The myth of the personal assistant who will fix everything
We don’t actually want everything we think we want. (Image by Larisa Koshkina)
She’s discreet and thoughtful.
She anticipates your needs. It’s almost like she’s reading your mind.
She’s happy to do the things that you don’t want to do, and she does them with style and flair.
She more than pays for herself with the time and money she saves you.
She’s your perfect personal assistant — and, like your fairy godmother, she doesn’t exist.
Sure, it’s possible to have an amazing personal assistant who has all of the qualities above. But how do you get to that point?
It begins with clearly identifying what you need done and how — including your estimate of how long the work will take to complete on a weekly basis. Then, using this information, you have to advertise for the position, process applications, and interview candidates.
Then, once you’ve found the right person, you negotiate the terms of your agreement. Once that is done, you hire and onboard the person.
Next comes training. This might be difficult in a job that involves such a wide range of tasks and requires a varied skill set. It will require lots of time and patience.
Eventually, you’ll get to the point at which you have a reliable personal assistant. But it will take awhile before you have realized a net savings of time and money. It’s a lot less glamorous than the fantasy, and it’s not usually a quick way out of overwhelm.
Many of us wait too long to get help for our problems. From that suspicious whining sound the car is making to total overwhelm at tax time, there’s a tension between the urgency of the things we need to do and the time required to seek solutions. It would be so wonderful to be able to say to someone, “Oh good, you’re here. Figure all of this out.”
That kind of person exists, but that’s not a personal assistant. You need a mechanic for your car, a bookkeeper and accountant for your finances, and a dermatologist for your weird mole.
How about a stylist? A professional home organizer? A personal trainer? A hiring consultant? A productivity specialist?
Or maybe you could engage an operations strategist to help you figure out what kind of help you need.
While I’d love to hire someone to cook my meals, send emails on my behalf, and book my travel arrangements, the hundreds of thousands of dollars I spent on personnel last year does not include a personal assistant. I have benefited much more from hiring people to take on specific roles or projects within my business. These are people who would tell me no if I asked them to book a flight for me. It’s not in their job description. They don’t serve me, per se — we work together to serve our clients.
Because of my team, I have time to send my own emails and cook my own meals. I have the space and clarity to figure out whom to hire next. And it won’t be a personal assistant. I have found that, when I have the right kind of high-level support, I don’t really need someone at my beck and call.
When we’re overwhelmed, we feel so desperate for someone to take away the things that are stressing us out. Who has the time to go to the store to get a birthday card for a friend? But these are the kinds of things that are hard for a personal assistant to get right, and they aren’t usually frequent enough to give us much bang for the buck in terms of training time.
Instead, we can look for the big levers. What are the larger, repeating processes we can give to someone else to do? It’s scarier to trust another person to do the big stuff. It’s an ego blow to find someone who is better than you at doing it. But that’s where you begin to uncover the freedom to do the stuff you’re the best at.
Maybe someday, you’ll find the personal assistant of your dreams. But I’m guessing that, by the time you do, you won’t be expecting that person to save you or fix everything. You will have already figured out how to do that yourself, and the assistant will be a bonus.
