Chapter 42Working with an Executive Assistant
When my long‐time assistant, Andrea, went out on maternity leave a few years back, I quickly became aware that she boosts my daily productivity/capacity by about 25 to 30 percent. While I was nothing but delighted for her to take the time off, it was a very happy day when she came back from leave! If creating a personal operating system is the first step to good self‐management and time management, the second step is learning how to find and work with an executive assistant.
Other CEOs regularly ask me what value an executive assistant provides, particularly in an era where almost everything can be done in self‐service, lightweight ways. It's tempting for CEOs of startups and even companies that are just out of the startup phase to want to do it all themselves, either because they feel that they don't need help on small tasks or that it's important to send the message that nothing is “beneath” them.
I'll say it again: time is your scarcest resource and as the leader of an organization, anything you can do to create more of it is worthwhile. A good assistant does just that – literally creates time for you by offloading hundreds of small things from your plate that, sure, you could do but now you don't have to. A great executive assistant can create three to four hours per day for you. That's a lot of time that you can put either back into work or into the rest of your life.
Finding an Executive Assistant
There are generally two ...
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