May 23, 2018

Being a business administrative assistant is a busy and demanding job, especially in a busy, fast-paced office environment. A business administrative assistant is someone who is responsible for organizing the happenings at the average business office and they are responsible for doing their jobs quickly and efficiently to ensure that the entire day-to-day process in the office runs smoothly.

While sitting at a desk most of the day might sound easy, the position of business administrative assist can be much harder than it sounds. However, offices often rely heavily on their business administrative assistants to help them keeping their offices running smoothly. The following are 7 great tips to help keep office administrative assistants to help keep pace with the office environment around them:

• Determine Your "Prime Time": Determine what time of day you are best at. If you have some flexibility in when you arrive at work or how late you can stay, determine what times of day work best for you. Schedule your most demanding tasks during those hours to ensure that you are being productive as you can be with the time you are spending at work, especially when you are working on more demanding tasks.

• Use a "Task" Manager: It's no secret that being an administrative assistant can be a very busy and demanding job. It can feel like your list of "to-dos" oftentimes grows faster than you can check items off of it. Moreover, you may feel as though you are losing track of items and forgetting to do things you said you would already do. Using a "task" manager that essentially helps you make an electronic "to-do" list is a great idea. Moreover, many email programs come with a "task manager", so that may be a great place to start your first "to-do" lists till you find an app or way to do it better, especially if you spend a lot of time on email and will view your list more regularly.

• Create Professional Folders: Creating folders for each company, client, or task you handle can help you keep track of otherwise large and sometimes disorganized mountains of paper that otherwise might get disheveled or even misplaced. Organizing your papers can help you find them easily when you need to access them and can help save you time if you don't have to dig for the papers you need because they are intermingled with other papers that are not even related to the exact project at hand.

• Use Cubicle Clips To Organize & Decorate Office Spaces: Hanging clips on the side of your cubicle is a great way to help decorate your cubicle and add some color to your office space while also effectively organizing loose papers, notes, reminders, etc. on your office wall where you will be able to find them easily and they can serve as reminders of what needs to be done in the immediate future versus what is scheduled what day.

•  Use A Paper Wall Calendar: While a paper calendar may seem "old school" and you don't have to use one for every little task that needs done, having a large calendar that hangs from your wall and using it for your big appointments can help you remember them. Check it every morning and set reminders on your alarm clock or even on your phone to help you remember important events such as planning sessions, times set aside to work on specific office projects, or even staff meetings. Only the big stuff needs to go on here, but if it's an event where you have to go meet someone, then it can go on this calendar.

• Organize Inboxes: Use specific inboxes for specific messages. However you like to organize your messages is up to you, whether it's organized by a certain sender, by a specific project you are working on, or any other way that works for you, just getting the emails organized and setting it up so emails go to the appropriate inbox can make mountains of emails seem less intimidating. Once your inbox is organized answering and responding to emails becomes more manageable and it doesn't seem like the massive chore that it once was.

• Get Organized Early: Getting organized each morning when you come into the office will help you stay organized throughout the rest of the day and will help you focus on the tasks and the day ahead. It might take 15-30 minutes of your time, however, you will have yourself organized and ready to go for the rest of the day.

Organizing your office can be tricky, however, organizing your specific office departments such as your papers files, email files, Word/Excel/etc. documents, etc. will help you start off each day more organized and with a clearer mind than you would if it you just threw everything into piles and tried searching for things as you needed them throughout the day.

Remember, organizing each morning might take time, possibly 15-30 minutes to begin with, maybe more or less, however, over time you will be able to cut down on your prep time as you get used to organizing your office space. In the end, it will pay off to be organized as you will spend less time digging for things you need and spend more time working productively throughout the day. You will also save your office staff time if you are able to provide the materials as they request them rather than spending time looking through other information for what they requested for.

An organized administrative assistant can not only boost their productivity for the company but also for those who you provide information to who have to spend less time waiting and more time working when the needed information is provided in a timely manner. Staying on top of your game as an administrative assistant can help be the oil that helps fine-tune the machine that is your office so use these tips to help your office run smoothly as it can. Your company and the employees you assist on a daily basis will thank you for the extra effort and organization.

For more information on organizational skills that can help your administrative assistants stay organized and on top of their duties and tasks please feel free to contact us.