How To Transform Your Life and Creativity With A Dedicated Assistant

My experience and learnings working with a dedicated EA/VA

Jun 13, 2023

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One of the things I am passionate about in this season of life is spending more time in my zone of genius. If you aren’t familiar with the zone of genius concept, it means doing only the things that you enjoy doing and uniquely excel at.

While I was running my tech company Troops, I found myself operating a lot in my zone of excellence instead of my zone of genius. This is very common amongst executives and founders and can end up quite draining.

The only way to move into your zone of genius is to become a master delegator. Otherwise, the things that need to get done that are outside your genius zone won’t get done. I’ve known for a long time that I need to hire a dedicated EA/VA, but have put it off for one reason or another. It wasn’t until I watched a video with the founder of AthenaGo in a private group chat that I finally got the kick in the butt I needed to get going.

This article shares my experience working with a dedicated EA/VA and AthenaGo. My hope is that it provides ideas and inspiration for more people to begin occupying greater time in their zone of genius. If you’re interested in working with Athena, you can check out my referral link here and get 1 month free to try it out.

My Outsourcing Background

I’ve been working with VAs and freelancers abroad since 2012. In all instances, I was working with them in an hourly capacity on various tasks.

What I learned is that there is a ceiling to how much leverage you can create with hourly assistants because the person you’re working with doesn’t really ever learn your preferences. In order to really create leverage, you need someone to eventually learn how you work to increasingly replace you which requires lots of investment and a long relationship.

I learned that there is a continuum of delegation and that I had been operating on one of the bottom rungs. Here’s their framework for the 5 levels of delegation:

Task-oriented delegation - delegating individual tasks, or steps like in the case of planning parties, events, or once-occurring instances.
Project-oriented delegation - comprises multiple individual tasks and requires more planning for outline steps and milestones. These take longer and can also recur like inbox or calendar sweeps, and website optimization.
Process-oriented delegation - requires you to effectively pass your methodology or process and have them execute the entire process. This requires you to communicate it to your EA so they can understand the why behind how you do a task and how you think.
Goal-oriented delegation - at the expert level, developed over years of delegation, this is the point wherein the EA knows you so much that they can find any additional factors you may be missing as aligned with your goals. They’re no longer operating in the short-term but are able to anticipate tasks proactively ahead of time solely by basing on their perception of your goals honed through time.
Clairvoyant delegation - the nirvana of delegation, at this level, you have a group of EAs and a chief of staff all synergizing with your goal in mind, leaving you sufficient headroom to focus on your zone of genius. It isn’t a continuous state but when it is observed, it heaves plenty of weight based on a goal-oriented direction utilizing a group of proficient EAs.

I had really only been operating at the task level. In order to teach the levels of goal-oriented and beyond, I needed to commit to working with someone full-time and build my delegation musculature. It was the only way I was going to have someone learn my preferences and systems so that I could truly be living in my zone of genius.

I started working with my Athena EA on March 9th. I chose Athena because I was so impressed by Jonathan and wanted access to their playbooks and onboarding. They also had an incredibly rigorous vetting process to find world-class people.

For the first 30 days, we met daily for 30 minutes so that there was a tight feedback loop on what I wanted them to accomplish and the work output. The daily meeting was also a forcing function for me to be creating systems for everything. This sounds laborious, but in most cases, all I was doing was creating videos of me doing the tasks and then sharing them with a notion database.

My goal in working with the EA/VA was to offload everything that wasn’t related to me actually creating content and exploring ideas which are things I deeply enjoy. My dream situation was to just write in google docs and show up to podcasts and everything else would be handled from production and posting to maximizing the content across various social media platforms.

What My EA Helps Me With

I’m happy to say I’ve made great strides. Here’s a list of things my EA/VA has helped me with related to Substack and audience building:

Turning a google doc into a fully produced post
Editing/proof-reading blog posts
All post-production processes for podcasts
- Creating youtube episodes and optimizing videos
- Designing artwork for Spotify / iTunes
- Syndicating the podcast across all platforms
Posting repurposed content on short-form content platforms like Twitter and Substack notes (I do the actual writing in bulk sprints)
Documenting analytics to find out what worked well and where we should be focusing
Keeping weekly, and monthly analytics on all goals and performance
Finding and reaching out to fellow writers on Substack in similar niches to build relationships
Hiring freelancers for video editing, thumbnail design, youtube shorts, and ghostwriting
Keeping track of the responses on blog posts and Substack notes. Documenting replies and new posts that Scott needs to respond to in a daily engagement brief
Creating a website and content production for my intuition course
Executing various marketing campaigns and experiments, and then measuring them

What’s awesome is I have built systems around all these things. Something I’ve considered is building out a service so that other people can just have outsourced help + my systems in a box for their own audience. If that’s interesting, let me know.

In addition to all the actual tasks, my EA/VA also helps me tremendously with all these personal admin tasks that take away from my ability to create and spend time with people I enjoy. Here are some of the things they help with there.

Personal admin:

Replying/sending emails for certain tasks
Unsubscribe/skip emails
Calling/emailing and setting up appts (doctors, mechanics, handymen, repairmen)
Research (hotel, car rental, possible, possible podcast guests, items to buy)
Documenting quick capture notes in Roam database
Setting up appts on google calendar
Documenting tasks that Scott did for the week for an energy audit process
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I’m sure there are things I am missing, but you can see how much time is freed up. It’s awesome to go through your day feeling like you have a co-pilot there for anything you need that comes up.

Biggest Learnings To Make This Successful

Here are some of my biggest learnings of the process:

There’s so much more leverage created when you hire a dedicated person vs. part-time.
Take videos of everything and voiceovers of your thinking so that they can learn how you think and start to make decisions on your behalf
Do time tracking in the beginning so that you can coach them on whether something needs to be perfect or good enough.
Give feedback on improvements, but also things you really like
The daily meeting for the first 30 days is essential. After this, you can move to a weekly cadence and more asynchronous daily task
The more access you give, the more leverage you get. I give my EA/VA access to my email, calendar, and all services I use. The only thing I don’t give them access to is my banking stuff
Every little click or task adds up. If I’m going to do something a lot even if it seems small, I build a process around it. For example, I don’t unsubscribe from emails. I just mark all things I want to unsubscribe from and then they go in and do the whole click-through. It’s very much death by 1,000 cuts otherwise
ChatGPT is still not there from a content repurposing perspective. If you want to do things like turn a blog post into tweets or a video into shorts, you need to do it yourself or hire a ghostwriter or freelancer to get quality that is actually good
Share feedback over video on everything and have the feedback aggregated in your playbook/task database for future reference and new hires. You need to remove dependency on one person’s knowledge transfer

Here are some learnings from my EA/VA:

Executing quickly > 100% perfect. The biggest lesson I learned from Scott, is “Perfection is the enemy of good” (basically, striving to perfect something may prevent you from doing good work on most things
Don’t be afraid to ask questions, help or support
Never assume, always seek to clarify things

So far this has been one of the best investments I’ve made in myself. Not only because I am able to do more of what I love and feel like service to the world, but also because I am building my delegation muscle. To really have the impact I want to have, this feels very important to me regardless of what I want to do.

I still have many systems I want to build out and also specialists I want to find to help me with the content stuff so that the ideas I care about can reach the people it may help.

I’ll continue to share updates on my delegation journey here and if you’re interested in working with Athena and getting a free month + skipping their waitlist, you can use my referral code here.

If you liked reading this, feel free to click the 🔄 or ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏

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