Top 5 Apps for an organised Virtual Office
As a Virtual Assistant, we are used to working in the Virtual Office world. But with the changes during 2020, many more people have had to move into remote working. Now we are in our second Lockdown, we thought we would share some apps to help you stay organised in your Virtual Office.
Just because you are not in your usual work place, you can stay organised so that everything is easy to find when you go back. Using apps like Trello you can make digital notes of your tasks so you can stay on top of them. So there is no need to be moving that diary or to do list back and forth from the office.
We use Slack to communicate within our team. Rather than sending lots of short emails cc’d to everyone, we can send quick messages to the whole team, a group or one person. This way we can look back on our conversations in one place, rather than looking for lots of different emails. You can also integrate Slack with Trello, allowing you to add your message to the relevant task and see the conversations.
Each of our clients are different and have different business needs, our team of VA’s have a variety of ways to communicate with them. Each VA has a regular catch ups with our clients, which we could not do this without apps like Skype, WhatsApp, or Zoom, along with phone calls and face to face meetings. During the last lockdown we moved over to Zoom to hold our weekly and monthly meetings. With the added bonus of being able to record our meetings so we can watch them back, we can also share them with colleagues that could not attend.
Running a team of Virtual Assistants who work for a range of different clients, it is important that we stay on top of our time keeping. We have found the best way to do this is with Toggl, which is a cloud based time tracking software.
You can export your time logs onto a spreadsheet, which gives you insights into how much time your team are spending on a given task. It is a great way to give you a true indication of the time spent on a project.
We started using HubSpot to create our CRM database, as we find it an easy way to keep on top of our contacts, clients and lead generation. By linking it up to our Gmail accounts, it records our email conversations all in one place under the right contact. So you never have to hunt around for that last email you sent someone. You can also make notes on each contact to keep track of your conversations and set yourself tasks and reminders, making sure you never forget to do that important follow up call.