SH: Yeah. On previous podcasts I called that the psychic weight like I have a great deal of psychic weight just pulling me down because I know that when I get back to the hotel, I've got this crushing amount of e-mail that needs to be caught up on. Every line item in Outlook is equally important just by virtue of the way it appears in Outlook. I noticed when I e-mailed you to try to set up this interview I got two things from you in the e-mail. Immediately I got an out-of-office reply, but not typical one. It said, "I check my e-mail every two to four days because I'm trying to get work done, so bear with me." A few hours later, I got a very kind e-mail from a woman named Amy who lives God knows where, I don't know, another time zone somewhere.

TF: Vancouver, Canada.

SH: Vancouver. You outsource to Vancouver, Canada.

TF: Uh-huh.

SH: She said this sounds like a very exciting thing. She cc'd your editor, let's see if we can get on a schedule. She explained the situation and, well, I initially thought - because I'd heard that you've done this kind of outsourcing. I don't mean to use the word outsourcing, maybe there's a better word.

TF: No, it's fine. That works.

SH: When I heard this, I said, "Gosh, am I that important?" and I had a little kind of talk with myself. Should I do this? Is this valuable? Would people be insulted if I didn't answer their e-mails personally? But then at the same time, it did let me understand that, well, Tim's got stuff to do. I better make my communications with this individual, so Amy value-added. I ended up writing her an e-mail that was more detailed and more specific in the amount of time it would save you when it eventually got down to you.

TF: That's why I recognized your name when you came up to me today and I wouldn't recognize the names of the other 150 or 1,000 people that e-mailed me today.

SH: I'd never seen an assistant e-mail like that. She also included at the bottom, she said, "Amy, Executive Assistant. This e-mail is" - she had checkboxes - "Bloggable, Please Ask, Private." She checked "Please Ask" and I thought that was fantastic because I never know when I e-mail someone if it's going to show up copy-pasted flat out on their blog. I really thought that was impressive.

TF: I have to give credit to Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher. I borrowed that from him and then Amy liked it so much. I said, "Hey, you should use it too. I think it's a good idea considering how much e-mail would be coming in."

SH: I assume she has access to your e-mails so then when you get to your box, there are specific actions on for you to take.

TF: I have multiple e-mail accounts depending on their functions so I have a semi-public e-mail account that goes to Amy. I have other business accounts for my separate businesses, which are primarily handled or at least filtered by other assistants. I have my sort of personal e-mail that I use for immediate action items that only I can attend to. It's very clear what I have to do with them and I've actually streamlined that further to the point where she no longer forwards e-mail to me at all. That is not common. What's most common is what I did initially with Amy who manages other virtual assistants as well who act on my behalf, so she's more of an operations manager, which was she would send the e-mails to me that she felt required my attention. What I found was much more effective was simply getting on the phone with her once a day. I laid out a set of rules essentially for preparing for the call and it's bang, bang, bang. I jumped on the phone with her today at 4:00 on the ride up here and handled all the e-mail that I needed to handle, meaning I told her what she needed to do in about four minutes and I get more than 1,000 e-mail a day.

SH: This sounds like in the project management or in the agile world, we call this a scrum. It's like a rugby scrum. Everyday, we have a meeting. It's a standup meeting. We get together and we say, "What are you working on? What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? And what do I need to do to get that problem, whatever you're facing, out of the way?" Anything else is peripheral. If they last more than 15 minutes, you're doing it wrong. It sounds like you're having a daily scrum with your operations team to find out what do I need to do and how can I empower you to do something on my behalf?

TF: Sure. The other thing that I do, and I talked about this in The 4-Hour Workweek, is I set certain guidelines and I expect that I will have small problems I need to fix. I don't try to prevent every problem because if you focus on trying to prevent every problem, you really can't take the pro-active steps on mission-critical tasks that you should be focusing your resources on. So for example, I'm giving Amy increasing levels of decision-making ability with e-mails as she becomes familiar with my preferences and I'm sure every once in a while something will slip through, but the alternative is hand-holding and checking every e-mail that she reads, which would not only not save me time, but it would consume her time and consume my income.

SH: You're actively trying not to be a micromanager. If you don't empower your subordinate, then why do you have a subordinate at all?

TF: Right. The way you empower them though is by providing extremely detailed explicit rules. It's not about saying, "You seem smart. Make the right decision." There's a certain component of that, but it's very minimal. It's supplemental to having extremely well defined rules. She has a file that is Tim Ferriss Rules and every time I send her an e-mail - let's say she sends me an e-mail and she asks, "How should I respond to this." I'll respond and I'll say, "New rule," and then I'll define exactly the principle that she can use to respond to these types of e-mails in the future. She will cut and paste that into this running document that she uses and she also shares with her subordinate VAs whom she manages. It's very effective.

SH: Is she your full-time virtual assistant or does she have other people that she works for?

TF: She works for other people, although I think she's probably working close to full-time with me at the moment, but I'm actively taking steps to cut down on the number of her hours. She's perfectly happy to work full-time because I'm paying her for that time, but I'm actively trying and recruiting her help to cut down on the number of hours because it forces us to refine the rules. Right now, she said, "I'm happy to put in X number of hours," which is a lot of hours, but I said, "You know what? This is just the beginning." From the outset, you have to ask yourself, "Can this system scale?" Amy's doing a great job right now, fantastic. She's putting in 40 hours a week, but I'm getting 1,000 e-mails a day. What happens when I'm getting 10,000 e-mails a day? There are a lot of ways to solve that. I can simply take down all my e-mail addresses, which I may do at one point. Simple fix. Done. Over. Five minutes. But I'm at a point where I'm still gathering information from my readers so I can make improvements and there will be a point of diminishing returns and when I hit that point, I'll remove my e-mail.