April is Stress Awareness month so we thought it time to revisit and update our article on life hacks: tips, tricks, skills adopted to manage your time more efficiently and simplify your world, and essentially reduce stress.

Make your office virtual

Do you have piles of paperwork and post it reminders stuck to every surface? Pull those reminders off and email them over to your VA.  She will diarise your reminders and ask you about them when the time is right.

With regards to paperwork, if your VA is local you can drop off those piles of paperwork.  She will magically transform them into pdf copies, accessible at any time of day from dropbox by way of a scanner and a shredder!

Telephone answering service

Companies such as Moneypenny and Office Answers will answer the phone for you, take a message and email you.   You will no longer be interrupted all day by unnecessary telephone calls and will be able to call back in your own time.

An alternate solution is PhoneTag which uses technology to convert voicemails into a text or email!

Virtual contract tools

Red Desk have been using EchoSign for a while now for handling our client agreements, and we can’t speak more highly of it.  It will save you time, postage and of course trees by handling all your contracts online.   (Google have their own version DocuSign & Apple have E-sign)

Online Accounting

Freelancers and small businesses are now able to use online accounting packages such as Quickbooks. Storing all your accounting data online in a secure place is only going to save you time and money in the long run.  There is no need to install any software onto your computer or any danger of files becoming corrupted.  Plus you are able to provide logins for your bookkeeper or accountant to have access to the same up-to-date information.

Time and budget efficient

Hiring a VA, like one of the Red Desk team means you have access to business support services at any time but only pay for the time the VA has spent on each task or project.  We will use services such as Royalmail.com which allows us to weigh and print postage from our office rather than bill you for time we spend in a post office queue!

We’d love to hear your favourite office-related life hacks, so please get in touch if you have any.