How many virtual assistant hours do I need?

This is the question I get most often, usually before anyone knows exactly what they want to hand over. Understandable, because you are buying hours rather than a result you already recognise. The good news is that you can work it out fairly precisely, and you rarely get it badly wrong as long as you start small.

Is 10 hours a month enough?

For contained, repeatable work it is fine. 10 hours a month comes down to roughly half an hour per working day, and more fits into that than you would expect as long as it keeps being the same kind of task:

• Clearing your inbox. Newsletters out, standard questions answered, the rest sorted so you only read what actually matters.
• Keeping your calendar. Booking and moving meetings, sending confirmations, guarding the buffers.
• Entering invoices. Supplier invoices booked, sales invoices sent, reminders chased when someone forgets to pay.
• Loose ends that keep hanging around. Updating an address list, booking a trip, tidying up a quote.

What 10 hours mainly does is show you whether outsourcing fits you. In that first month you find out how well you can hand work over and how much explaining it takes. The administration page shows what that work looks like day to day.

Which hour package fits which work?

The packages differ in size, but mostly they differ in what you can do with them. With few hours you pick off a handful of tasks; with more hours someone takes a whole area off your plate.

The gap between 10 and 20 hours is bigger than the number suggests. At 20 hours, roughly an hour per working day, the collaboration finds a rhythm. Someone knows how you work, picks up recurring things independently and only comes back for what genuinely needs your decision. You stop explaining everything. The full price breakdown sits on the pricing section and in the article what does a virtual assistant cost.

How do you work out your own hours?

Instead of guessing, you can simply measure. This method costs you a week and hands you a number you can act on.

1. Write down what you do for a week. Rough is fine: task and number of minutes, one after the other in a note or a spreadsheet.
2. Mark everything that does not strictly need you. Anything where your name, your face or your judgement is not decisive qualifies.
3. Add those hours up and convert them to a month. Four weeks of it, quiet weeks and public holidays included.
4. Take roughly half of that as your starting point. That is the package you begin with, and the one you actually fill.

Why half? Because most business owners underestimate their own tasks and overcommit at the start at the same time. Just keeping social media going or a webshop current adds up faster than you think: products, photos, copy, questions from customers. Starting with a package that fits and adjusting it after two months works better than going in big and never filling the hours. Which tasks lend themselves to this is set out in which tasks can you outsource.

When should you scale up?

A few signals are almost always right. You notice yourself saving work up until the package frees up again. You hear yourself say that something has to wait until next month. Or your hours run out halfway through and the rest slides forward. At that point the package has become too small, not the collaboration.

It works the other way round too: if hours are left over month after month, stepping down beats letting them lapse. Because you can adjust monthly, that choice never has to be postponed. If you are not sure which package fits, talk it through in an introductory call; I will work it out with you before anything is agreed.