The Easiest and Most Productive Tasks to Send to Virtual Assistants
Here at Byron we’ve seen our fair share of projects come through our platform. By far the largest amounts of time we’ve handled for our clients have been research requests, but is outsourcing research projects the most effective way to use an assistant?
A client recently asked us what are the easiest and most efficient tasks that he can quickly send through Byron. This question got us thinking so we pulled some data from our platform to find out.
We calculated the total time it would take for clients to do a particular task themselves and factored in the total amount of time it would take for them to delegate it.
Using our platform’s averages, here are the top 5 most effective tasks to send to an assistant.
#5 Research
Online research requests can include pulling articles, data mining, researching competitors, and finding contact information.
Average research requests per month: 10
Average time spent per month if you did it yourself: 9.3 hours per month
Total time it would take you to delegate: 1.67 hours per month
Research Productivity Ratio: 5.5:1
#4 Data Entry
Importing data, copying information from websites, and entering data into forms are a few of the most common data entry requests.
Average number of requests per month: 5
Average time spent per month if you did it yourself: 5 hours per month
Total time it would take you to delegate: 50 minutes per month
Data Entry Productivity Ratio: 6:1
#3 Coordinating Travel
On average, travel requests take 1.5 hours to complete. This includes finding flights, planning itineraries and completing purchases on behalf of clients.
Average number of trips booked per month: 3
Average time spent per month if you did it yourself: 4.5 hours per month
Total time it would take you to delegate: 30 minutes per month
Travel Productivity Ratio: 9:1
#2 Scheduling Meetings
It typically takes 15 minutes to find an open time slot on every party’s calendar. Typically we see it take 3–3.5 emails per meeting.
Average meetings per month: 30
Average time spent per month if you did it yourself: 7.5 hours per month
Total amount of time it takes you to delegate: 30 minutes per month
Scheduling Productivity Ratio: 15:1
When looping in an assistant into an email thread it takes about 1 minute per meeting to delegate.
#1 Transcription
Industry standard metrics say that for every 1-hour of audio it takes 4 hours of assistant time to transcribe.
Average number of requests per month: 3 one-hour audio calls
Average time spent per month if you did it yourself: 12 hours per month
Total time it would take you to delegate: 15 minutes per month
Transcription Productivity Ratio: 48:1
Summary
All of these ratios can certainly be thrown off if you have a large outlier request (for example: sending in one 15 hour research request), but just by going off of averages within our platform transcription projects take the cake.
