This Is Why Our VAs Should Never Mark Their Own Tasks as Complete

We have a painful issue with well-meaning folks who are marking their own Basecamp tasks done, when not actually done. And when it’s marked done, we believe it’s done– so there is no way to rescue it– unless someone like me manually reviews everything that was marked done, seeing if it actually was done.

Anyone can imagine that would be tedious, expensive, and defeats the whole purpose of having task management. Thus, 20 years ago, after many years of pain from people marking their own stuff as done, we made a rule that only managers can mark things done.

But still, it persists. There is not a week that passes by where I don’t find myself reminding someone not to do this. It is a constant pain that plagues us, even though the rule is sprinkled in many places. How can we stress this enough?

They may think that we’re being too strict, but there’s a reason why anyone who is below level 4 should never close their own tasks.

If we accidentally mark something as done, it could cause us to accidentally throw the asset away, since anyone who looks at the project may believe there is nothing more to do there. Thus, a shame to throw away something the client has worked hard to create– and which we’ve invested time to edit, and something we could have used in our ad campaigns.

What’s worse is that they often close a task without providing a link that managers can take a look at. There could be quality issues that may have been missed. There is no proof and no QA by us.

As a rule, whoever is working on a task should NOT be the one marking it complete for obvious reasons. Only managers and I are allowed to do it anyway.

See This Is Why Virtual Assistants on Our Team Shouldn’t Message Me Directly to learn about another constant pain.

If we referred you to this page because you made that mistake, please go through the Level 1 Virtual Assistant Course again. It is constantly updated and will help you become a better team player.