Assistant Persona

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

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

Unlike, Katie and Mitch, Esther does not coordinate the many people she interacts with. She is not responsible for their productivity and success. Rather she 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 her tasks.

The majority of Esther's tasks are actually for Mitch where Esther is acting as a proxy for Mitch. As a result, Esther needs to stay in constant communication with Mitch to make sure she is representing his interests accurately.

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

Esther approximates the meetings she pulls together for Mitch are 60/40 internal/external. And that her personal daily interactions are 50/50 internal/external.

One of the people she works most closely with in-office, outside of Mitch is Greg, who is Esther's counterpart to Freada, Mitch's wife and director of LPFI and co-director of ... and ...

Esther says she often plays Tag team with Greg, working on projects together, handing tasks off to each other back and forth. This applies most to projects that require both Mitch and Freada's participation (ie. IDEAL scholars) or if they are literally trying to coordinate an event or trip specifically for Mitch and Freada (ie. vacation).

Esther's System

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

Esther likes to keep the entire thread surrounding an open issue in the Inbox, so that she 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 her Inbox.

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

Esther's Calendar system Esther uses iCal to manage her own calendar, her dog Arlo's calendar, her partner Carl's calendar, Mitch's calendar and the OSAF Office calendar. She also duplicates Mitch's calendar into Outlook (with Exchange) so that Freada and Greg can have access to it.

Esther maintains a personal calendar, which she often keeps permanently turned on under Mitch's calendar. She also has a separate calendar for her partner Karl and one for her dog as well.

Esther also enters "stuff she has do later in a specific timeframe" on her calendar.

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

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

Esther's Folder system

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

Projects

Esther 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 Mitch include dealing with the House manager, medical insurance evaluation, etc.

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

Mitch is a frequent, but not constant traveler. Esther usually has between 5 and 7 active trip folders open at any given time. She coordinates approximately 1-2 trips a month for Mitch. 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.

Esther is always preparing for or wrapping up some event for one of the entities in the Kapor Enterprises Inter-Entities group. This year, there will be 4 Mitchell Kapor foundation board meetings, 3 OSAF board meetings, 3+ Mozilla board meetings, several CSG gatherings and a Calconnect event. Esther estimates that there are about 12-15 major events of this kind to manage every year.

-- MimiYin - 20 Apr 2006