Anyone have any advice on Virtual Assistants?

June 22, 2008 — 15 Comments

A bit of a bleg: I’ve been looking at hiring a virtual assistant. It’s Sunday as I write this and there are over 200 unread emails in my inbox, and that’s with over 50 rules putting most emails into other folders, of which there is thousands of unread emails.What I’m looking at is someone to process my inbox, follow up on Friend requests mostly (74 FriendFeed follows in the last 2 days for example), delete the junk and tag the stuff that is urgent/ needs immediate attention. I figure maybe 2 hours a day, and the cost works: I’d be looking at around $3-5/ hr according to a couple of the outsourcing sites I’ve looked at as I won’t require a highly skilled top level VA, really just someone who can follow a set of instructions, process that list daily, and give me an extra hour or sometimes more every day.

What’s holding me back: what’s the best way to get a VA to process their work? I use a GTD program that isn’t web compatible so that’s out, I download my email so Gmail won’t completely work, although it could be tweaked to do so I guess. I’m just wondering how other people do the management side of a VA, perhaps there might be some dedicated software or web package to make it easier/ facilitate the process?

Any thoughts you’d care to share are welcome.