My goal after this blog is to walk you through the process of how to effectively delegate your email and calendar to your Virtual Assistant.
One of the first things that our clients in 2xYou usually delegate is their email and calendar. It's what I usually refer to as a way to manage their input which are the things that are coming into their attention and then managing their output, things that they need to send out into the world whether those are invites or emails or letting people know what's happening, having your virtual assistant successfully manage your input and output is going to save you a lot of hours in your day and in your week, as you're working through and working with them.
What I'm going to walk you through for these two tasks is, I'm going to walk you through a three-step process:
Walk Through → Delegate → Automate
We're going to walk you through the whole process of how to do it without delegating by abdication or micromanaging your assistant at all.
Delegating Your Email
Check Your Systems
You want to check your systems.
What I mean by this is, if you're using Gmail or using Outlook or using some kind of service, high chances are that there is a way where you can assign your email to them.
Your assistant will be able to see the things that come into your inbox without even having your login, and the way to do this either on Gmail or Outlook is usually in your settings. You can check and see if there is a way to delegate this.
If you're on Google Workspace, it's even easier because you can assign your email to someone else, the same thing for Outlook. This can even usually be found inside the settings of your email itself without having to go into the admin console or anywhere else. It’s to ensure your own privacy, of your assistant not being able to login using your email because you want to see if there's a way you can just delegate the email from the software itself.
Create a Flow
Walking through is essentially just going with the flow and creating the flow that your assistant will go through. If you’re someone who's been managing your email for a while, you want to walk through your assistant just like, ‘Hey, this is how I do it, this is how I clean it up.’ You might want to do this two or three times before you start moving into the delegation part, but you also want to create a flow that makes sense for both of you.
1. How often to check
For example: For me and my assistant, our system is Start of Day: Lunchtime or midday, and then before wrapping up the day. This way she doesn't miss any important emails that might have come on throughout the day, I'm able to flag them or reply to them or she would be able to reply to them as needed
2. Unsubscribe/Delete
Walk your assistant through the process of what are the things that you've been wanting to unsubscribe from and what are the things to just outright delete, that way they're starting to learn your preferences of like, ‘Hey, I really like being subscribed to this newsletter, feel free to just leave it there, I'd like to read that in the morning,’ or it could be like, ‘Hey, anytime that this kind of email comes in (which is usually like whenever people are doing lead gen on you on the services that you're not interested in) or it could be if it's just an email that was wrongly sent to you then that's something that you can just say, ‘Hey, feel free to delete this.’
3. Filter and label
Essentially, the process of making sure that every single email is labeled in the right way, attaching filters to it which makes it easier to label things and makes it easier for both of you to look at.
Once you've gone through that, you've basically gone through the walkthrough part of delegating your email.
The actual delegating is when you're letting them probably check a few emails this is after like maybe a week of them seeing how you clean up your email and essentially, this is the part where you start adding filters, labels and getting to the part where you're doing templates.
When it comes to the filters, depending on the software you’re using; I'm using Gmail for everything else in our company so that's kind of my frame of reference. If you want to start creating filters and labels on a few main things:
Create Filters & Labels
- For Me
Any email that is JUST FOR YOU, and these are typically emails that only you can respond to or emails your assistant hasn't seen before and is unsure of how to respond to. These could also be emails that are a little bit sensitive so they want to make sure that you look at it before they even respond or do anything, that's the first kind of label or filter that you need. This could be creating a filter for people who are your clients or people who are important contacts, that way your assistant automatically sees it when it tags the filter for the email.
For example, when the assistant sees that the email is labeled with FOR ME or for your name essentially, then this is something that they know like, ‘Oh, this is something I don't even have to check or can check real quick, just give the summary to my client.’
One of the first things is creating a filter of what emails you personally want to look at, emails from clients or potential partners whose email addresses are familiar to you that’s why you’ve labeled them as FOR ME. Basically, in this case, where your virtual assistant can understand that this is something that you need to see.
2. For Assistant
For example: For me and my assistant it’s just like For Assistant Tasks or For Assistant Eyes you can play around with the label as much as you want but the point of this label is that they know that this is something that they're in charge of, that they can respond to. They know that this is an email that they can read, they can respond to or do something about. This could possibly be emails that they sent out themselves as you, so follow-up emails or emails from people who want to maybe interview you or reach out to you. These are now the things that they can start going through.
3. Action Needed
If it's something where both of you have to be in a meeting to be able to discuss or go through, you can put it under ‘Action Needed’.
These are different labels so your assistant can start labeling inside of your email, they don’t even have to do anything at first. It could be that, as you're delegating this since that's the phase we're in, they're going through each and every one of them and just labeling them to the things that, ‘Hey, I think this is where they should be going in to.
You can always add other labels. For example: For me, I have labels based on the partnerships that I'm on, so their company name. I have labels if it's an email coming internally from other members of the team and I have a label on daily reports based on the subject line that our EAs use so it makes it easier for me to look at things and understand, it’s kind of a heat map of where my inbox is at so it's easy for me to look at and know what to do next.
4. Archive, Rarely Delete
What I mean by this is, as much as possible, when it comes to your emails especially since your assistant is handling them, is to try to make sure that they get archived instead of getting deleted overall. That way you can always go back, you can always clean things up later on, you have a record of when certain emails came in, when you're supposed to be following up, so on and so forth.
Finally, getting to the automation side of it, so we went through the walkthrough, we went through the delegation – now, how do we actually automate email management for your assistant?
Create Drafts
What I mean by this is when they see an email and they think they know what their response should be, is to just leave it as a draft in your inbox for you to check on later and see if it is done well.
Create Templates
When it comes to creating templates, it's essentially the process of them creating a Frequently Asked Question or creating general templates for themselves of how you've responded to emails so then they would know that they can just copy and paste it into an email and then send it out.
Sending Without Checking
This usually comes in, in the later part as they're learning more of your voice, how you respond and they know about your business and what are the things that you want to make sure is conveyed through email and at this stage, I recommend that you add one more label which is basically, By – your assistant's name or By them, this way you're able to go back and check what are the things that they have sent out. You can just double-check things, you can quality check if you need to but there's a way for you to able to see what are the emails that they sent out versus the things that you wrote.
The eventual goal here is to free you up from that whole process so you don't have to do email management by yourself.
In the next blog, I'll be talking about calendar management and I'll walk you through that same process of Walk-through, Delegate and Automate so then it's easier for you and your assistant to keep working together when it comes to managing your calendar.