Chapter 1: How did Jonathan Swanson's experience at the White House influence his view on delegation?
How did you get started in thinking about time and delegating?
So my first job out of school was working at the White House and I worked for the president's top economic advisor. And I got to walk in the West Wing every morning, which was cool life experience. And I sat next to the president's executive assistants. And as you might imagine, the executive assistants to the president are really freaking good.
And it set my bar crazy high for what this client-EA partnership could look like. And so when I left the White House to start my first company, I asked myself the question, what if I had an assistant or a team of assistants that was as good as the president's? Obviously, I'm not going to become president, but what else could I accomplish if I had that sort of support?
And so I hired my first assistant that way and then set out on a journey to build the best team I could to see how it changed my life.
What were the unlocks that you saw inside of the White House? How complex and big is the system of spindly octopuses with their tentacles and everything trying to help get the machine moving?
I mean, it's insane. The president has multiple assistants, as you might imagine. There's actually an entire department called Advance that plans every minute of the president's life. for months in advance. And so if he's going to be in Brazil in three months, there's people deployed months in advance to go scope, prepare everything.
And, you know, I think there's just kind of the level of optimization, which is one thing. But the thing that really struck me sitting next to the president's assistants is seeing the relationship they had. It wasn't just saving him time or doing tasks for him. At the end of the day, he would sit down, lean back in his chair, and be like, what happened? And he would talk to his assistant.
And this was one of the people he trusts most in the world. There's all these other people jockeying for his attention, governors, senators, NSA chiefs. But this assistant is the one person who's just like got his back fundamentally, emotionally, psychologically. And you can tell there was a real psychological connection that was very valuable beyond just the work.
So it's a deep relationship of trust and kind of awareness, I suppose, because of how globally connected that assistant is to everything.
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Chapter 2: What are the cardinal sins of delegation that one should avoid?
you can get a group of four friends together and say hey let's all babysit each each other's kids one one night a week or you just got a free babysitter for those other three nights uh so there's a way it's such a clever idea ways to get leverage for all of us and you know my recommendation to people is you start small with whatever resources you have and you learn to delegate to an ai assistant people talk about prompt engineering that's just delegation
And as you get really good at that and you have the resources, then you can upgrade to an assistant with a company like ours or an in-person assistant, which is even more expensive, or, yeah, a fleet of assistants that runs your whole life. I've worked with billionaires who have teams of 50. It's totally mind-blowing, and that's out of reach for almost all of us.
But I think everyone can take the first couple steps and you go as far as you want or you're able.
Let's begin at level zero then. Let's say that someone thinks, okay, I believe that time is pretty important. What is some of the zero cost or very low cost ways that people can start to do that and then we can build up toward the platoon?
Yeah, so level zero is you delegate to friends and family. It costs you nothing. And this is group work. So you get together, you do the babysitting, you get together and you say, hey, I want to meet more friends in dinner parties. I'll plan one. dinner party once a quarter. If these other friends, you also do it once a quarter.
And now you get a monthly dinner party, making new friends, and you're only doing a couple times a year. So that's level zero. And that's where everyone should start. The next level above that is 20 bucks a month, chat GPT. You know, they're trying to be a human assistant. It's limited in what it can do today, but you can use it like a coach, like a you know, a limited assistant.
And so, you know, if you want to exercise more, you can go to ChatGPT and say every day, ask me if I've exercised and check in with me and give me a report card at the end of the week. It can do that. 20 bucks a month, you'll learn how to leverage it more and more over time.
Once you have the resources for five, 10 bucks an hour, you can go to Upwork or a company like that and hire someone directly. If you've got 3,000 bucks a month, you can work with a company like Athena where we recruit, train, manage the assistant for you. And then if you want someone in person, it's $100,000 a year. And then, you know, it goes up to infinity.
This billionaire that I worked with has a team of 50. He has eight executive assistants. The executive assistants all graduate from Princeton. It's totally wild and crazy. But yeah, you start small with whatever resources you've got.
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Chapter 3: How can someone start delegating effectively with limited resources?
And those are the fundamentals of good health. But why do people not sleep much? It's not because they don't want to. It's because they don't have time. They're working too late. They want to spend time with the kids. And so in my view, time is actually the most fundamental pillar of health. And learning to control your time, getting sovereignty over it,
is how you then unlock good sleep and everything else that follows.
Where are the places that people are wasting time or where are they spending time in very low leverage ways or in what ways is it being sapped and pulled away from them that they might not realize?
Yeah, so I think for most beginner delegators, they start by delegating things that sap energy and that are monotonous and annoying. That's renewing a passport or a driver's license. It's calendar. It's inbox. It's paying bills. Those are things that don't require any cognitive load, don't require any creativity. It's not why people get up in the morning.
And so starting there reduces this just kind of like cognitive load
weight that you carry every day you've got to do xyz but you take those things off and then the things that remain are higher order it's planning its goals its aspirations and those higher order things are much more exciting more energy uh giving and that is uh that's a wonderful trade so cognitive offloading is a mental upgrade here in that regard Exactly.
Yeah, the more you offload, the more time you have for the highest order things in your life. I'd like to say assistance like a cognitive prosthetic for remembering, planning, sequencing. And just like inflammation damages your body and health, chronic to-dos damages or impairs your mind. And so the more we can free ourselves of those things, the freer and the more upgraded our mind can be.
What I think when it comes to delegation, a lot of people have a, a number of X and concerns, probably quite a lot of hurdles to get over. I certainly know that I did and do, but especially if you're agentic, uh, hard charging, get after it yourself, uh, uh, the prospect of giving tasks to somebody else, uh, I don't know. I seem to have two categories of friends.
One are those who can't wait to offload and another are those who can't work out how to do it. So what are the cardinal sins of delegation?
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Chapter 4: What are the different levels of delegation and how do they evolve?
They're all in with a full-time person. And you look at the clients we work with, the ones who have really transformed their life, they're working with the same person for many years. And that person becomes their second brain, knows them like a little sister. That's how I think of my assistant I've worked with the longest. She knows everything about me. And that takes this long-term commitment.
So just putting a toe in doesn't give the assistant the required depth of resolution to be able to actually look at what's going on in life. They need to be able to see everything and the gains accrue as they start to see more.
It's like getting married but only going on a couple dates. You know, the marriage and I think all good things, wealth, relationships, they compound. And the power of compounding is it gets better and better gradually over time. And that's true with an assistant. The more you do, the deeper and better it gets.
Right, okay. What is your perspective on the difference between a VA and an in-person PA or something? Because what you're talking about here with Athena, a lot of this are virtual assistants and presumably people can get these for cheaper, but your virtual assistant might be able to organize a cleaner, but can't be a cleaner.
They might be able to organize someone to collect your Amazon parcel, but they can't go and post it themselves. So how do you think about piecing together different assistants in that sort of a way?
Yeah, I mean, if you have the budget for both, that's the best. You have someone in person for arms and legs and to run around and help you and someone in the cloud who's virtual. Typically, someone who's virtual is less expensive. You know, in Athena, our assistants are based in the Philippines or Kenya, where you have great talent at more affordable rates.
And in person, you know, if you're in New York or SF or Austin, it's just going to be more expensive. So I recommend people start virtual, and then as you have resources, you can do more. The team and I were just joking, there's these humanoid robots that are now getting closer, and some of them are tele-operated.
And we're like, we're not far away from you being able to have a robot in your house that your virtual assistant can actually tele-operate. And so you can be like, hey, can you grab me a coffee? And they could tele-operate the robot in your house and bring it to your desk. You know, we're getting pretty close to that being a real thing. So it's going to be a fun frontier when that happens.
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Chapter 5: How does delegation impact personal ambition and time management?
Elon built the first cars with steering wheels because you had to drive them. He didn't build them without steering wheels. And as you drive them, you're actually teaching the machine how to drive. And progressively, they automated. They have assisted steering and auto braking, and then eventually full self-driving. And we view our work as similar. It's going to be fully human.
And then gradually, the machine will do more and more. Human will always be in the loop. But the human will do more advanced, more powerful, more creative tasks over time. And the machine will do the more rote mechanical stuff.
And it's effectively the AI will become an assistant to the human assistant, which will increase their memory, allow them to work overnight, do all sorts of cool productivity things. But our view is the human touch is real and is going to last for a long time, no matter how much some of the AI promoters would like to say otherwise. But the combination is going to be a pretty cool thing.
Yeah, that's cool.
Around the I can do it better or I keep finding frustration when getting somebody else to do a task on my behalf, that can last for maybe a bit longer than you might want. How does someone navigate that challenge day to day?
Yeah, I think some of this expectation setting, I think some people think you just delegate and it works. And that's not the real world. The real world is you delegate and the first version doesn't work or it's not exactly what you wanted. And then you give feedback and you do it again. And the next time is a little better. And you have to have a high tolerance for failure, for iteration.
But as long as you have a high tolerance for those things and you just continue compounding improvements, then it gets better and better over time. But... Yeah, I think like most things in life, there's no easy button. You've got to invest in the partnership. And we tell clients who work with us, if you just want to show up and want everything, your life to be perfect is not going to work.
You have to invest. And the more you invest, the better your partnership will get. And in fact, if you look at the best assistants at Athena, the kind of top 1%, they just so happen to work for the clients who are the best at delegating. Not a coincidence. They've become so good because the client is so good at exporting their thinking and
giving feedback, praise and recognition, helping build up their confidence when they make mistakes, helping correct them and steer them. And it really is a marriage of sorts. And so as long as both parties are really invested in it, it can be super powerful. But if it's one-sided, ain't gonna work. How do people get better feedback? I think this is something that lots of humans struggle with.
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Chapter 6: What strategies can help overcome the fear of delegation?
Another kind of framing I have is Elon Musk sometimes talks about teams being the vector sum. So a company is a vector sum of all the humans involved. And, you know, it's just a fancy way of saying there's inefficiency because these vectors are not perfectly aligned. And the only way to get more output is to have a higher tolerance for inefficiency.
And that's just a fundamental rule of the universe is if you're focused on more and more output, there's going to be more and more inefficiency because more humans are involved.
Right, okay. So inefficiency is... a price that you need to pay to increase output overall? Well, I mean, I remember in university learning about diseconomies of scale, and one of the biggest ones being communication, that you know everything that you need to know by design of the fact that you already know it, and you're the only person that needs it communicating to.
As soon as you've got two people, well, they need to know what you now know, and some of it gets lost in translation. And as soon as you scale up to 13... There's lots that gets missed and lost, but your total capacity for overall output has gone up, even though the efficiency is less. 13 people in a team is less efficient than one person 13 times in 13 different companies.
But the total output of the company that's got 13 staff is greater than any of the individuals that have got one.
A hundred percent. Yeah. You know, how do you, another way of asking this question is how do you measure your life? Do you measure it by efficiency or do you measure it by how many times you go on a date with your wife or how many times you exercise or how much you spend time doing a hobby? Those outputs are what you actually care about.
You don't care about the inefficiencies that were involved in creating those outputs. You just want that good life that you want.
Yeah, okay. What about the relationship between leverage and ambition? Because it seems to me that lots of people who are very ambitious lean into their leverage, but I get the sense that it can become a feedback loop as well. So how do you come to construct ambition and leverage?
Yeah, this is one of the more counterintuitive things that we discovered as we've coached clients on delegation, which is most people assume that... powerful people or successful people have all this leverage and that's how they become ambitious. That's why they have all this ambition. Or because they have all this money, they can create all this leverage.
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Chapter 7: How can voice delegation improve communication with assistants?
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They're like, that's it. I'm going to find myself an assistant. I'm going to do it through Athena or I'm going to find somebody in person or whatever. What does effective levels of integration, where should somebody start? What are the first things to outsource? What are the ways to best onboard? Take me through the full stack.
Yeah, so step one is start with chat GPT or in person or whatever it is. And the beginner way to delegate is offload pain. So make a list of all the things that you don't like doing that reduce your willpower that make you unhappy and start there. And this is kind of monotonous stuff. It's like your inbox, your calendar, paying bills, passport renewal. etc.
This might take a year to offload all these things.
As you offload... I need to pause there. What a lot of people might assume, I think, and I know I certainly did when I started working with assistants, was this is going to be the immediate fix. I'm going to introduce this person into my life and I'm never going to have to do anything again.
But being modest with the speed at which this integration is going to happen effectively, I think is a really, really good idea.
Yeah, look, my recommendation is you do this as a new way of living. I think that's the right way to do anything, exercise, meditation, or whatever. If you're doing it for a week or a month, kind of worthless. But if you can do this for the rest of your life, then it will compound. And yeah, you start with pain, unload all these monotonous things.
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Chapter 8: What historical figures exemplify the importance of delegation in achieving great things?
Yeah. Yeah. I do think AI is going... AI is just going to get better and better. And I do think there is an opportunity for... And I think lots of AI labs are going to do this. They're going to start watching your screen as you work. and they're going to look at what you're doing, and they're going to proactively offer opportunities for them to help you.
And this is, we've built something like this at Athena as kind of internal testing tool where we watch, this is just using it for internal employees, but we watch them as they work, and then we automatically offload a task they should delegate, but they haven't vocalized to their assistant. And the person who built this internally, the majority of his delegations are now machine generated.
That means he didn't say anything. He's just working on his computer. The machine is effectively watching. It's identifying things that his assistant could help with, and it sends it to the assistant. Now, of course, the human's in the loop and is going to say, oh, Chris would want me to help with this. I'll start working on it. Or this one's worthless. I'll say no.
So I do think that is going where the world's going. I think we're getting to a world where you just work Machines watch you, they identify your goals, and then pass it off to a combination of machine and human assistance for the execution.
What are some of the potential negative externalities of a world where people outsource incorrectly or they do it too much? What are some of the ways that people can get this wrong?
Yeah, I hear some people say, you know, you shouldn't delegate your life. And I think that's right. Like you shouldn't delegate spending time with your kids or with your wife. You should delegate the things that you don't want to do to do the things that are meaningful to you. So I think that's one way.
You know, the other thing is I think you need to treat your assistant with the respect and love that they deserve, right? This is not just, hey, do this for me. This is, hey, we're a partnership. I want to help you build your life. I want to give you more opportunity, more income. You're going to help support me, and it needs to be a mutual relationship. thing we this doesn't happen very often.
But we've had to fire a few clients at Athena who just like weren't kind to their assistants. And that's unacceptable to us. We only want to work with people who are kind and generous with their assistants because our assistants are there to take care of you and they give so much that they deserve that same in exchange.
Yeah, I worry. There's been parts of my life where I've got concerns that my tolerance or my resilience for bullshit, which is inescapable, may become more finely attuned as I don't deal with bullshit on a daily basis. Kind of like these astronauts that go up to space and they don't need to lift any weight and then they come back down and they're unable to support themselves.
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