Prepaid three months of VA hours and used maybe a fifth of them

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

I've sat on the other side of this. When I was placing people, the clients who burned out fastest were always the ones who bought full time first. The ones who stuck around started at 10 or 15 hours and complained within a month that they needed more, which is exactly the right complaint to have.

One thing I'd add to your fix, anchor. Don't just write the tasks, record yourself doing them once. Screen recording with your voice on it. It's boring to make and it cuts the ramp roughly in half compared to a written doc, because the VA can see where you actually click. And a decent agency will ask you for those recordings unprompted. If they don't ask, that tells you 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, in my experience they know and they don't say. Billed hours are billed hours. I had one account manager who did tell me, and I stayed with that agency two more years, so there's your answer on 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 not being able to walk away in week five. That trade almost never works for someone still figuring out the work.

I think the real cause is slightly different from how you're telling it. You didn't lack tasks, you lacked a process that was already running badly with you doing it. Every VA hire that's worked for me was me handing off something I was already doing every day and hated. The ones that failed were me hiring someone to start a thing I'd never done. You can't delegate a process that doesn't exist yet, and lead follow up was probably in that second bucket.