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Laura Nicole: 0:02

Welcome to your Virtual Assistant Coach, the podcast for moms who want to make money from home on their own terms. I'm your host, Laura Nicole, a successful six-figure earning VA and coach, who replaced my college professor salary in just five months back in 2020, after my daughter was born, and I have never looked back. I'm here to help you build a profitable, flexible VA business that fits into your family's lives, so you no longer feel like you're living just to work. Let's dive in.

Laura Nicole: 0:33

One of, if not the biggest and best perk of, being a virtual assistant is the time freedom that comes with this line of work and making money. But it's a catch-22, because if you are not careful, then your VA work and your VA business can take over every single little pocket of your day.

Laura Nicole: 0:55

A lot of times when I'm live on TikTok, people will ask me like what's the downside, what's the con to working as a virtual assistant? And truly there are not many of them, and this is usually my go-to answer is that creating boundaries for yourself and your work can be tricky, especially if you are taking the time to find aligned clients that you're super excited about. You love working for them, you love pouring into them, you love their business and who they're impacting. A lot of times, you get really excited when you're doing work for them. You love pouring into them, you love their business and who they're impacting. A lot of times, you get really excited when you're doing work for them, and there's kind of this like adrenaline rush that comes with that, and so it can be hard to turn it off sometimes. So in today's episode, I'm going to talk to you all about how to set boundaries with your own work time with yourself, so that your VA business doesn't run you okay. I will share the exact tools and methods that I use, like tried and true time blocking, and also a couple of apps that I have found that are super helpful to keep me staying focused and able to protect my family time and actually enjoy the biggest perk of making money as a VA, which is the flexibility right that I got into this for and that so many of y'all. That's one of the root drivers for why you want to become a virtual assistant, so let's protect that.

Laura Nicole: 2:17

Okay, having time boundaries matters so much, and it really really is important to start and to implement from the very beginning of when you become a VA. Okay, this is something that I learned the hard way. I did not have boundaries. They did not exist for the first, probably two and a half years that I was doing this. It truly is a double-edged sword. Right, having flexibility is a double-edged sword because, right, having flexibility is a double-edged sword because, yes, you have the ability to work whenever it works for you, but that also makes it really easy to just work all the time. Right, because you can just pop in here for five minutes and pop in there and check something on your phone really quick.

Laura Nicole: 2:57

And if you don't have boundaries set in place for when you'll be working and when you're not working and again, I know this from experience it will lead to burnout. Inevitably you will end up burnt out. You'll just have traded in a nine to five burnout for a burnout of your own design, right, and that's not what we want. We want to have crisp, clear lines between work and family, not blurred, fuzzy, overlapping lines just because we are working from our home. And having these boundaries set to create clear work times for you will help you to be present with your family when it's family time. You can actually turn work off right, even though it's in the palm of your hand, it will help you get better quality work done because you will be really focused in those times that you have available to work and it avoids that trap of always being available to your clients. So there are some main tools that I have utilized.

Laura Nicole: 3:55

Once I recognized my own problem, right Y'all, when I started this I didn't have a coach, I didn't have a mentor. I was fucking winging it okay, and I got so far in. I was so obsessed with my clients. I loved the work I was doing. It was fun, it was an adrenaline rush. I really enjoyed and took pride in being that person who made their life so much easier and made their business flow better and help their revenue increase. It was literally addicting. It was again that dopamine hit that adrenaline rush and then it truly made it hard. It sounds kind of silly to say looking back, but it made it hard a lot of times to close my computer and turn my brain off from it and go spend time with my family, even though I love my family and that's the whole reason I'm doing this is to have more time with them while still supporting them financially. But I didn't have boundaries in place and once I reached a point that it was like holy guac. I can't continue this way, like it's not worth it. I can't keep going down this path.

Laura Nicole: 4:55

I found a couple of really, really helpful tools that allowed me to put boundaries in place that I felt comfortable with, but they are also still flexible. They can change in different seasons or when we have different projects going on with my clients, so I want to share three of them with you. We're going to talk about time blocking, and then I'm going to share two different like app restricting apps that I use to help me stay focused, not only when I'm working, but also when I'm in family mode. I have a feeling that time blocking is likely something that you have heard of before, but if you haven't, the method of time blocking is just about scheduling your day in focused chunks of time, so each block has one clear purpose, and so when you're in that specific time block, then you are not going to be bouncing between different tasks, which then allows you essentially to give yourself permission to focus fully on one thing at a time, because you already know there's time scheduled to handle all of the things you need to handle.

Laura Nicole: 5:51

The way that I use time blocking in my days is I go through on Sunday night and I fill out my planner for the week with all of my meetings, my deadlines, everything I have that's important in the next, monday through Sunday, and I'll obviously block out the times that I'm unavailable to work, whether that's because we're getting ready for school or it's the first two hours after pickup or because I have a meeting or a coaching call. Those get marked out of my calendar and then I go through and I highlight the times that I do have available to work. Okay, so I can see what those pockets are going to be. I can see what my blocks of time are going to be each day and then the way I do it, I kind of do a hybrid. I do like a weekly overview. So if I have something I know specifically needs to be done on a certain day, I go ahead and fill it in on Sunday. Well, on Sunday night I fill it in for whatever day it needs to be done that week, right. But then during the week, every day when I start my work for the day, I will sit down, look at my priorities list of work that I need to get done and then fill it in for what I can get done that day based on the time blocks I have available. So, again, I know that all of that work is going to get done because it has specific times assigned to the certain tasks, which stops me from trying to do it all at once. Right, it shows me exactly where my work is going to fit into my day and it also protects family and personal time, because I'm putting things on there like dropping off at school, pickup time with little miss Bengals football games that I'm going to watch with my husband. Right, like I'm scheduling in my work things, but I'm also scheduling in life things, and it truly does make it so much easier to shut down and like get out of work mode when you're at the end of a block, because you know that that to-do list that's like looking at you and taunting you. You know that, like it's okay to stop and go do stuff with your family because you already have the time scheduled to finish knocking out that list either later that day or later in the week. Everything will be fine, it will be fine and the time blocking helps you to see that bigger picture.

Laura Nicole: 7:51

And then there are two different tools that I have used that kind of force me to stay focused whether, again, I'm in a work block or I'm in a family block on my phone. So there's two different ones. There's an Opal app Okay, it's called. It's called Opal O-P-A-L, and what it does is it allows you to set and schedule blocking sessions where you get to choose what apps are being blocked and then you start that session. You set it for a certain amount of time and when you start the session it blocks it, right? So let's say I'm in family mode and so I'm going to set a block up for all of the apps I would use for work, and I set it for two hours, right. When I pick up a little miss from school, I don't work for two hours, I just hang out with her. So I set my block for all of my work apps for two hours and if I try to go open one of those apps, then Opal is going to tell me like nope, sorry bro, you can't get in right. It's going to physically block me until that timer that I set for the block is done.

Laura Nicole: 8:53

And Opal has different strengths of blocks that you can set for yourself. Some of them are easier to override. There's the really strong one, like you, literally can't override it until the time is done, and it was super helpful. But I got to a point where I was just overriding it all the time and I was like, ok, this isn't actually helping me anymore. I've found the loophole here. And so then my business mentor actually told me about the brick that she uses, and the brick is actually this little square thing that you tangibly get. When you order a brick, you order this actual little plastic square and it does essentially the same thing as Opal, right, you're setting what things you want to block and then you quote, unquote, brick your phone. But it takes it kind of to the next level because you have to physically tap your phone against the brick to put it into that block mode and then also to take it out of that block mode.

Laura Nicole: 9:47

So, for example, I have my brick on the windowsill in my office, and so when I'm working and I'm in the office, I will actually brick TikTok or Instagram right, if I'm not scheduling out content, then I'll block those, so that I'm not tempted to just pick up and scroll and waste 15 minutes that I should be working. And then, once I'm done working, I will unbrick my phone by tapping it again, but then I will switch it to a different set of apps being blocked and I will rebrick my phone before I go pick up Little Miss, so that again now my work apps are blocked but I can't just override it because if I want to check something while I'm sitting in pickup line, like tough shit because the brick is at home on my windowsill in my office. Like tough shit because the brick is at home on my windowsill in my office. So they're kind of just like different levels of how strict I guess you want to be with yourself about blocking how much self-control you have. I don't have self-control, and so I would always override Opal. But they are both great options because they help you to enforce your own boundary with yourself for when it's work time and when it's not work time.

Laura Nicole: 10:49

So some ways to apply this big picture right in setting boundaries, set a realistic capacity for yourself, especially when you're starting. We talked in an earlier episode about honoring your capacity in terms of how much you can work on a weekly basis and again, honoring that and starting smaller will help you to create these boundaries early on and decide what times of day work best for you. Do that method I talked about earlier Look at your whole week, write out what's not available, then highlight places that are, and commit to yourself to protect those work blocks right and also to protect the family time. We are the only ones who can create that boundary for ourselves at home, with your clients, about your availability and when you are available to communicate. Having time boundaries is not about restricting yourself. It's actually about making sure that you're allowing yourself that time, freedom and flexibility which is, for almost all of you, one of the very, very top reasons that you're pursuing virtual assistance as a way of making money.

Laura Nicole: 11:51

And if part of the reason that you want to pursue virtual assistants is because you feel very stuck in a nine to five, where boundaries are pretty non-existent and the expectations of you, even outside of typical nine to five hours, are feeling pretty wild and a little excessive, I want you to know that you can take control back of your time and be able to implement those boundaries by switching careers into something that gives you the flexibility and freedom like virtual assistance does.

Laura Nicole: 12:22

I have a free download that you can grab, called the career switch cheat sheet, and it's going to show you how to take the skills you're already using in your current boundary-less job and turn them into services that you can offer as a VA, to start creating income that can have boundaries and can truly give you that time freedom. Grab that cheat sheet at the link in the show notes and start building a career that actually works for your life and your boundaries, instead of constantly blurring the lines and setting wild expectations on you.

Thanks for hanging out with me today on your Virtual Assistant Coach. If you loved this episode, be sure to share it with your best friend, your sister or even your favorite coworker, who you know wants to start making a flexible income. I'll see you all next time.