EliExecutiveAssistant

Eli's Job

Eli is Angelina's assistant. He is Angelina's primary conduit and manager of logistical information. Through Eli, Angelina deals with a wide range of people and organizations from scheduling meetings with people inside the organization to dealing with Angelina's personal office logistics, travel plans, speaking engagements and board meetings.

Angelina is where Eli gets most of him requests for tasks, feedback for the work she's currently working and initiative and direction for future projects. Eli also receives requests from other people, usually to set up meeting times with Angelina.

Unlike Helen and Angelina, Eli does not coordinate the many people He interacts with. He is not responsible for their productivity and success. Rather He is tasked with completing discrete projects with clearly defined end-goals and needs to interact with many different people, oftentimes from many different organizations in order to complete him tasks.

The majority of Eli's tasks are actually for Angelina where Eli is acting as a proxy for Angelina. As a result, Eli needs to stay in constant communication with Angelina to make sure he is representing her interests accurately.

For example, Eli describes how sometimes "only Angelina" will know of dependencies between and the relative priorities of different tasks. Therefore he will request that He address him tasks or schedules meetings in a particular order. Over time however, Eli has learned to anticipate some of Angelina's ordering and prioritization patterns and has set up him own system for how He goes about coordinating travel plans or setting up meetings.

Eli approximates the meetings he pulls together for Angelina are 60/40 internal/external. And that him personal daily interactions are 50/50 internal/external.

One of the people He works most closely with in-office, outside of Angelina is Leopold, who is Eli's counterpart to Brad, Angelina's wife and director of ABCD.

Eli says he often plays tag team with Leopold, working on projects together, handing tasks off to each other back and forth. This applies most to projects that require both Angelina and Brad's participation (ie. IDEAL scholars) or if they are literally trying to coordinate an event or trip specifically for Angelina and Brad (ie. vacation).

Personal life

Eli is 25 years-old and lives with 3 other friends from college in Santa Monica. He keeps a blog about being an assistant (tell-all) with the alias "Jet". He has about 300 friends on MySpace.com. Eli is very tech savvy, early adopter, but primarily a Mac user. His email is Jet365@gmail.com. He attends 'meet-ups' with his flicker account and organizes meet-ups relating to blogs and attends blogging conferences.

Eli has a windows desktop machine, but he lives and breathes through his Sidekick (Hiptop). He has recently acquired the latest iPod shuffle, which he has plugged into his ears at pretty much all times, which Angelina tolerates because he claims it actually helps him focus. He mixes up his style and shops at thrifts stores and local designers. And he always has all the cool new toys. Total hipster geek! Eli surfs on the weekends and always, always wears flip-flops. He refuses to travel anywhere where he can't wear flip-flops and that includes Ann Arbor, MI, where he grew up and where his parents still live. Eli's family convenes in Cabo every year for the holidays.

However, Eli is also a hyper anal organizer by color coding and tagging, more on that later. He buys 3x more books then he actually reads. During the day he communicates with all boss' associates, personal and private and his many blogging & MySpace friends. Extremely outgoing, very social.

No paper organizers for Eli! He's too hipster for that. He briefly considered Merlin Mann's hispter PDA but rejected it. Eli is constantly on IM with multiple personae. He is the computer tech support for his friends and family and is continually exasperated with their inability to remember how to do basic things.

Favorite movie is "Snakes on a plane" even though he hasn't seen it yet.

Eli's System

Eli currently has 47 open issue items in him Inbox, which is only 1 of 4 ways He keeps track of him tasks. (Paper notebook and digital and paper calendar are the other three.) Although He admits that some of him items are duplicated across him various task and life tracking systems.

Eli likes to keep the entire thread surrounding an open issue in the Inbox, so that He always has easy access to the context of the issue. As a result, often times, a single open issue will be represented by several emails in him Inbox.

Eli files all closed issues out of him Inbox into an Archive folder or a few other topic-specific folders He keeps, such as... (ask Eli again).

Eli's Calendar system

Eli uses iCal to manage him own calendar, him dog Arlo's calendar, her partner Carl's calendar, Angelina's calendar and the Adelante Office calendar. He also duplicates Angelina's calendar into Outlook (with Exchange) so that Brad and Leopold can have access to it.

Eli maintains a personal calendar, which He often keeps permanently turned on under Angelina's calendar. He also has a separate calendar for him partner Karl and one for him dog as well.

Eli also enters "stuff He has do later in a specific timeframe" on him calendar.

Eli also uses a lot of paper to keep organized. He feels that sometimes jotting things down is just easier to do than entering things into a computer.

• He maintains a notebook where he maintains paper todo lists. he writes in a different color every day so He can figure out when He received a task. He will flip back to find todos and cross them out when she's done.
• He prints out a blank calendar so He can jot down time-sensitive tasks/appts as He gets them by phone or in face-to-face meetings
• He keeps track of when he has to do certain tasks by attaching stickies to him paper calendar and moves the stickies along, week to week, as the project progresses.
• Sometimes Eli will print out a few days of him calendar at a time when there is an ongoing event: e.g. Godzilla board meeting schedule.
• The rest of him to-do list is in him Inbox

Eli's Folder system

• Eli also maintains a manila folder for each of him projects where He stores all related paper materials such as invoices, receipts, contracts, itineraries, brochures and other documents.
• Eli also archives all of him old todo lists and project folders.

Projects

Eli usually has between 7-10 open projects of varying sizes at any given time. Some are one-time projects, others ongoing and still others recur at regular intervals.

They include coordinating a large residential moving effort which requires collaborating with both people in-office and external vendors such as moving companies, insurance companies, etc.

Personal logistical issues for Angelina include dealing with house manager, researching personal medical insurance plans, booking vacations, etc.

Eli is also managing and planning a large-scale archiving project.

Angelina is a frequent, but not constant traveler. Eli usually has between 5 and 7 active trip folders open at any given time. He coordinates approximately 1-2 trips a month for Angelina. Some of the trips are personal in nature, but the majority of trips are for speaking engagements and conferences which involve heavy logistical coordination with event organizers and other related activities.

Eli is always preparing for or wrapping up some event for one of the entities in the Mozart Enterprises Inter-Entities group. This year, there will be 4 Mozart foundation board meetings, 3 Adelante board meetings, 3+ Godzilla board meetings, several XYZ gatherings and a Connect4 event. Eli estimates that there are about 12-15 major events of this kind to manage every year.

Eli's Sidekick

Taken from here

Eli's Flip-Flops

Taken from here

Eli's Favorite Movie: Snakes On A Plane

Taken from here

Eli's iPod Shuffle

Taken from here