Outsourcing calendar management to a virtual assistant

Your calendar looks like a small thing, right up until you count the time it eats. Emailing back and forth about a slot, one meeting that shifts and drags three others with it, a call sitting far too tight behind the previous one. Outsourcing calendar management means someone else solves that puzzle, and you only open your calendar to see what is on today.

What does a virtual assistant do with your calendar?

In practice it is quite concrete. This is what a virtual assistant takes over:

• Booking and rescheduling. The back and forth about a time slot runs through the VA instead of through you.
• Guarding time zones and travel time. International calls land at the right hour, and there is enough room between two locations to actually get there.
• Protecting buffers and blocks. Focus time, lunch and admin stay in place instead of filling up with meetings.
• Looking ahead. A short overview every morning of your day and your week, including what you still need to prepare.
• Cleaning up. Double bookings, cancellations and stray invitations get tidied away, so the calendar matches reality.

The calendar management page shows what the service looks like day to day.

How does someone else get access to your calendar?

This is almost always the first question, and the answer is less alarming than it sounds. In Google Calendar and Outlook you grant rights at calendar level. You share no password, and you hand over no access to the rest of your account.

• Share availability only. The VA sees that you are busy, not where you are or who you are with.
• Edit rights where needed. If you want bookings made independently, you grant edit rights on one specific calendar.
• Shield private entries. Personal appointments go on private, or into a separate calendar you keep to yourself.
• Withdraw whenever you like. Access comes off again in two clicks, without changing a single password.

If you already work with a shared mailbox, calendar and inbox usually run through the same access. There is more on that in outsourcing email management.

What can and cannot be booked on your behalf?

Not everything belongs with a VA, and that is the point. The execution moves away, the choices stay with you. A common split looks like this.

The pattern is always the same: the doing moves away, the deciding stays with you. If you are not sure where to start, which tasks you can outsource will get you going.

When does outsourcing calendar management pay off?

A simple test: count how many emails you need in a week to get meetings agreed. Add the rescheduling, the double bookings and the days that are packed too tight, and you have your signal. If you regularly roll from one call straight into the next without a break, the problem is not how busy you are but who is running your calendar.

The cost is easy to size up. Ten hours a month comes to 840 euro excluding VAT, and that usually covers calendar and inbox together, because the two run into each other. Twenty hours is 1600 euro, forty hours 3000 euro and sixty hours 4200 euro. There are no setup fees, and you can adjust monthly if the workload moves. What you get for those hours is set out in what does a virtual assistant cost.