The professional world is more fast-paced and demanding than ever before, and personal assistant roles are expanding beyond traditional administrative responsibilities. As a PA, you are tasked with supporting your bossโs workflows, simplifying their day-to-day tasks, and assisting them in handling the many demands of their workplace and industry. In this day and age, itโs never been more important to enhance your digital skill set to achieve these goals.
By integrating the right digital tools into your daily schedule, you can excel at your role and ensure your boss has the support and assistance they need to thrive in their position. These tools can also simplify your workload, ensuring you perform at your best without burning out.
Here are the five essential digital tools you should master as a PA โ before you get asked to!
1. Scheduling and calendar management tools
One of your foremost tasks as a PA is to manage your bossโs extensive schedule. With so many meetings, networking events, travel obligations, and projects on their roster, a standard paper diary may not be enough to manage these events optimally.
This is where a scheduling tool or digital calendar enters the picture. If your boss has a significant online presence, their new appointments, event invitations, and meetings likely stem from numerous sources. Coordinated calendar scheduling platforms can integrate your employerโs virtual calendars and bookings, displaying them on a centralised interface.
This central display will help you ensure your boss never misses an important meeting, conference, or flight again. It also helps you avoid double booking, which would otherwise add to their stress load. Tools like Calendly also display availability automatically, streamlining the process of booking meetings and events without requiring long chains of emails or messages between parties.
2. Virtual task managers
When you take on the role of managing your bossโs endless number of tasks, it can be challenging to keep up. Making physical notes of these responsibilities may help, but itโs easy to misplace or overlook them as a busy PA.
Task management platforms can help. Many of these tools are fully customisable and simple to use, allowing you to make comprehensive notes of all your bossโs responsibilities in a single place. These reminders can then be shared online with your employer and their team, and managed across all your devices for effortless access.
Options like Asana, Todoist, and Trello will ensure that you can keep track of your bossโs daily tasks. These tools help you prioritise obligations, categorise projects, and even set deadlines and reminders with ease.
3. Unified communication tools
Digital communication platforms like Connecteam, Slack, and Google Workspace have transformed the way we communicate in the workplace. These tools are highly functional apps for personal assistants, offering extensive sets of solutions for your everyday communication requirements.
Many of the best tools available allow you to organise conversations with your boss and their team through dedicated communication channels and direct messaging platforms. These features allow you and your employer to keep all your communications on a single channel. Previous chats can be referred back to at any time, across a variety of computer and mobile devices.
Some platforms also enable simple virtual file sharing, which helps to keep you, your boss, and their teams on the same page at all times. Many can also be integrated with other leading business tools, and may offer video and voice call features for added productivity.
4. Meeting room booking systems
With so many meetings on their daily calendar, your boss likely doesnโt have the time to handle meeting room and conference bookings themselves. Learning how to use a meeting room booking system like the one from SuperSaaS can help you manage your employerโs meetings professionally, while mitigating the risks of double-bookings and delays.
The right meeting room booking system for your needs is one that is designed specifically for office spaces. It will enable you to manage your meeting and conference rooms seamlessly with automated scheduling software. Many platforms can instantly determine the capacity and availability for each meeting room at your offices, schedule once-off and recurring meetings, and adjust each roomโs configurations to meet distinctive meeting needs.
Systems like SuperSaaS also enable you to automatically sync your bossโs meeting bookings with their calendar apps. Plus, they can be integrated with leading payment systems for meeting room services and send booking confirmations and meeting reminders to attendees via email and text message.
5. Time tracking and productivity apps
PAs need to maintain a consistently high level of productivity to simplify their bossesโ workflows. As a busy personal assistant, using the right apps and tools to maximise your productivity is the key to your success and your employerโs.
Time tracking tools like Toggl Track and TrackingTime make it easy to track your hours and manage your team. Many tools offer automated time tracking, billable hours tracking, and detailed analytics and reports to give you key insights into your and your teamโs time management practices.
The right platform will also provide client and project organisation features that can be integrated with top project management tools for added convenience. Some can also generate custom reports and be integrated with virtual calendars to display tracked hours and progress in a way your boss can access instantly when needed.
A functional productivity app can also assist you in optimising your productivity at every level of your role. Options like ClickUp can provide extensive insights into your daily workflows and performance by tracking your activities, scoring your productivity levels, and providing you with comprehensive productivity reports.
Use these insights to block your tasks in line with your periods of ideal focus, set goals, and track your progress towards them. Tools like these can remarkably improve your time management and productivity as a PA, which can benefit your boss in myriad ways.
Mastering digital tools for career success
Digital productivity, time tracking, and scheduling tools are the future of personal assistant workflows. They allow you to effortlessly keep track of your bossโs most pressing obligations while centralising communications, document sharing, and meeting bookings in accessible locations.
Master these tools before your boss asks you to elevate your skill set and give you and your employer the support you need to supercharge your careers.
For more career development article, do explore PA Life’s Career News.
