Finding more to delegate

Everyone says that working with an EA is a life changer.

It can be. But many fall short.

It takes effort and creativity on the delegator’s side to think of what they can and should clear off of their plate.

Here are 2 simple approaches to help uncover more delegation opportunities to get you working with higher leverage.

1. The Hour Long Loom Challenge — Something you can do now

Record your screen for 1 hour. Do whatever work you would normally do. Just think out loud while you’re doing it.

Loom is the easiest tool to use.

If you have an experienced EA, send them the recording. Get them to create a list of tasks that they think they can help out with.

If don’t have an EA yet:

Go through the video and bookmark the different tasks you worked on during that hour.

You’re looking for three types of wins:

1. Quick wins: Any repeating tasks that I can hand off?
2. Creative wins: For the tasks that I did, are there any supporting tasks that I could have someone else do to make it more efficient or effective?
3. Long term wins: I wish other people thought about this entire process/set of tasks like me. If someone shadowed me a few times, and learned my thought process, could they take over?

2. Delegation Diagnostics — Questions you can answer every quarter

a. What things are you doing over and over again that don’t lead to growth?

You need to lay out 2 things first — your priorities and your activity list.

Priorities: Every entrepreneur should have a clear idea of their priorities. For most CEOs it’s around growth. What are the priority growth metrics and efforts?

Activity List: Create a log of all of the different tasks you’ve done in the past 1-3 months.

Literally make a multi-page doc with a long list of bullet points.

Take 10 mins to brain dump as much as you can.

Pull from your emails, project management, one-off todo lists, etc.

Go through this activity list.

Which tasks are repeating and don’t directly apply to your priorities?

b. Where do you find yourself hiding by working on low leverage stuff?

What tasks do you do when you’re stressed out but you’re still at your desk feeling pseudo productive?

The times when it’s late, your brain isn’t working, but you feel like you still need to get work done?

For a lot of us this includes mindlessly clicking through things like email, categorizing transactions for bookkeeping, checking vanity site metrics, etc.

c. Where can you act as Quality Control rather than Production?

In 2022, my son was 1 year old. I was struggling to balance my family life while working at Mercury.

At our company off site, I noticed that the CEO & Co-Founder of Mercury, Immad, was an involved parent of two young kids.

It made me think — So he was building this unicorn fintech startup with 2 kids while I was struggling to pursue my side project with 1 kid.

So I asked Immad a dumb question. I was looking for him to confirm my experience. I expected to walk away thinking — Everyone feels that way. Just keep building.

But that’s not what happened.

Me: “What’s your day to day like? Are you pretty stressed?”

Immad: “Not really. I have smart people around me. I just give my opinion on everything and ultimately trust their decisions.”

This stuck to me ever since.

Mercury wouldn’t be a success today if he still held tightly onto the production of everything. Moving into quality control through his opinions allows him to still shape the product and company without becoming a bottleneck.

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EA Playbook of the Week

There are so many stomach dropping moments as an entrepreneur.

The worst one is when you get this text:

“Date night??”

It’s your wife. You got caught up in the 100 things you need to get done today and it all flew by.

Things just end up falling through the cracks.

It could be date nights, follow up emails that could close deals, and more.

Unfortunately, this is an experience that’s universally shared by founders.

This week’s playbook helps relieve this pain — Daily Previews

Review this one with your EA. Make sure you’re giving them enough context by sending them a daily brain dump/recap (video or voice note).

Daily Previews (Instructions for EAs)

Task Overview

Daily previews help clients keep the important things top of mind so things don’t fall through the cracks. It also helps keep EAs and clients aligned on the things that matter. Regularly iterate on what is included in your Daily Preview, add sections for new priorities and trim sections for old ones.

What it looks like:

Prequisites

• Access to email, calendar, and other systems to gather context
• Recommended — A daily recap and brain dump from client to get untracked context (ie. ad hoc calls, texts with clients, etc).

Process

1. Listening and Processing Client’s Daily Recap
   • Encourage client to send end-of-day recaps with the goal of staying aligned.
   • This would include any movement around priorities, key decisions, things to do the next day, things they could use help with, etc.
   • Take detailed notes on action item/s, key points, and reminders.
2. Conducting Inbox Check
   • Review client’s accounts (Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) and emails.
   • Identify and note messages or items that may need attention.
   • Notify and prioritize based on urgency and importance.
3. Review and Surface Unresolved/Pending Tasks
   • Review the past daily preview and all tasks, comments, etc.
   • Confirm status of these tasks and surface as needed.
4. Providing General Updates
   • The client may give some tasks outside of what is mentioned in the daily preview, add an update on these tasks.
5. Checking Client’s Calendar
   • Review client’s calendar for the day.
   • Identify meetings, appointments, commitments and check if there’s anything unrecorded from the past day.
   • Surface these in the Daily Preview.
6. Compile Daily Preview in a document and share with client.

Tips:

• Be mindful of the client's preferences regarding the format and level of detail in the daily preview.
• Maintain confidentiality and discretion in handling sensitive information.
• Add context as your client needs. If they request more specific context on team members, for example, feel free to add that.
• Explicitly communicate when you decide to remove sections that are normally there, but you’ve deemed no longer important/relevant. This gives them a chance to confirm.

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Executive Assistants at work

Real examples of elevated EA work.

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I first hired my EA, Dane, as a Junior Researcher.

Over 200 people applied, 50 people did the sample research task, and only 5 had good enough results to interview. She was the only one I hired.

It was a very challenging research task — Given this is of Delaware C-Corp legal names, find their website, founders, and the founders’ contact info for outreach.

There were endless edge cases in the research but at the end of the day, her task was very defined and constrained.

This process filtered for a really solid task-level team member.

Since then, Dane has earned more and more room to elevate from task-level to project-level.

This past week, she executed and shipped her largest end-to-end project — our new EA Discord community.

She would write up plans and record looms explaining her thoughts. I would quickly guide by sharing examples, asking questions, and giving feedback.

Dane drove the entire effort from planning to implementation.

We often think about hiring an EA and expect a high quality task-level team member. You think of a task, then you tell them what to do.

That’s a great start but your EA is likely capable of operating at a higher level than that which makes everything easier for you.

Here is the actual output of Dane’s detailed planning for rolling out our EA community. Even better than what I would’ve done.

If you’d like to work with top tier EAs like mine, we’ve got a few available!

Candidate A:

• Over 4 years of experience as an EA to a startup founder.
• Performed admin tasks such as the usual inbox and calendar management but also served a critical role in data management and other general ad hoc tasks. Supported multiple departments.
• Has 6 years of managerial experience in Human Resources where they were responsible for optimizing/managing areas like team efficiency, productivity, and data integrity.

Candidate B:

• Over 2 years of experience as an EA
• Experience with core EA tasks (inbox, calendar, travel, meeting management, etc).
• Has 3 years of experience in a customer service role and got promoted to team lead within the first year. (Note: CX in the Philippines is often metrics-driven)
• Computer Science grad and was a web developer intern doing SQL work.

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