Personal Development
August 29, 2008 by Kylie Short · 2 Comments
As you all know by now, one of my objectives in business is to continually undergo training and personal development. Well, this is just a quick note to say that I’ll be unavailable Monday and Tuesday 1-2 September as I have AAPB coming here to assess my skills in bookkeeping. This is particularly important for me as under the new regulations about to be passed by the Australian Government, if I wish to continue to provide bookkeeping services, I’ll need to pass a minimum level of competency in order to gain my BAS (Business Activity Statement) Service Provider accreditation and number.
Wish me luck!
Do you have a contingency plan?
August 5, 2008 by Kylie Short · 1 Comment
The Virtual Assistant (otherwise known as Kylie) woke from her slumber and rose to eat breakfast with her young family. Afterwards code monkey assisted her in preparing each of the trainee code monkeys/Virtual Assistants for child care and school. She just knew that today would be a fantastic day. The sun was shining brightly, she loved her family and she loved her work.
As she travelled to her brand new office outside of her home, she quickly summarised what had to be done that day in her head. She’d need to check in with each of her Associates as well as complete client projects due that day.
After 5 minutes she arrived, collected her belongings from the boot and walked the last few metres to her door. “Hmm, that’s strange” she thought to herself. “Beckie is normally here by now, I bet she’s left me a text message on my phone.” And so she had. Beckie was unwell today and so the Virtual Assistant rearranged the schedule slightly and reallocated some of the client tasks scheduled for that day.
The Virtual Assistant unpacked her fourth baby (her MacBook Pro), turned it on and went to make herself a coffee with her cappachino machine. When she returned she saw that it appeared to be having trouble starting up. She did a forced quit and restarted. Still, the same thing happened again.
Nearly in tears, the Virtual Assistant called her code monkey to tell him of her troubles. “oh oh, I think we need to reinstall it” he said.
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Normally this is the part of the story where you read about the person being unable to meet deadlines, unable to communicate and unable to work AT ALL because they didn’t have a contingency plan for when things like this happen. Luckily I do. I simply jumped onto a PC, logged onto the network and other than the different operating system, it was like I was on my Mac. I had NO DOWNTIME!
Have you planned for contingencies?