The best advice I ever got as a young CEO:
Always have an executive assistant.
Not rocket-surgery for sure...
But I’m stunned at the number of business owners I know who don’t have an assistant.
But this newsletter isn’t about getting an assistant.
It’s about the 1999 workflow I just resurrected that makes working with an EA 100x more effective.
When I became the CEO of my first business, I was 28.
New baby.
And within 3 years, I was the President of the state trade association, headed the industry’s lobbying efforts, had baby #2, and went from a single-office company to a 3-office company.
I was on the road... a lot.
And we made it work with what I called “the packet.”
Every morning, Sarah, my EA would put together “the packet”...
A stack of paper that I needed to read, decide on, respond to, sign... plus notes on meetings for the day.
All in a folder.
Everything in the packet had a note attached with what I needed to know about it (context) and what I needed to do with it.
If I was going to be on the road, I got the packet on the way out of the office.
I’d go through it all on the plane (usually in 30 minutes or less).
When I landed at one of our other offices, the receptionist there took the completed packet and sent it back (fax or FedEx).
It was a liberating system.
I didn’t suffer death by a thousand cuts all day.
They accumulated, got organized, filtered, and handed to me with context.
I was free to focus and be present all day.
Then email arrived...
And the system started to break down.
Context was increasingly splintered and invisible to the EA.
2005 was the last time the system really worked well.
In 2010, when I started this firm, I made my first hire: an EA.
She was amazing... but lived in a different city.
For the last 16 years, I’ve tried to get something that worked as well as “the packet”...
And I’ve failed again and again.
I even tried the “morning brief” AI prompts floating around the Internet.
They kind of worked, but were never complete.
There was always a blind spot... a tool or context source they couldn’t quite see.
And the review “interface” inside a chat was honestly not suitable for real executive work.
So I passed on them until now...
For the last two weeks, I’ve been waking up to the digital version of “the packet”.
What makes it work is partly AI, but more importantly, how it’s delivered.
And this is what I want you to take away from this...
The leap in peace, focus, and speed lies in the “interface.”
Grab my complete template and AI prompt to create this system for yourself…