Working with a Personal Assistant

In times past having a personal assistant was reserved for the rich and famous. Nowadays having a personal assistant is much more common and often occurs in households where both spouses are working long hours at demanding jobs. For example, if you are an attorney charging $600 an hour, your time is too valuable to be spent doing chores. Outsourcing them to an assistant makes sense.

And the amount of things a personal assistant can do is wide: grocery shopping; bill paying; correspondence; email; errands; picking up children from school; keeping the family calendar; event planning; buying gifts;  sending holiday cards; scheduling and supervising home repairs and deliveries; travel planning; processing expense reports, and many other things.

In my years of placing assistants with clients, many clients have voiced concern over asking an individual with a degree from a good school to go to the shoemaker for them. Personal assistants actually love what they do. These individuals like the varied nature of the work and they find satisfaction in checking things off their daily to-do list. So it doesn’t matter if they are creating complicated travel itineraries, doing research or picking up those shoes. To an experienced assistant it is all part of the job. I’ve interviewed a lot of personal assistants and the majority of them genuinely enjoy making their principal’s lives easier. They get satisfaction from it. Many work with the same client for years and become part of the family.

If you have a job with long hours, having an assistant will improve the quality of your life. The time you do have off can be spent doing things other than catching up on chores. And leading an organized life day in and day out can be life changing. I know an assistant who is such a great organizer that her client’s bathroom looks like one in the Ritz Carlton. Coming home to everything in its place and labeled frees one up to function better in life and in business.