We need more PAs

When I joined my current company, I was assigned a personal assistant.

I had never worked with a PA before. And frankly, I found the idea antiquated. Didn’t we throw out PAs with the fax machines? Hadn’t these people heard of Calendly?

But as the weeks passed and I fell into a rhythm with my new PA, I got it. And I’m now a total convert.

In fact, it’s crazy we don’t have ten times as many PAs.

A good PA can manage the diaries of 4 or 5 people. In doing so, they free those people to do what they were hired for.

PAs are drawn to the role because they thrive on tasks requiring organisation and attention to detail. These are exactly the things that the rest of us are happy to see the back of.

Tools like Calendly can’t solve the biggest headaches – scheduling meetings when everyone is unavailable. That’s where the horse-trading skills of PAs come to the fore.

And no travel system matches a real human getting things scheduled according to pre-agreed preferences.

Call me antiquated, but I feel this is something AI and software can never truly replace. Long live the PA!