April 27th is Administrative Professionals Day in New Zealand. On this day businesses are asked to value the support that administrators give.
While many thought that with the advent of technology assistants days would be numbered, it seems that with this changing technology came a flood of information and subsequently information overload. It could be said that senior business people now need information gatekeepers more than any time in the past.
(As an aside: the costs of information overload have been estimated at $997 billion in the United States.)
The big change however is that the assistant no longer needs to sit at a desk at the managers door. Technology means that an assistant can be anywhere in the world and still do the work required of them.
One of the popularists of virtual assistants is Tim Ferriss. In his book The 4-hour work week he says
“What if you never had to check e-mail again?
If you could hire someone else to be spend countless hours in your inbox instead of you?
This isn’t pure fantasy. For the last 12 months, I’ve experimented with removing myself from the inbox entirely by training other people to behave like me. Not to imitate me, but to think like me.”
You can read the his blog for the full article on his the ways in which he used virtual assistants as the method for removing information overload from his life.
Now, while Tim is seen as one of the most adventurous in terms of how much of his life and business he outsources (he once outsourced the process of getting a girlfriend to his virtual assistants), the ideas he puts forth are increasingly been taken up by entrepreneurs and business people around the world.
Much of this thinking was apparent to the founders of Unified Inbox when they started development. The assistants they worked with were in different countries and Unified Inbox had to be the tool that allowed these assistants to work closely on the business. For more information on how managers and assistants are using Unified Inbox see our showcase.
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