Today was the first day with a VA.

Today was the first day of having a virtual assistant (shout out to Karen) start helping me and I must admit although it was quite a tough day overall, it was so incredible to go in my inbox and have a nice little summary of the many emails that came into Cool Cat along with a tidy action list.

Outsourcing is something that you can do and it can be affordable for you. Certainly some things aren't appropriate to have help on, but for me, it has already paid dividends on day 1.  We're still not “caught up” on my email and we're working through it, but it will happen.

I think that this is something that we'll see more and I hope that we'll also see some sort of outsourcing firms that specialize in the needs of education along with meeting our higher standards of privacy requirements, etc. There are many things like updating the website, answering all the email that comes into the school and forwarding it to the right place, etc. that truthfully could be done off-site for $5 an hour. Maybe your solution in these tight times is not to hire more staff, but to go virtual.  (I did this as www.elance.com as Timothy Ferriss recommended in 4 hour work week.)

Best wishes. (BTW the “tipping point” according to the article from timemanagement ninja below is 50 emails a day — more than that and you're overwhelmed.  I've been getting 250-300 legitimate emails a day for some time.) Think about it. If you want to hear more about this, let me know.