Why are personal assistants at least okay at everything?
As someone that likes to do everything myself and rarely says no, I've had a pretty wide range of responsibilities over my (fairly short) lifetime. As a personal assistant, I get asked to do kind of a lot of different tasks. This ranges from babysitting to making business cards to managing databases to baking to event planning. So it's no wonder why personal assistants are at least capable of doing pretty much anything - even if we have to figure it out along the way.
The main reason personal assistant can kind of figure out how to do everything is because it is literally our job to give a crap. That's the whole job. Giving a crap. So not only do most PA's not say "no", but also strive to do the most beautiful job possible. Google is our bff.
A quick example:
A couple of weeks ago, I was helping my lovely boss throw a private tour party to find buyers for a $2.5million estate. So, obviously I did something a little better than an open house flyer. I created an entire open house package complete with in-depth descriptions of each of the structures on the estate, the grounds, and its rich history of charity. Then I also coordinated the real estate agents that would help give tours, created invitations, sent them out, had them bounce back because there were to many invitees, scrapped that, created an Evite, and kept track of a very unstable guest list. The day of the event, I created all of the signage, took pictures for social media, set up the tables, arranged the flowers so that there would be consistent decor throughout, and checked in each guest so I could provide analytics on buyers attended versus onlookers. There was an awful lot going on!
Luckily, I know florists and have worked event venues and my business mostly deals with creating open house packages, so I kind of knew what I was doing. But! a lot had to be figured out. For instance, I now know that you are only allowed to send a certain number of emails a day from a gmail account, or they will think you are a spambot. Also, Google Groups is not helpful for more than ten people.
And that's the beauty of being a personal assistant - you get to figure out how to do pretty much everything and it's basically just a big set of Ikea instructions in a language you don't speak. But that's what makes it interesting... Figuring it all out and then mastering it.
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If you have any thoughts or feedback or extra knowledge, share it in the comments. The whole point of this blog is to help each other figure it all out!
