(upbeat music) - I think everyone should have a part-time personal assistant. And that's an absolutely life-changing productivity hack. - So I do not have one, and I've struggled in the past. And like five years ago, I tried. What kinds of things do you have this person do? And do you ever get too caught up in, I wanna make sure that they're doing them the exact way I would do them, and then it ends up taking more time?

- Basically, everything that I don't wanna do myself. So a lot of emails, so my assistant, Dan, is remote, but he's based in the UK, so we've met in real life, which I think is really useful. A lot of people try and hire a VA in the Philippines for $5 an hour, and then they're surprised when it doesn't work.

But if you have the ability to hire someone that you can potentially work with in real life some of the time, or at least meet in person, it's just really nice. But anyway, Dan basically goes through all my emails, he deals with all my scheduling, things like scheduling this podcast, for example, I have basically outsourced the management of my calendar to Dan, so he deals with it.

And it means that as emails come in and stuff, I'm actually not the first person to see an email. I'll see the superhuman notification on my phone, and if it's something really interesting or really urgent, then I'll reply to it there and then. So yes, scheduling and emails is a big one.

But just beyond that, there's a lot of random admin tasks in life. Like for example, I knew I wanted to get a cleaner for the house, kind of a bit of a first world problem. But I don't want to be the one calling up random cleaning agencies in London and trying to find a cleaner who can be there at the same time that I want and do some of the ironing and change the sheets.

So I just said, "Hey, Dan, can you find me a cleaner for the house?" Basically, if they can come in on a weekday morning and do all the things including ironing, that's what I want. And he was like, "Cool, I'll call around, I'll ring a few agencies." And he found someone and now we've got a cleaner.

Things like, I remember when I first got an assistant, I was just sort of like hanging around to be like, "Huh, what are all the things I could delegate?" I was like, you know, I wanted to learn how to play the ukulele. I said, her name was Elizabeth at the time.

I said, "Hey, Elizabeth, can you find me a ukulele for under like 200 pounds and just find some reviews and just order it?" And she was like, "Cool." The next day, a ukulele arrived at my house. And it's like, I'd been procrastinating from again, playing the ukulele for like two years, because all it would have taken was for me to sit down and spend five minutes searching on the internet for what's the best ukulele for a certain budget.

But it's in a way so much easier to be able to say that to an assistant or to a voice note that you can then send to an assistant. Right now, Dan is hunting for a new property that we're moving into. We're trying to move to studio spaces, ringing up estate agents and dealing with like booking viewings and arranging viewings.

Dan is doing all of that. And he's just getting them to send us WhatsApp videos so that I can spend my time doing things that I actually want to be doing, like talking to you on this podcast or like making videos or like writing or things other than dealing with the hours and hours of admin it takes to book viewings for a property in a market where properties are moving fast.

So almost anything within reason can be outsourced to an assistant. - Have you done a blog post or a video on how to use an assistant and all the tasks you could use for them? - No, we're working on it. I have this course idea in my mind that we've sort of fleshed out.

It's gonna be called something like the life-changing magic of a personal assistant. And I wanna make videos and blog posts and tweets and all of this stuff about it at some point soon. - And for someone who hasn't gone down the path of how much this could cost, like you mentioned, you could go to the Philippines, it's super cheap, you don't need someone full-time, right?

This is something you can kind of start at a pretty low cost and add a lot of scale. - Yeah, I've been telling all my friends, four hours a week will completely change your life. And if you can find someone for like, someone local here in the UK, 15 pounds an hour.

So that's like $20 an hour for four hours. That's like $80 a week. And people are always like, "Oh, that's like $320 a month. "That's so expensive." And I ask, "Okay, this is not for students who are broke. "It's for people who have real jobs." It's like, A, what's your actual hourly rate?

Like you're doing the whole Naval thing of what is your actual hourly rate? Should you really be the one to do this thing that you don't wanna do? But also the other way of thinking of it is like, if you could free up four hours of your time to, for example, spend with your family, how much would that be worth to you over the long term?

It's like, okay, probably worth more than $20, right? So now that it gives you an idea of how much it would potentially be worth hiring an assistant for. I'm so bullish on the part-time personal assistant thing. I think it's great. - I got this email from someone this morning.

I'm gonna butcher the name, but Lee Aaron. And they were like, "Hey, can you do an episode "on family life? "I know you've talked about it a little, "but like, I have no time. "Like, how do I maximize my time?" So this is a great example to Lee Aaron, who wrote in something to consider to buy back some time.

And I'm a big fan of buying time. Like, to the extent that you can find a person to do a thing that you don't wanna do, or not that you don't wanna do. I used to love cooking. And before kids, cooking was like in lieu of sitting on the couch doing nothing.

And that trade-off was good. Now cooking might be in lieu of spending time with your kids or working or doing these other things 'cause you just have less time. And so, you know, it's not that I don't like it. It's that I now have different priorities because there are more things on my plate.

And so whatever's at the bottom of that list, I find that we often are doing those things, even though we might not actually prioritize them because they have to happen. But to the extent you can hire someone to cook or to clean or to do whatever task it is on your list, it sounds like I need to test out one of these VA services or find someone.

I keep procrastinating. I keep procrastinating. I gotta get something very clear of what I'm gonna do next and get it in motion.