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.
