Discover the Surprising Way a Virtual Assistant Can Skyrocket Your Career!

Things are cluttering my brain. There are the work things (people to call, email, meet, things to read and write, expenses), then there are the life things. Gifts and school uniform to buy, summer trips and accommodation to book, hospital appointments and after-school clubs to organize. Many of the tasks on my personal to-do list are hardly exhausting but cumulatively haunt my mind, sometimes disturbing my nights.

So when I was offered a month with a remote personal assistant to tackle my tasks, I was grateful that I said yes. Unlike an executive assistant, who keeps work journals, organizes meetings and travel, my white knight is Laura-Faye Trainor, a remote PA who will help smooth my private life. Kath Clarke, the founder of BlackBx, which employs Trainor, has big claims for the service. Users will have more free time and greater gender equality at home, freeing women from their domestic burden and boosting their careers.

I was undecided on my first call. Could I really ask Trainor to write down the 11 and under soccer games in my diary, find a gift, and book tickets to a Beatles tour? Yes, he urged. He felt uncomfortable. But very quickly, he felt damn bright. He had outsourced the tedium.

Clarke started BlckBx in the pandemic when she saw women struggling to keep up with work and home life with school closures. The service was also born out of Clarke’s own frustrations. Friends of hers thought the mother of three, who worked for herself as a consultant with flexible hours, was living the dream. Instead, she was constantly “googling time management, [wondering] What am I doing wrong.” She noticed that women who seemed to have their lives in order had better focus not just support. “It’s a secret that all these successful people have help.”

So he created a service that tackles “the really boring stuff, outsourcing for family management,” aimed at employers. She hopes they will offer a virtual PA as an employee benefit.

The sweet spot, Clarke said, is the daily to-do list, “Then there’s Red Nose Day, World Book Day. Christmas plays, fundraisers, and then all the Christmas shopping.” She said her remote personal assistants — 80 percent of whom are employees — save a family 10 to 30 hours a month, on tasks ranging from vacation ideas to booking an online store.

Demand for remote PAs has increased post-pandemic, says Melissa Smith, founder of The Personal Virtual Assistant service. “She gave people time to reflect. . . People would put aside their weekends and their nights [to do life admin]. They thought, ‘Why do I need to do that?’”

The days of asking a workplace PA to buy a gift for a spouse (or lover) belong to the martini-drenched days of the Mad Men era. Chloe Cotty, a virtual personal assistant based in Devon, previously worked as a personal assistant for a large company, but interrupted her career to have children. Many of her clients have an executive assistant in the office, but it’s not her job to do life management: “If my boss had asked me to book the dentist, it wouldn’t have been right.” She also enjoys variety. “You’re not sitting around making bills all day.”

Virtual PAs are an increasingly popular employee benefit, says Barnaby Lashbrooke, founder and CEO of virtual PA company Time Etc, for employers looking for ways to “maximize staff productivity and reduce stress.” “People want to enjoy their free time. In addition, the urgent administration of life tends to creep into working hours”.

Adam Hearne is the CEO and co-founder of Carbon Chain, a platform that allows companies to track emissions from their supply chain, and recently offered the service to employees because “people are overwhelmed with managing their personal lives”.

But the startup also wants employees to look for more sustainable products to reduce their carbon footprint. This can take more time on top of family and work demands, so offering a virtual PA is “one way to help staff think about lower carbon options.”

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Investigation suggests that a more equitable distribution of unpaid care and domestic work would contribute to greater equality in overall employment rates, different types of employment and the number of hours worked. But Abby Davisson, co-author of money and loveHe pointed out that many more tasks are primarily mental, and invisible, rather than physical work.

Sometimes referred to as brain load, “they still take up time and brain space,” he said, which is where a virtual PA can really help.

Hearne and his partner, for example, now centralize to-do lists, popping up tasks like routine dentistry or easily forgotten doctor appointments. “Even things out,” she says, referring to the couple’s division of duties.

Christian Edelmann, managing partner and co-head of Europe at Oliver Wyman, is paying for a PA himself. (The consultancy offers BlackBx assistants as a benefit to new parents and those experiencing stressful times in their personal lives, such as divorce.) “My wife also works full time,” says Edelmann. “She has made us aware that we want to share tasks 50/50. It is usually women who assume it”.

The same goes for Davisson, who has young children and has recently launched a business, as has her husband. “As a result, we’ve both been able to devote more mental space to our professional endeavors, and we’ve been able to be more present when we’re with our children. The investment we’ve made seems worthwhile, and we see it for exactly that: an investment in our careers and our lives, not just an expense.”

Ironically, Trainor has helped me get my free time back because she left her previous career as a lawyer, when the workload swamped her personal life. She is able to “empathize” with clients about a poor work-life balance. There are some overlaps between the law and being a PA, mainly the fast pace when clients need something urgently.

Many traditional secretarial tasks, such as dictation, have been replaced by technology. With the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence, will virtual PAs still require human participation? Clarke says they already use ChatGPT to automate some jobs. “AI technology can power repetitive, recurring and predictable administrative tasks [such as sourcing gifts while the] auxiliary cherry picks. . . They know you inside out and can provide you with personalized service.”

BlackBx is building an AI platform to help attendees and improve and refine services. Clarke believes that there will always be a demand for real people. “Everyone has empathy. You can’t replace that.”

What impressed me about my month with Trainor was that a service that seemed like a luxury quickly became a right. Trainor became a status symbol when, horribly, my family started mentioning “your PA” as much as possible at social gatherings.

I soon developed a learned helplessness, particularly pronounced after we said goodbye to Trainor. Plotting a train trip through France and several stopovers, I mourned the loss. It felt too much on my own.

However, I can’t argue that she recalibrated my relationship with my partner, since the housework is split pretty evenly. But my mental load was lighter, knowing that things were being done without my input. I mean I used that extra time to focus on my work, but I suspect I used it to watch more TV.

The FT paid for a month of trial of BlckBx