[rexreed]

The secret is automation that does things while you're doing other things. Parallel not series. I've even seen people secretly hire foreign virtual assistants to do their low value tasks for pennies while the employee focuses on the higher value tasks.

[zero-sharp]

So I'm assuming that your comment is in reference to me casting doubt on the usefulness of automation in meetings, emails, and other forms of communication.

The point is that there's plenty of high level, technical, and nuanced communication that can only happen between experts. The expertise isn't documented anywhere (unless you count previous email exchanges), it's not somehow represented in a database, and often times decisions are highly specific to one particular situation. Asking a non expert to fulfill this role is difficult enough. I'm not convinced that this is a problem solved by technology.

[ghaff]

I'm honestly not sure what I would use an admin for if you gave me one. A lot of what an executive admin does is dealing with the calendars of people who have far more demands on their time than they have time. And getting the status on various projects from people. Generally speaking, other than travel sometimes, I don't really have a lot of "Make it So!" tasks that I could delegate to an admin/assistant.

There are things that I'm not good at that I'm better off not spending time hacking at to do a mediocre job--e.g. web stuff generally or design--but that's really something else.