Hacking the Admin Assistant Role

Since I’m consolidating my blogging efforts, let me establish some basics. I’ve been an administrative assistant for the last eight-plus years. Before that, I lived the life of a wandering ronin. I’m sorry, a temp. I get those confused. I presume that both involve a lot of light typing.

Over the years, my abilities have evolved. The geek within me ensures that I sprinkle a dash of computer nerd on everything. This has produced some unique DIY attempts to fix annoying problems. Some fail, but others succeed. I’ll be sharing some of those.

In my world, this basic administrative aid is married to science, working as I do at a research lab. I’m an scientific, admin-assisting, grantwriting, manuscript proofreader, uh, jack of all… Hey, what the hell am I?

What the hell I’m not

A receptionist or secretary. I’ll take generic old “Assistant” over any of that. It at least has the benefit of being accurate, rather than unintentionally insulting. No offense to those roles; we all have our place. But, with hard work, I sidled my way out of those roles, and since I don’t answer the phones or live at a filing cabinet, it doesn’t seem fair.

That said, I can’t blame people for what amounts to labeling errors. As a title, Administrative Assistant is so vague that it’s practically useless. Across and within organizations, the duties of an AA are insanely context sensitive and vary wildly.

In addition to familiar sounding paperwork tasks, I also help coordinate grant submissions and do proofreading and layout for submitting manuscripts to publishers. Visit payscale.com and search to your ass off. you won’t find a job listing that matches more than two or three of my core responsibility. Perhaps I haven’t struck upon the perfect alchemy of keywords, but I’ve sure tried a lot of them.

Leah Verre posted a link to “So You Want To Be a Producer.” It’s a great episode of Extra Credits, and while it addresses what game producers are expected to do, I was surprised to discover just how much of those same skills are required to be a good admin assistant. Give it a watch for some bonus perspective.

Personally, I’ve learned to slightly de-emphasize the Administrative part. Then I put ASSISTANT in all-caps. Let the word “Coordinator” roll around in your head and you begin to get the picture. We are process-focused and try to see the full trail that links beginning to end.

Pro hacking tip: It's easy to go paperless if you just scan and/or shred everything in sight. (CC Image courtesy of Rosmary at Flickr)

The hacking part

It’s possible to be a completely competent AA without employing any special tricks. I know more than a few old school admins, with basic computer skills, who burn through work as fast (or faster) than their younger, tech-saavy counterparts. They’re experienced and have perfected the art of doing one damn thing after another, plus, they aren’t sneaking in Farmville sessions (amazing how that affects overall productivity).

AA’s are on the banks of a river, and each stepping stone leads to the next, and that’s how we cross the river. Heads’ down, we look at the next stone in the line. We focus on the horizon only when we must think strategically. Otherwise, we lose our focus and get bogged down in worry and minutia. We zoom out, then zoom right back in because each project has a hundred subtasks. We change our frame of reference as the situation warrants.

My aim is to fuse that old-school single-tasking with tech that just works. Over the course of an average year, I’ll try a few new things out. Many won’t make the cut. This is because my core questions are: Does it work? Is it fast? What’s the point, exactly? If the answers are no, no, and huh?, then it gets the boot.

So, The Long Game will change once more. It’ll be all the usual mystification about the cosmos and our species’ collective cognition issues. But, it will also include process tricks, neat desktop tools, and really sweet pens. It’ll have a dash of Lifehacker, but aimed at we science AA’s. More on that in my upcoming posts.