If you know other mystery shoppers personally or even if you have visited the mystery shopping forums online, you no doubt have heard others talk about completing an astronomical number of assignments in a given day or week. You may struggle to do half as many as they do in the same amount of time. It can really be mind boggling to try to think about doing so many assignments, and still doing them with high quality work that will keep your shopper rating up. This, of course, begs the question – how many mystery shopping assignments is too many?
Your Skills. Completing the most number of mystery shopping assignments possible in a day is due in large part to your own skills. Your skills as a mystery shopping include the ability to quickly and accurately complete assignment requirements on-site as well as the ability to complete your reports quickly, too. If you like to take your time on your site visits (which is perfectly acceptable), you cannot expect to complete as many assignments in a single day as someone who rushes through their site visits with just enough time to complete the requirements before they hit the door. Another key skill is your own time management skills. Some people are just more efficient in their work habits and organizational skills, and this will definitely play a factor in how many assignments you can pack into a day.
The Assignments. You know that all assignments are not created equal. Some will take you an hour to complete while others take ten minutes. It’s really not feasible to expect to do ten or more hour-long assignments in a day, but you can probably do a dozen quick and easy assignments with relative ease. So as you book your assignments each day, make an estimate of how long you think each assignment will take, and include travel time from wherever it is you will be traveling from (which likely may be from another assignment location).
Effective Planning Skills. If you are driving across town three times a day trying to pack in various assignments into your day, you can see that you are spending far too much time in the car and not enough time actually working. To really make the most of your mystery shopping work hours, you will want to try to choose assignments that are located close to the same general vicinity. Or, if necessary, choose a couple of assignments for the morning hours in one area of town, and another group of assignments in the afternoon hours in another area of town. Effective and efficient selection of assignments is truly one of the most important ways you can maximize the benefit of your work hours. Keep in mind that you want to spend as much time as possible working on assignments rather than traveling to and from assignments.
The bottom line is that every mystery shopper is different, and the city or part of the city where they live is different. So there isn’t a magic number of assignments that is “just right” or too many for a mystery shopper to complete. However, if you regularly are barely making your submission deadlines for the reports or are feeling stressed about squeezing in all of your assignments into the day, you may need to either figure out how to make your work hours more efficient or cut back just slightly on your assignments.