Soon it was book launch time, and the task list doubled overnight: hiring a designer to get a personal website up and running starting a Google calendar to manage speaking engagements sending flowers and wine to people who’d done me favors.
She exhibited a zenlike calm while sorting through a series of irrational requests for documentation from our company’s truly horrendous Flexible Savings Account provider at the time.
When I lost my phone on a business trip, she spent the better part of the following day with the Washington DC taxicab commission trying to track it down (to no avail–there’s only so much a ZA can do making me more responsible with my belongings is not one of them). Sam cheerfully tackled some seriously annoying tasks. I am an obsessive paper list-maker (known around the office for an elaborate system of Post-It notes) the ability to start crossing some of these items off of my lists, one bold stroke of a pen at a time, gave me untold joy. Most of these tasks may only take only a few minutes, but when you add several dozen of them up, they consume hours.
Could she track down the sheet music? I asked her to take on a few things that had been languishing on my to-do list for months: update my frequent flier accounts start a database that tracked my favorite restaurants by neighborhood figure out how to get Showtime Anytime and HBO Go to work on my iPad. Could she sleuth around? I was about to take my final book-writing vacation in a country house that had a piano, and I wanted to learn how to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I waded in a little more deeply: I’d been trying to locate an exact replacement for my favorite Orla Keily wallet, but I couldn’t find the same version anywhere.
Sam was quick, easygoing, friendly, and, it turned out, a wizard with free shipping. I was dubious I would be able to create enough work to fill eight hours of time a month, but I tried, starting Sam off with some simple things-booking travel for a few business trips, ordering some items online. We set up a Skype call to talk about the ways we’d work together, and we were off.
I signed up for the most basic level of service-at the time, $199 per month for eight hours of assistance-and soon heard from Samantha Baker, a friendly recent college grad who lived in central Connecticut and was active in children’s community theater. Camille told me about Zirtual, which she had recently started using-she described it as a sort of Zipcar for personal assistants-and sent me an invitation to join. One day during a coffee meeting with Camille Preston, an executive coach I was interviewing for a story about productivity, our conversation turned to the importance of outsourcing and delegating. I always thought it was just as easier for me to make my own lunch reservations and book my own travel.īut my role expanded over the years, and then I wrote and published a book (author plug here: The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving), a massive side project with a million moving parts. A long time ago, in a resource-rich galaxy far, far away, Fortune had a four (four!) assistants who were shared among the editors. I’ve never had my own dedicated assistant before.