How Your Executive Assistant Can Help You Reach Your Goals
We all know that setting goals is much easier than actually achieving them. This can happen for a variety of reasons: a lack of time, unrealistic or misaligned goal setting, or a lack of accountability. But what if you had a partner at every step of the way who helped you become a goal-achiever? A virtual assistant can be this person.
Why you can lean on your executive assistant to leverage your goals:
An executive assistant is uniquely equipped to help you set, track, and achieve your goals. Initially, as you set your goals, your EA is the perfect sounding board: They know your daily routine and likely also know your frustrations when the priorities are never quite prioritized. As a partner, an assistant can come alongside you and offer insights that you might otherwise miss. It’s also great to have an EA who manages up; that means if you’re sharing your goals with your assistant and they notice that the goals don’t seem to match up with where your energies and focus have been, they’ll tell you:
“During our check-ins, you always express the desire for more time not in meetings. But one of your goals is to have more weekly touchpoints with each of your direct reports throughout the week–let’s brainstorm how we can make this happen without you adding additional meetings to your schedule.”
When you have a collaborative partnership with your virtual assistant, you have an ally who is invested in helping you set goals that will maximize your output and increase your sense of accomplishment.
Additionally, an assistant serves as a great accountability partner. Once you have developed your list of goals, consider what success looks like and how it will be measured. Creating short-term metrics to help you see incremental progress will feel more rewarding than the more long-term checkmark once the goal is achieved.
Your EA can include an update on these goals as a part of your weekly check-ins. Consider kicking off those calls with a quick overview of your goal progress. Starting your call in this way will help keep the long term goals top of mind as you make decisions about your week: as you consider whether you should add that additional meeting with the marketing department, your virtual assistant can remind you that it would be at the expense of more time in deep work, which is on your list of long-term goals.
Ask your Executive Assistant to use Work Block planning:
Every busy executive knows that protected work blocks are essential in a weekly schedule and that without them, personal goals are easily overwhelmed by team goals. Your virtual assistant serves as the gatekeeper of your time and when they are in alignment with you on your long term goals, they can better serve in this role.
Your assistant can come alongside you and help you break down your goals into measurable and manageable time blocks. Once your list of goals is formalized, consider asking your assistant to do a calendar/schedule audit to ensure that your schedule is set up such that achieving your goals is attainable. If it’s not, consider your priorities: are you more committed to your current weekly schedule, or the list of goals that you set for yourself? Often meetings on a busy executive’s calendar are a result of the impulse we all feel to say “yes” when we should be saying “no.” But often these confirmations are to the benefit of others’ goals, instead of your own.
If you have deliberately and intentionally put together a list of goals that you feel good about, you should trust that list and feel confident that making time for them should be a priority. Your assistant can help you identify events on your calendar that don’t really need to be there and add the daily, weekly, and monthly blocks that you need to accomplish your goals. Additionally, your assistant can help keep you accountable for sticking to those blocks instead of scheduling over them. If your assistant has been a thought partner with you throughout your goal-creating process, they will feel invested in seeing you achieve them.
Have you been dreading setting goals for yourself because you just don’t know where to start? Or perhaps you have created a list of goals more times than you can count, but have never felt the satisfaction of achieving them. A virtual assistant who is a collaborative partner can help you.
33Vincent is a community of high-caliber, remote Executive Assistants offering flexible support to entrepreneurs, executives, and leadership teams. 33Vincent’s service is designed for high-performing leaders who are tired of trying to "do it all,” and provides outstanding EA support without the headaches of hiring. 33Vincent EAs are more than task-takers—they proactively make sense of chaos in a fast-changing environment. We elevate your impact and help you invest your time in what matters most. Contact our team to share your support needs so together we can discover if 33Vincent is a good fit for you.
33Vincent has many other resources to help you maximize your time and communication with your executive assistant.
