12 Strategies to work
better with your assistant
to buy back your time.
If you're not doing these things,
you're spending time on things
that are sucking your energy
that don't make you any money.
See, I've been teaching people
how to hire executive assistants,
train them
to get more leverage
so that they don't build
the business that they grow to hate,
which unfortunately,
is how most entrepreneurs do it.
And that's why
I teach the buyback principle,
which is we don't hire people
to grow our business.
We hire people to buy back our time
because if we do the second,
we get the first
and an executive assistant
is one of the highest forms of leverage
in your first hire.
Now, most people
don't know how to do it right.
And that was my journey.
I had to like,
learn through trial and error
and having somebody make huge mistakes
and try to figure out what’s
the communication rhythm,
how do I get them integrated
into my inbox,
how do I get my calendar to work?
How do I make the whole system work
so that I actually feel relieved,
not stressed out
that somebody is just one email away
from making a huge mistake.
That's what I want to share with you.
And there is
four key areas
that we're going to unpack
with three strategies per area.
Let's get into it.
The first
pillar that I want
to unpack is the inbox.
You know, a long time ago,
my brother called me up and he's like,
hey man, I think it's time that I hire
an assistant. I see what you're doing.
I see what you've done with clients.
How do I do this?
So I sent him everything.
I sent him
the processes, the test project,
the profiling assessment,
the whole thing.
And he actually went on
and hired somebody.
And I remember a month later,
I'm at his house and I'm like,
yo man, how's the new assistant?
I'm excited to hear, like,
how they're buying back your time.
And he kind of replies
with a bit of a sigh and he's like,
I don't really see what the big idea is.
And when he did that,
I knew exactly where he missed
his opportunity.
And I asked him
one question: Is your assistant managing
a 100% of your emails
that come into your life,
or are you just CCing that
person on tasks they need to do?
And he's like: Oh,
why is there a difference?
Yes, there's a difference.
Essentially, your inbox is a public
to do list for strangers
off the Internet on your time.
Think about that.
Your email is a sophisticated
distraction machine from people
that you may or not know of
that are just asking you for time
or your attention
or messing with your feelings.
So having somebody take that over is key.
But most people don't know
how to get that done right.
There's three key strategies
to really unlock an executive assistant
when it comes to inbox.
The first one is your folder structure.
You need to create a place
where all the emails come into one spot
so that they can triage it.
And the key folder out of the finance one
and to respond
and all of these other ones
that I break down in my book
is the review folder,
and this is the folder
where they will put all the things
that they don't know how to handle.
And as long as you have a schedule
to meet
with your assistant
to review that review folder,
nothing will stay there for too long.
And that's your opportunity
to train them, to coach them,
to teach them
how to think about your life
and have them process things for you.
Now the second thing
is the daily meeting.
It's the rhythm, it's the sync.
What do you review
when it comes to your email
with your assistant?
So for me, it's always
that review folder.
It's always doing a quick
scan of things in the to respond,
which meant
that these are her task
list, things
that they need to move forward.
And it's also the things
that are in the responded folder.
So I know how they've been communicating
to the people in my life
so that I can get comfortable
with them understanding more context
and doing things on my behalf.
Now the third thing is the inbox SOP,
the standard operating procedure,
and here's how it works
is as your assistant
is processing your emails
and talking to people
and scheduling things
and taking a lot of stuff off your plate.
You want them to document
what they're doing right?
Let's say you get an email from somebody
asking you involved in their charity,
create a response.
One where it's, yes,
I want to do this and one where it's not
and have them add that as a template
into your email system,
but more importantly
into the inbox procedure.
And the more they add to it,
the more they create,
the more they respond
to people on your behalf.
You'll be able to add
all these
different nuances and scenarios
into your inbox procedure
so that they and future
people can come into your life,
support you in your inbox,
so that you have the folder structure,
you have the daily meeting for review
and the procedure to make that awesome.
The second pillar is the calendar, right?
My rule is nothing
goes in or out of my calendar
without my assistant being aware. Why?
Because they own my time.
When you can delegate
your schedule
to somebody else,
then you can be free of knowing
that you're doing
the most important thing right now
and not be distracted.
Not wondering
if something is going to get missed
or something needs to be scheduled.
You can just give that to somebody else
and they own it.
Now,
some of you guys
are going to be freaking out.
I know that when I was building
my company
Flowtown,
my co-founder Ethan and I,
we had a hard time to schedule things
because I was the bottleneck.
I was the one that, he'd
send me an email,
we need to schedule this meeting,
and I would be like,
I don't want to get back to him
right away. Right?
Or I don't know if I want to do that.
I'm trying to keep my Fridays open
so maybe I can go skiing,
or whatever it was.
And eventually
I brought in my executive assistant
and I realized that when it comes
a calendar,
these are the three key areas
you have to get right.
The first one is a perfect week.
You know, if you’re
gonna have somebody else
manage your calendar,
then you need to give them the
blocks of time
where you want to do certain things,
where you want to do
sales calls,
where you want to have team meetings,
where you want to go to the gym,
where you have family time,
where you have relationship
time with your partner,
where you decide
that you want to connect
with your friends.
And once you give them that scaffolding,
then they can easily review
the demands on your time, things
that you've asked them to add or emails
that come to to you to get scheduled
and they can put it in the right place
in the right frequency
so you don't feel overwhelmed.
You don't feel like
somebody is just taking stuff
and you've always got to be the filter.
So that's the first step.
The second thing is
you need to make sure
that you review the calendar with them,
and I call it calendar complete.
When I look at my calendar
on Sunday night,
I expect my calendar to be complete
from the previous Friday.
What that means is that everything
that I need,
every meeting that was scheduled,
all the details, the calendar is complete
so that now I can review all the projects
and the goals
that I've set for my own life
and add any open
spots, the projects
or the creative activities
that are going to help
move those forward.
And they could be phone calls, right?
But the calendar has to be complete
for the following week
so that you can add your things
and make sure that it's designed
so that the activities to achieve
your goals are in there.
The last thing is using your notes
for context.
So in every calendar invite
there's a description
section, the notes section.
I essentially ask my assistant that
whatever I need for that meeting,
if it's a link to a project file,
if it's a resource file,
if it's a booking confirmation,
if it's literally everything,
the context, if it's a podcast interview,
I want to know who I'm speaking with,
what are the questions
that they've sent ahead of time
for me to prep on.
That way,
I know that the calendars
got the context for me to move forward
so I can go from meeting
to meeting to meeting and quickly ramp up
before I have those conversations.
It saves me a lot of time.
Now I'm going to give you a tip.
If sometimes
other people schedule with you
where your assistant
might book
a Calendly link in their calendar
because you've requested the meeting,
then you can add a second
meeting called notes.
And in the description of that
which is coinciding right
along the original booking,
you can add all the information
for the context to that meeting.
So oftentimes
I'll ask somebody for a meeting,
but by the time I have
that conversation,
which could be two or three
weeks, I'll forget what it was about.
So my assistant will put notes in there
and tell me,
they'll literally copy
and paste the original email in there
so I can see that and go,
oh, there's notes for this conversation
and I'll read the email,
get the context, and be able
to show up with perfect information
so I can really deliver for that person.
Number three is travel.
When it comes to understanding where I am
and what I'm doing
and who I'm talking with,
there is a special person in my life
that needs to kind of know
what's going on to synchronize,
and that is my wife.
Now, she doesn't care who I meet with.
She doesn't want to be the last person
to know that I'm meeting with her sister
to help her with her business or her
best friend
to help her business
or another friend
to work on a charity thing.
Like she just wants to be informed.
And oftentimes
because my life is pretty chaotic,
I've got a lot of different
business interests
and I'm always moving forward
really fast.
I don't always know
and I don't manage my own calendar.
So as it pertains to travel,
booking flights,
seating arrangements, all that stuff,
we delegate that to other people.
But I had to create tools to allow me
to make sure that everything was in sync.
And I want to share those with you
because if you're struggling
right now
with having somebody else
book your travel and schedule
your hotels
and trying to get different
people, synchronized,
you're going to want
to implement these three.
The first one is the preloaded year,
and it's a template.
You can click the link below to download
my whole workbook for Buy Back Your Time.
And it's included.
Essentially, it's
a one page document
where I can look at my whole year
at a glance.
It's every day is a little dot
on this month
and there's 12 months on this page
and at a high level I use my iPad
and I highlight things and I circle them
and I put in where I'm going to be,
what I'm going to do,
if my wife's doing stuff.
If we’ve got our family vacations.
If it's my events that I do some some key
launches or whatever
it is, it's all the big stuff
on her part.
Our family, it's integrated
into one place
and any time we're talking to somebody
about like going on a trip
or speaking at an event,
I always pull up this document
so that I can see at a glance
my whole year in one spot
and it helps her as well
because I have it
synchronized on my phone.
Very simple.
She has a link to it.
She can go, oh, Dan’s
mountain biking this week.
Okay, we're going to do it
the following week
or we'd love to go to this thing
with a couple that we just met,
but we can't do it
because we're going to this other event.
So having a one pager
helps with everything.
The second thing is what we call
trip files.
So trip
files are essentially a Google doc
that's created any time we travel.
And what it has inside of it
is the accommodation,
the transportation,
the information
about where we're going,
what are we doing
while we're there, some high level agenda
and it's always linked up
in all the calendar invites
so that if my wife's like,
you know,
who's picking us up at the airport,
I won't know that
because my executive
assistant managed it.
But the information
is always in the trip file.
So what we have is an ongoing Google doc
with all of our different trips
and vacations and etc.
and we highlight the date
and we link it to the trip file
so that we always know where to go
find the one for our next trip
and it's added
in all of the calendar entries
and it's just a template
that my assistant copies and pastes,
puts all the information
that's in my inbox
into this one document
and my wife and I know where to go.
The third thing
I'm going to encourage
you to add
is a weekly sync
with your executive assistant
and your partner.
I have to do this because again,
I'm not aware of everything
that's going on in my life.
And part of that weekly
sync is really scanning forward,
what are we doing
the next two or three weeks?
What's going on with child care?
How are you going to go to that event?
And I'm doing this event
and having two busy entrepreneurs
in the same family.
It requires this level of coordination
and conversation,
because I'll tell you, when we didn't
have this weekly sync meeting.
We were always tripping over each other.
We'd always have moments
where some person was supposed
to be driving a kid
to some event,
and the other person's like,
well, I've got this talk
I got to give
or I'm going live,
or I'm shooting my podcast
or I'm creating content for YouTube.
Whatever was going on, it was always us
stepping over each other.
And we added this weekly sync
and it solved it all.
A very structured agenda.
We review the key items,
our travel, our weekend schedule
and anything that we need.
We can action it
off, get it, put it in there
and it is ready to go.
The fourth core pillar is communication.
If you've had an assistant in the past
and they didn't work out, it's
probably because you didn't
set up a rhythm to communicate
that allowed you to stay in sync
for the person to understand
your preferences or build context.
What I calll a context map
about your world to be able to respond
and move things forward
without your involvement.
So if you don't have these three things,
this is probably what's holding you back.
These are advanced strategies
that I know
if you have an assistant
today,
will unlock a new level of communication
to allow you
to get more freedom
and buy back that time.
Number one is
you have to have a daily sync
with your executive assistant to review
what's going on in your life.
You need to give them
the context, the conversations.
You have to explain to them
what that email means.
You have to explain
what that person means to you.
You have to tell them the story
of how decisions were made.
And essentially what happens is over time
they will understand
how you make decisions,
who is important to you,
how do they get work done
if they need to work with a legal team,
a finance team, your travel agent,
whoever it is, your estate lawyer,
these are all things that an assistant
can help broker communication
and move projects forward.
If you have a daily sync that unpacks
the nuances
for how you want them to interact
with those people.
The second is what I call
rerouting communication.
So oftentimes, I've got,
you know, hundreds of emails
coming at me.
I've got
dozens of messages
through social media platforms
coming to me every day.
And what I've learned, and it’s
one of my rules
that you will teach people
how to treat you.
And if somebody messages you over
SMS or WhatsApp
or Facebook to coordinate something
and you're like, man,
I really wish they would’ve
emailed me
so I could
have this interaction in my inbox
with my assistant.
I'm not the person
they should be asking directly
because I don't know,
but you keep replying.
You taught that person that that's
how they should communicate with you.
So what I do is
I reroute when somebody messages
me like my buddy did today,
and he's like,
hey man, I want you to speak
at our October event.
I can screenshot that reply all,
loop in my assistant
on text messages or Facebook or email
and just post that screenshot
and then leave my context
and then move it to email
with my assistant.
And she now knows to understand
what the request is, that it's
something I want to do
and that subtly cues the person to know,
oh yeah, Dan likes
when I email him, right?
And you could politely remind them
like, hey,
always better to email that way
it doesn't get stuck on me.
That's the reroute process.
The third is closing the loop
and this is something you need to ask
your assistant to do every day
and check that it gets done.
Because most entrepreneurs
have a hard time letting go
because they're worried
that something's going to get dropped.
And what happens is at night
you're laying in bed
and you're thinking about your day
and you're like,
oh jeez, did they reply to that?
I didn't see that email.
Oh, no.
What— did that get scheduled?
Or, oh my gosh,
I had that big opportunity.
I wonder if anybody got back to them.
Or, oh my gosh, I'm flying next week
and I don't think I booked
whatever it is.
Like those are the open loops
that will drive you crazy.
So what I asked my assistant to do is,
we have a private Slack
channel just for us
and she'll post closing the loop
at the end of her day
to write down all the things
that she got done or move forward.
It's not a micromanagement thing.
It's just a way for me to quickly
scan and go, oh, cool,
all these things are done.
Good.
I only honestly check it
when I have a question
because I don't want to bug her.
And then that way
she has almost like
a personal accountability process
to kind of work
through and get things done
and just kind of leave them
there as kind of FYIs.
So I never have to wake up in the middle
night and go like,
oh, did we ever book
my mountain bike
for that mountain bike trip?
And then go find out like,
oh, there it is.
Okay, it got done last week.
Perfect.
Closing the loop is a powerful strategy
to free up your mind
and trust your assistant
to keep moving things forward.
Now, if you want to take things
to another level,
be sure to pick up a copy of my book.
Buy Back
Your time, get unstuck, reclaim
your freedom and build your empire.
Because in my world,
an empire is not this big,
crazy, scary thing.
It's literally
a life of unlimited creation
you never have to retire from.
And that's what I want for you.
So if you're sick of building
the business that you grow to hate,
be sure to get a copy of my book
to unlock opportunities
in so many ways, to show up as a leader,
to really buy back your time
and build your empire.
As per usual,
I want to challenge you
to live a bigger life
and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next Monday.