We All Need an Assistant 🙌🏻
Undeterred from my last experiment in employing a personal assistant, I have now tried it again! I just read a book called We Should All Be Millionaires, where author Rachel Rogers says that one part of getting rich is to ensure you inhabit the mindset of a millionaire. Which means learning to delegate and prioritize someone else doing the work you need taken off your plate. She suggests you immediately hire an assistant, starting with five hours per week. Well, that sounds good to me!
I really want a WIFE but if an assistant is as close as I’ll get then so be it… – Coach Mandy
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Find Your Assistant with Faye 💻
It can be intimidating to try to figure out how to hire a personal assistant, especially since they might be handling some sensitive things for you like doctor appointments, your schedule, and buying things for you. Faye, a personal assistant service located in Texas (with US-based assistants) approached me to give their service a shot for a month and see how I would fare, compared to my Yohana experience. I was happy to try them out for a spell and I’m here to share how it went. I started with a trial of the 8 hours a month service, which costs $299.
Meeting my Assistant, or Family Advisor 👯♀️
I had an intro call with my new assistant Jen, who has lots of experience in assisting others, as well as her own side gig as a financial coach. Pretty neat! I felt like we hit it off right off the bat as fempreneurs, and I found it interesting that she has made a career out of helping others with their odious tasks. Her point was “It’s so much fun to do it for others versus doing these things for myself.” I get it! She’s a smart woman who works with a few different clients at a time. The great thing is that her schedule is basically around the clock. Not in a 24/7 way but she gets to her tasks as it’s convenient in her schedule and also is able to text or email me in real time for any questions or updates. So I didn’t have to necessarily wait until Monday morning to hear back about a particular task.
Meal Planning 🍴
I think I learned a bit of a lesson from the last experiment in that I shouldn’t try to accomplish too much at once. I started by asking Jen to help me with meal planning, which she was excellent at. She used our dietary preferences, the meal planning software I already use, a list of what’s in the fridge, and our calendar of activities to tailor the meal plan and shopping list for what was needed for the week. That worked out well because I was able to export my shopping list directly from Plan to Eat to the grocery delivery service I use. Of course, if I asked her to, she could go ahead and order the groceries for me as well.
We tried some new recipes that worked out well, including a nice cauliflower steak with homemade chimichurri sauce from the herbs in my garden. The one pan pesto chicken and veggies was well-received too.
Plan to Eat – My Fave Meal Planning Software 🍽️
Incidentally, I am obsessed with Plan to Eat, which is a meal planning, recipe storage web-based tool and app. It lets me save my favorite recipes from the web, and to search and catalog them all in one place, plan out my meals, print out grocery lists, and load these directly to grocery ordering sites. If you try it out, friend me! My username is demandy. We can share recipes!
Contractors 🧰
Jen helpfully sorted through selection of contractors to help us find a new handyman for a specific project. Once I was able to share my schedule, she arranged the vendors to come give quotes. We managed to make a deep dent into the list of electricians, handymen and window covering vendors to help us get quotes from well-reviewed vendors in my area. She handled all the phone conversations with the vendors and appointment setting.
Calendar Management 🗓️
A wrinkle in the ability of any assistant to help with calendars is the need to access them. My husband wasn’t keen on handing over permissions for a stranger to see our family iCloud accounts, so for this experiment I used screenshots to share our availability. My work calendar also isn’t shareable because of corporate permissions, so these added challenges in allowing her to help me manage these. One of my major headaches is often juggling work, coaching and family calendars, so it was top of my list.
When using an assistant, after vetting, I would absolutely share all my calendars with my assistant so she could help us negotiate all of our carpooling responsibilities and appointments and make that seamless.
Family Activities 🧺
I asked Jen for some fun date night ideas locally, as well as a list of fun fall activities for the family to do together. She was able to come up with lists of ideas, in a thorough Google sheet with dates, times and links with details. Some of the events I knew about via Raleigh Today newsletter, and others were new to me.
My Best Tips for Working With an Assistant 📋
If you are a micro-managing optimizer like me (aka control freak) you will have to get into the mindset about being ready to let someone else help. Here are my tips and tricks that made the process easier for me:
- Think about what you really don’t like to do and unload those tasks first – especially if they are self-explanatory. Here are some sample tasks people start with – but you’ll find lots of ideas on Faye’s website.
- Use a system like Faye’s or your personal to-do list to track and see how the tasks are going. I used a kanban-style approach for “on deck” tasks, “in progress” tasks and “needs review” – those I need to provide some input on. I use a free tool called ToDoist and I found it worked well for sharing tasks with my assistant and my husband, since waiting for his input on things was often the holdup. I was able to rank the tasks in priority order, categorize them, and we could trade comments, add pictures and links, and generally keep up with each other.
- Get ahead of the appointment setting – it’s clearly the worst.
- Sometimes it was useful to just talk to my assistant and get her take on what’s easiest to hand over or to empty my brain of what’s weighing me down. This could be as quick as 5-10 minutes.
- Give yourself and your assistant time to get to know each other and you’ll develop trust in them to do different types of tasks.
- Rachel Rogers suggests in her book that one of the first things to tackle is something that drives you nuts. In our case it’s broken ceiling light in the master closet. That will be remedied by the end of the week! (and I’ll feel like a millionaire… or someone who no longer attempts to pick out matching clothes in the dark.)
Takeaway: 4 out of 5 ⭐️
Overall, I loved having the Faye service and assistant at my disposal. I think at my current level of needs I would probably use half the number of hours per month that I trialed, and work my way up to the full amount. I liked that the assistant is also able to help with small business tasks, because it was something Yohana was unwilling to do. But I was unable to really find tasks for my small business in the first month that didn’t require significant creative input, so it wasn’t a fit. My heaviest workload at this time in the season is content writing and planning, which I am pretty picky (and indecisive) about.
I could get used to having this level of help to give my brain more space to make more important decisions – reducing my decision fatigue.
Mental Load
I don’t think that getting a personal assistant is a total solve for mental load inequality. Your partner should be a full partner in the things you need to do for the household. That includes not just taking your orders, but taking full responsibility for their share of the responsibilities and planning. But having an extra set of virtual hands to help with a lot of that work can be a life-saver. If you were to pair up what you learned from Fair Play (see my review here) with incorporating some help into your lifestyle, this is where you can finally have a bit of a mental vacation! Just DON’T fill up every available minute with more work. Give yourself some leisure time.
Faye Pros:
- Dedicated single assistant who can work in ways that work best for you and learn your family.
- Assistant can communicate with me via email, text, or notifications within the app. She’s also willing to use the systems I already have set up.
- Great meal planning work.
- Personalized, local assistance.
- Vetted assistants who are already working with a limited caseload of clients, in a nearby or current time zone, in the US.
- You can jump on a call or Zoom with your assistant to quickly touch base.
- Area to upload secure files, pictures, and other documents.
Faye Cons:
- More expensive than Yohana.
- App not yet fully built out, and will need more visibility to tasks added.
- Works best when you already have systems that work for you and your household, but your assistant is a pro at this and can recommend ideas.
- No real-time status on tasks, unless you ask for it. (That way you aren’t paying for minutes just spent on tracking tasks vs. doing them.)
- Some onboarding required to figure out best way to work with your assistant.
- No in-person task help available, such as dog walking, laundry, but they can help you source help for these things.
More About Faye
Faye’s on a mission to help families make the most out of their time, connecting them to a skilled Family Advisor who tackles the tasks that drain them of time and energy. Family Advisors are background-checked and trained by Faye, then matched with a family for 1:1 support.
The company was started in 2023 by Emily King and Kip Kaehler, two seasoned executives with deep experience across consumer technology, product development, and AI. They met at Nextdoor, where they bonded over their entrepreneurial spirit and shared love of small businesses. Faye was born shortly after they became parents and saw firsthand how difficult it is to balance the demands of parenting while working intense jobs.
They’re passionate about helping parents lighten their invisible load, the hidden administrative work that comes with running a family, and finally placing a value on work that’s typically unpaid and underappreciated.
About Emily King, Faye’s CEO
Before launching Faye, Emily King was Vice President of Digital & Product at Blue Bottle Coffee. Prior to Blue Bottle, she led revenue operations at Nextdoor, merchandising at Good Eggs, and e-commerce at LivingSocial. Emily started her career at National Geographic and now lives in Ogden, Utah, with her husband, Patten, and their daughter, Vivian.
Other Resources for Mental Load and Boundaries
- Fair Play by Eve Rodsky and my review of her book
- Examples of Boundaries and How to Set Them Guilt-Free
- Learn How to Actually Say No and Mean It
- Mental Load, a feminist comic by artist Emma
- Find Your Unicorn Space, Eve Rodsky’s followup book
