Small changes do add up. As a virtual assistant, I work from a home office. Telecommuting is one way I try to help conserve energy and reduce pollution — my car isn’t out there in gridlock every morning. Here are some tips for how to get started on making your contributions to conserving our energy:
Turn off your computers in the evening and on weekends. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, or need to leave your system on overnight to run utilities, shut off your monitor. Mac users — pay attention to the battery and energy saving settings in your monitors and tweak to adjust for energy savings.
Turn off the lights! Sounds so simple, but so many of us forget to do it. When I’m not in my office, I also turn off the light in my fish tank (my window on the world during the day) and power down any unnecessary peripherals such as printers.
Replace light bulbs where possible. Come on, you can do this! According to Energy Star, “If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.” Just one light bulb. Bet you can do 2….5…..how about all of them?
Combine your errands. The beautiful thing about being a virtual assistant is that we are in control of our day. Make a list of your must-do errands. Can you combine them in one trip? Have a friend, colleague or family member who also needs to go to the post office, office supply store or FedEx depot? Have them ride along. Even better for your health — can you walk to run that errand? Stretch your legs, get moving and generate some endorphins while you’re contributing to less energy consumption.
Image and read electronically. There is nothing like the feel and smell of a newspaper in my hands or a magazine on my lap. I understand. Yes, I’m old school about reading, but I’m trying to change. Can you read those articles off the net? I’m trying, and I know it helps save paper. Do you really need to print that e-mail? My colleague Taryn Merrick prints a reminder in her sig line asking the reader to consider the environment and determine if they really need to print an e-mail message, and I believe she is the first virtual assistant to do so.
On the subject of reading electronically, I’m checking out the Amazon Kindle
Did you hear my IVAA Expert of the Month this month on Cultivating a Thriving VA Practice on the Mac platform? There I talked about my favorite tool for imaging in our offices. Consider imaging your paper documents, then shred and recycle your unneeded paper.
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Little changes do make a difference. It may not seem like you are doing much, but if we all work together as virtual assistants and small business owners, together we can further help conserve energy for our planet.
About the author: At Your Service Cincinnati principal Nora Rubinoff’s core virtual assistant services include social media management, WordPress support, online reputation management, project management, customer relationship management, customized e-mail marketing campaigns and productivity enhancement. Nora is a Mac and PC specialist. Nora is enthusiastic about architecting solutions that enable clients to make more out of their business day.
Nora is a recipient of the Karen S. House Award for Regional Collaboration as well as the Women of Excellence Award, several state and local government proclamations and holds the IVAA EthicsCheck™ certification. Nora is a past board member for IVAA and serves on several community advisory boards. Read more from this author
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