Meetings, Huddles, and Being Present While Async
Presence is manufactured
Your client sees you, at most, one hour a week on a video call — the rest of your existence is text on a screen at 3am their time. That one hour carries absurd weight: it's where you stop being "the VA" and become a person they'd fight to keep. Working VAs treat meetings as performances in the honest sense — prepared, rehearsed, deliberate. This lesson is the choreography: before, during, after, and the daily rhythm that makes you feel present the other 167 hours.
Before: agendas and batched questions
Never arrive at a meeting empty-handed, and never spend your one live hour on questions that text could answer. The move: batch your questions through the week, then send the batch with a proposed agenda a few hours before the call — the trivial ones get answered async, the meaty ones get real discussion time.
"Ahead of our 9am ET call, here's my list: Quick answers (can be async): 1) OK to archive the 2024 leads? 2) Which logo file is current? Worth discussing live: 3) The Instagram engagement drop — I have 2 theories + data. 4) Should we move the newsletter to biweekly? Anything you want to add, send it over."
During: camera, voice, notes
Do
- Camera on by default — at 9pm PH, groomed, lit, headset on; it's a graveyard-shift reality, and showing up sharp anyway is the job
- Say something substantive in the first five minutes; silence reads as absence
- Take visible notes and confirm actions live: "So I've got three items — recap coming after"
Don't
- Answer every "any questions?" with "none po, all clear" — one good question per meeting, minimum
- Multitask; a delayed "sorry, can you repeat?" is visible from Ohio
- Let lag panic you — "my connection blipped, can you say that last part again?" is professional; pretending you heard is not
If camera-off is genuinely your norm for a reason (bandwidth, culture of the team), say it once explicitly rather than letting them wonder. But know the default US read: camera-on is engagement.
After: the recap message
The recap is the highest-leverage five minutes of your week. Post it within 30 minutes of the call, before memory diverges — because two people always leave the same meeting with slightly different meetings in their heads. Yours becomes the official record, and the author of the record is, quietly, running the operation.
"Recap — [date] call. Decisions: [1–3, plainly stated]. My actions: [each with a deadline, their timezone]. Your actions: [each with a name]. Open: [anything parked for later]. Flag anything I got wrong — otherwise this is the plan."
The daily heartbeat
Between meetings, presence is a rhythm: a start-of-shift note (what you're attacking) and the end-of-shift handoff you built in Lesson 4. Two short messages a day, every day, at predictable times. It sounds mechanical; it reads as reliability. Clients stop checking on you precisely because they never have to wonder.
Do this now
Twenty-five minutes, portfolio artifact. Scenario: you just finished a weekly call with Sarah (real estate team lead). Decided on the call: switch the drip campaign to the new template; you'll audit all active listings for photo quality by Thursday; Sarah will get you MLS access by tomorrow; the postcard idea is parked until next month. She also mentioned, in passing, that the last VA "never wrote anything down."
Write the full cycle: (1) the pre-meeting message you would have sent, with two async questions and one discussion topic of your invention; (2) the post-meeting recap using the template. Save as Meeting Cycle — worked example in your portfolio folder with the other artifacts from this course. Then go to the events page and register for this week's live training — recaps are practiced live there, and presence is a skill you build in rooms, not docs. Take the quiz when you're ready.
Tip: use your ← → arrow keys.