Ultimate Guide to Managing Executive Assistants and Delegating Like a Pro — Sam Corcos (4K)

Sam Corcos joins Tim Ferriss to build what they frame as one of the most comprehensive tactical guides to delegation. Sam traces his delegation practice back to reading The 4-Hour Workweek a decade ago and hiring his first EA off Craigslist, then walks through how Levels operates as a radically transparent, remote-first company built on 'treat people like adults.' He details concrete systems: recording workflows in Loom, tracking EA tasks in Notion databases, semi-automating social media and email management, and converting to-do lists into calendar blocks. The conversation also covers news sobriety, reducing chronic stress, hosting intellectual salon dinners, memo-over-meeting culture, and user-guide documents that explain how to work with a given person.

• Sam's entire delegation journey started from reading Tim's book; he posted a Craigslist ad for an EA with nothing for her to do, hired Lori, and she has worked with him for 10 years.
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• Levels runs radical organizational-design experiments: all investor updates from day one and all weekly team all-hands are public on their website, and they default-record meetings including one-on-ones to prevent gossip.
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• Sam calls Loom the most important business-enablement tool of the last five years, arguing 'content scales, time does not' and that a recorded workflow can be watched by every future employee.
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• The core delegation tactic is workflow recording: just turn on Loom and do your normal work; an EA can replicate complex tasks like video editing with ~90 percent accuracy after watching two or three recordings.
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• The single most important time-management tactic for Sam is moving from to-do list to calendar: schedule every task into finite calendar time (aiming for ~50 percent open slack) instead of an infinite to-do list.
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• Sam has been fully news sober for ~10 years after reading Ryan Holiday's 'Trust Me, I'm Lying,' replacing news with books and reporting lower anxiety and better physical wellbeing.
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• 'How you spend your time are your priorities' — Sam has EAs categorize every 15-minute block monthly, and finds people's stated values rarely match their actual calendar.
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• Despite having four EAs, Sam has never communicated synchronously with his first/longtime Philippines-based EA; all communication has been async via Loom and content.
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• Levels has to rematch roughly 30 percent of its EAs because of poor fit; a legal-background rematch for their head of legal doubled his output.
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• Levels runs a monthly team book club; recurring titles include 'No Rules Rules' (Netflix), 'The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership,' and 'Nonviolent Communication.'
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• Week three of Levels' one-month onboarding is 'async week' where employees may only communicate via audio and video recordings, no typing or writing allowed.
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• Sam records roughly 10 to 20 Looms per day and shares only about half of them, treating recording as costless.
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• Sam sources EAs through the Philippines-based agency Athena (around $15 to $20/hour); cheaper direct options include Upwork and the agency Shepherd (around $5/hour).
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• Sam built an internal communications tool because he dislikes Slack, calling it a 'slot machine' with the same dopamine loop as Twitter (citing a RescueTime study that workers can't go six minutes without checking comms).
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• Sam's EAs hold his Twitter password and post on his behalf; all his Twitter DMs and LinkedIn messages are managed and screenshotted by EAs so he avoids the dopamine loop.
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• Mondays are Sam's meeting day, sometimes 14 hours of meetings stacked, leaving Tuesday through Thursday open; he treats Wednesdays as a 'sacrificial anode' for overflow scheduling.
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• Sam only buys a book if it's the next one he'll read; his Audible wishlist holds 200 to 300 books, and his salon intros are just 'your name and the last book you read.'
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• Levels new hires write their own 'user guide' (temperament, communication preferences, etc.) by end of month one; Sam's notes that he strongly dislikes being interrupted and keeps his phone on do-not-disturb or airplane mode.
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