Ah, vacation. Just around the corner. As I clean off the desk, tidy the files, and delegate tasks for the week ahead I come to one of the more challenging pre-holiday tasks: preparing Outlook.

Of course I’ll set my Out of Office Assistant to let people know that I’ll be away and not checking e-mail. I’ve taken a public pledge to leave the BlackBerry behind. I may even try some of those special rules gizmos to automatically route some messages to the appropriate person (or the trash). But I’ll have to do a serious cleaning to enable my in-box to handle the 400-500 messages I’ll receive next week without exceeding its size limit. We’re running a pool on the exact number. Write your guess on the back of a $20 bill and mail it to me. (Note to any of my readers in law enforcement: I'm kidding).

All of this preparation makes me long for an old-fashioned In Office Assistant. An actual person who could keep things moving along in my absence: answer questions, direct inquiries, follow up on correspondence, set up my fall travel, and even solve the odd problem or two. A person who, in my father’s day, would have been known as my secretary. Someone who would have neat folders ready for my return -- mail to be answered, decisions to be made, approvals to be signed, etc. -- thus making my reentry smooth and efficient.

Fewer of us have administrative assistants in today’s leaner, flatter organizations. We have laptops and “user-centric” applications that let us create our own shipping documents, help desk requests, airline reservations, and handle hundreds of the other routine tasks without which business can’t function. I’m sure there is a spreadsheet somewhere that shows that each of these is more efficient in microeconomic terms (I can’t find it because there’s no one around who is actually trained and skilled in the fine art of filing), but I wonder if anyone has looked at the overall economic impact of managers and executives busying themselves with these tasks. A couple of hours on expense reports, 45 minutes trying to apply a credit to a future flight reservation, an hour cutting-and-pasting language in a contract: multiply that across your organization and you’ll see that pretty soon we’re talking about real time here.

Equally important, we don’t know the value of the loss of the informal network and institutional memory of the old administrative class. They may not have been high on the official totem pole, but they knew how to get things done, where the skeletons were buried, and how to find things in the files. They were skilled contributors to the overall efficiency of the organization. No one could get a new manager up to speed faster than a good admin. However we undervalued their contributions and made theirs the work that few wanted to do. Even if you could find someone who wanted to do the work, if your organization is like many it is easier to get approval to hire a vice president than an administrative assistant.

Perhaps I’m thinking too hard about this. Our laptops let us work in the evening and on the weekend to keep up with our jobs. Hence we are working more hours than ever before. My Outlook Out of Office Assistant doesn’t require benefits and will stand ready to serve 24/7 in my absence. I just need to file the 410 items in my In box before I head to the beach so that your message won’t bounce back as undeliverable.

HARVARD BUSINESS ONLINE RECOMMENDS:
Harvard Business Essentials: Time Management (Paperback)
What Companies Can Do to Help: Ideas for Improving Employee Time Management (HBS Press Chapter)
Managing Time: Pocket Mentor Series (Paperback)