Why prepaying a quarter of VA hours without a task queue tends to waste most of the hours

The category versus task thing is the whole post. "Data entry" isn't work, it's a shelf you put work on.

There is a clear pattern on the agency side of this. The clients who burn out fastest are almost always the ones who buy full time first. The ones who stick around start at 10 or 15 hours and complain within a month that they need more, which is exactly the right complaint to have. One thing to add to your fix. Beyond writing the tasks out, record yourself doing each one once, a screen recording with your voice on it. It is boring to make and it cuts the ramp roughly in half compared to a written document, because the VA can see where you actually click. A decent agency will ask for those recordings unprompted. If they do not ask, that says something about how they train.

Curious whether the agency ever flagged the low usage to you? Seems like they'd know she was idle and it'd be in their interest to say something before you cancelled.

Beacon, as a rule they know and they do not say. Billed hours are billed hours. The rare account manager who does flag idle hours tends to keep that client for years, which tells you which behavior is worth more long term. Anchor, the prepay discount is worth about $234 on your numbers. You paid $234 for the privilege of being unable to walk away in week five. That trade almost never works for someone still figuring out the work.

The real cause reads slightly different from the way you are telling it. The shortage was never tasks. What was missing was a process that was already running, even badly, with you doing it. The VA hires that work are almost always a handoff of something the operator was already doing every day and disliked. The ones that fail are a hire made to start a thing the operator had never done. You cannot delegate a process that does not exist yet, and lead follow up was probably in that second bucket.