What You Really Do All Day—And How to Show It

From oat milk orders to ops strategy—log it all!

Let me guess: you’ve just finished coordinating a last-minute board meeting, calmed down a panicked exec who lost her passport (again), proofread a PowerPoint deck while simultaneously trying to order the right kind of oat milk for the office fridge, and now someone’s asking, “What exactly do you do all day?”

Breathe. You’re not alone.

As Executive Assistants, our days are a blur of spinning plates, invisible threads, and ninja-level diplomacy. We remember birthdays, squash calendar clashes, and somehow manage to anticipate disasters before they happen. The only problem? Much of what we do isn’t visible to others—and worse, we rarely track it ourselves.

In this article, I want to talk about the invisible workload we carry, why it matters to track it, and how to do it without turning your day into a data-entry marathon. (Spoiler: this won’t involve spreadsheets unless you want it to. I’m not here to judge your love of conditional formatting.)

---

What Is the Invisible Workload?

The invisible workload is the stuff that falls between the cracks—the unlogged, unrecognised, and often unrewarded work that keeps everything afloat. It’s the 15 minutes you spend tracking down the name of “that person we met at that conference in 2019” because your exec is convinced they need a meeting with them tomorrow. It’s the back-and-forth to align six people’s diaries for one Zoom call which gets cancelled ten minutes after it was due to start. It’s the 3 AM thought that you should remind your exec to bring chargers to the offsite.

If your job was a swan, the visible part would be the graceful glide across the lake. The invisible workload is the frantic paddling beneath the surface. And my friend, we are world-class paddlers.

---

Why Bother Tracking It?

You might be thinking: “I barely have time to do the work—when am I supposed to track it?”

Fair question. But here’s the thing:

• Performance reviews: You can’t get credit for work no one knows you did.