Hiring a Personal Assistant?
Part 1 of 3
Consider Doing a Self-Inventory
The role of the Personal Assistant can be one of the most significant and positive in your household.
Years of experience have taught me that the key to a successful placement is to take time at the very start of the search to ask clients to reflect on their personal hopes, needs, and expectations.
It requires a bit of a self-audit, which can be enlightening and satisfying exercise!
To begin, I ask clients to answer these questions for themselves:
- What are your own goals and dreams right now?
- What is weighing you down? Which duties and responsibilities are eating up your time or creating obstacles to doing what it is you really want?
- What kind of life would be made possible with the addition of this staff person?
- Bottom line: What aspects of running your home are preventing you from ENJOYING the home?
To determine that answer, it’s worth taking a hard look at this next question:
- What is the scope of what you personally need to manage?
For example:
- Are you juggling staff schedules to respond to your travel, guest plans, school, and business calendars?
- Are you very active with gifts and acknowledgments on birthdays, important milestones, and happenings in the lives of the important people in your world?
- Are you managing an overwhelming amount of emails?
- Are you hoping to engage more fully with social media, such as posting more regularly to Instagram and Facebook?
- Are you noticing needed repairs, scheduling service calls, and following up with approvals and payments?
- Are you reviewing contracts and reconciling credit cards?
- Are you creating To Do and Buy lists to keep the house well-provisioned and running smoothly?
Now, a final set of considerations: here is where we create the Venn Diagram of factual and emotional needs.
- Which of those tasks are actually enjoyable or meaningful to you?
- Will you want to cede complete responsibility or collaborate on some of those?
- Which are personal /private and require doing yourself?
- Which are too complex to delegate?
The likelihood of a successful placement is often baked-in into these very preliminary steps. We are already way ahead of the game if we can look squarely at these questions.
Our goal at Meadow Lane is to lighten your load and clear a pathway forward for our clients to give more focus to their own goals and dreams. That’s an outcome we can all relate to!