Your new virtual EA is guessing
A free template for handing over the context a remote executive assistant actually needs
You have hired a virtual executive assistant, or you are on the verge of hiring one. Either way, here is how week one usually goes.
They are capable, they are experienced, they came recommended. Monday morning a message arrives. It is a reasonable question, something like “do you want me to decline this or check with you first?” You answer it. Ten minutes later, another one. By Wednesday you have answered maybe thirty questions, and somewhere in the back of your mind a small ugly thought has formed: this is taking longer than just doing it myself.
That thought is the reason a lot of founders quietly decide delegation does not work for them. And it is wrong, but it is wrong for a reason worth understanding.
The problem is not the person
Your EA is not slow. They are guessing.
Everything they need in order to be useful is currently stored in one place, and that place is your head. Which meetings you will always take. Which vendor you have history with. That you go quiet when you are thinking and it does not mean anything is wrong. That travel under five hundred dollars is fine to book without asking, but moving an external meeting is absolutely not. None of that is written down anywhere, because you have never needed to write it down. You just knew it.
So a competent person sits down in front of your business with none of the operating context and does the only thing available to them. They ask. Or worse, they guess, get it wrong, and now you are both correcting rather than building.
The questions are not a sign the hire was a mistake. They are the sound of context being transferred one drip at a time, in the least efficient format available, in the middle of your workday.
Nothing transfers by accident when you are remote
In an office, a fair amount of this leaks out on its own. Someone sitting fifteen feet away picks up an enormous amount just by being there. They hear the tone of your phone calls. They notice you are visibly fried on Thursday afternoons and stop bringing you decisions then. They watch you wave off one visitor and light up at another, and quietly file both away. Nobody taught them any of it.
Working remotely, none of that happens. There is no ambient anything. Your virtual EA sees exactly what you deliberately send them and not one thing more. A short message can read as curt when it was just short. Silence can read as displeasure when it was a meeting running long. The whole invisible layer that would have been absorbed in a month of sharing a room has to be either written down or discovered the hard way.
This is not an argument against working with a remote EA. We are a fully remote company and so is nearly every client we work with, and it works beautifully. It is an argument for being deliberate about the thing an office would have done for you by accident.
This is a build task, not admin
We talk a lot about the difference between maintaining work and building work. Maintaining is the tide, the stuff that comes back no matter how well you did it yesterday. Building is the thing you do once that changes the shape of everything after it.
Answering your EA’s questions one by one, forever, is maintaining. Writing the answers down once is building.
It is a couple of hours. Maybe less. And it permanently removes an entire category of friction from the relationship, which is exactly the trade you are supposed to be making when you bring someone on in the first place.
So we made the document.
What is in it
We use a version of this with new Nacho clients, and it has worked well enough that we have put it on the site for anyone who wants it, client or not. It is called Working With Me, it is free, and it is twelve sections you fill in yourself and hand to your EA before your first real conversation.
The basics. What you are actually responsible for, your working hours, your time zone, when you are offline, the times that are permanently protected because of the school run or a standing dinner. Time zone matters more than people expect. A two or three hour gap between you and your EA is completely workable, and it is only a problem when nobody says it out loud and one of you starts wondering why messages sit unanswered until eleven. There is also space for what is coming in the next sixty days that your EA will get pulled into, because nothing derails a first month like a board meeting nobody flagged.
Reaching me. A simple grid: use this channel for urgent, this one for needs-an-answer-today, this one for everything else, and here is how fast you can expect me to reply. Remotely, this is not a nicety. Nobody can walk over to your desk and read whether now is a good moment, so the channel has to carry that information instead. Two minutes to fill in, and it prevents the specific misery of an urgent thing sitting in an inbox you check twice a week.
Systems and access. One row per tool: what you need help with, what level of access they get, who sets it up, by when. When your working relationship is entirely digital, this table more or less is the working relationship, and every row still marked “pending” is a row where your EA cannot help you yet. There is an explicit option to write “later” for anything you are not ready to hand over, because “later” is a real answer and a much kinder one than silence. There is also a line for what they should not have access to, and why. Naming that plainly beats leaving someone to work out the boundary by bumping into it.
How I like information. Headline first or full context. One end-of-day summary or ongoing pings. Recommendation or options. What you want to hear about even when it is small, and what you never need to hear about at all.
What you can decide without me. This is the section that does the most work in the whole document. It is a three-column reality: go ahead and do not ask me, check with me first, and always mine. Plus a dollar figure they can approve on their own. Most founders have never articulated this, which means their EA defaults to asking about everything, which means the founder is still the bottleneck, just with more notifications.
Calendar and inbox. The meetings you will always say yes to and the ones you would rather were redirected. Your best hours for hard thinking, which you are asking them to defend. What a good week actually looks like to you, because some people want meetings stacked into one brutal morning and some want them spread thin, and there is no way to guess which one you are from the outside.
The people around you. Names, who they are, how to handle them. This one earns its place remotely more than anywhere else. Your EA is never going to pick these people up in passing, and the first time they meet your most sensitive client will be in an email they are sending on your behalf. Including anyone with history worth knowing about before that email goes out.
Feedback and pet peeves. What you want to happen when something goes wrong. How you give feedback, which is worth stating when most of it will arrive as text and text flattens tone. The things that will genuinely drive you up the wall. And my favorite prompt in the entire document: things people misread about me.
What good looks like. By day thirty, what would make you happy. The one thing you most want off your plate. And the thing you are most nervous about handing over, which is worth writing down precisely because you would rather not.
It closes with a first-two-weeks checklist, nine items, so nobody is wondering whether calendar access got sorted.
How to actually use it
You do not need to download anything to start. The worksheet lives on the page and you type straight into it. Your answers save in your own browser as you go, so you can get halfway through, close the tab, and pick it up after lunch without losing anything.
Do not treat it as a form to complete perfectly. Set a timer for twenty minutes, fill in what you know, leave the rest blank. Blanks are informative too. They tell your EA where the ambiguity lives, and those become the questions worth asking in your first call rather than the thirty that were not.
When you are done, download it as a PDF or print it straight from the page. Your answers are not stored on our end afterwards, which matters given what you have just written down.
Then send it to your EA a day ahead of your kick-off so they can read it and come with questions instead of receiving it live.
Put a note in your calendar for thirty days out and open it again. If it is working, the “go ahead and do not ask me” list will have grown, and the “check with me first” list will have shrunk. That movement is the whole point. It is the single clearest measure that you are actually handing work over rather than supervising it from one step removed.
One more thing
If you are not close to hiring anyone yet, this is still a fine place to start. Filling it in on your own is a genuinely useful exercise. You will find out fairly quickly how much of your business is stored nowhere but in your own head, and that is worth knowing whether or not you hire anyone this quarter.
And if you would rather not go looking for the right person yourself, that is what we do. We do not send you a stack of applicants to sort through. We send you the person.
Do what only you can do. Hand us the rest.
