outline my experience in detail including the exact requests I used him for so that everyone whose felt like me can have a better understanding of what’s possible.
The Service and My Assistant Josiah
My assistant’s name is Josiah. He lives in Arizona and works as a photographer, web designer and internet marketer. I told Zirtual what I was looking for and they paired us up. Shortly after, we skyped for 30 minutes so we could understand each other’s workflow.
What I love about having a dedicated virtual assistant compared to other services is the efficiency afforded by open accessibility. He has access to all of my online accounts that I’ve granted him permission for. He also has the ability to make purchases for me through the secure Zirtual credit card integration.
This set up scales far better than services where you need to provide account information on a recurring basis. Our relationship also becomes more efficient the more we work together and develop a greater understanding for each other’s preferences.
Maybe I’m too trustworthy for my own good, but so far I’ve felt very comfortable with the Zirtual experience. This has been echoed by other Zirtual users I know.
All the Tasks He Executed For Me Last Month
One of the main challenges for me when I initially broached having an assistant was understanding what could be delegated. I thought posting a list of everything he did for me this month would help others gain insight into what’s possible.
Requests:
- Find contact at ECSI to chat with about adjusting my student loan payments
- Find exact process and phone number for getting a new debit card from Wells Fargo
- Volunteer Research: Find Out the Process and Availability for Volunteering at two places I selected
- Schedule a call with someone using my calendar availability (7 instances)
- Restaurant reservations (4 instances)
- Adding things to my calendar (4 instances)
- Find a tutorial on how to download SoundCloud files locally onto my Iphone
- Book a Dr’s appointment within a date range given my preferred availability
- Reschedule Dr.’s appointment…shoot.
- Isolate all the pictures of my family’s Dog in Dropbox and put them into a folder. Sometimes I need a cheer up. It happens.
- Data Entry from photos into excel sheet (2 occasions). I’d take a screenshot of unstructured data and have him log it into a google spreadsheet so I could sort and manipulate it.
- Find out the return policy for a electronics purchase
- Find articles on all the benefits of joining the freelancers union. Turns out there’s a ton of sweet discounts and anyone can join
- Call and see if some coupon my mom emailed me for Banana Republic applies at non-factory stores
- Invite everyone whose requested to join my google group HackingNYC every 2 weeks (recurring)
- Find Google+ Communities on Business Development, Sales, and Productivity for me to check out
- Find tutorials on how to extract audio from a video clip using screenflow
- Download the audio files from a membership site into my dropbox so that I can add them to my Itunes
- Sign me up for rewards accounts on 3 airlines I use occasionally. Log the credentials in a google docs spreadsheet.
- Find 5 Google Analytics/SEO experts for an Odesk job I created
This is part of what my money got me.
What I think is far more compelling is the additional value I was able to create for myself with a hypothetical, additional 10 hours of bandwidth. Granted I wouldn’t have done all of these things if I didn’t have someone to delegate tasks to, but I would have done many of them. And I have to tell you, it felt good to chip away at that “maybe-someday” list with someone else’s help.
Reposted from our client Scott Britton at https://life-longlearner.com.