Introducing Playbooks, Athena’s new how-to guides for our most powerful delegation practices

tl;dr: Athena believes delegation can be transformative. But it’s hard. That’s why we’re cataloging our best delegation processes and practices in our new Playbooks and gathering them in our just-launched Playbook Library. Each delegation playbook is a blueprint to help your EA return even more time to you.

The Athena Playbook Library is loaded with our first 40 delegation blueprints, and we’re experimenting with new ones every day.

Athena clients defy simple categorization: You are founders, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, executives, investors, and creatives. You are doers, not dreamers — high performers ready to roll up your sleeves because you’ve always been the best-equipped person to get results. But at some point in every busy, fulfilling life, the question becomes not “How am I going to do this?” but “Who can do this for me, without me having to think about it?” That’s what brings people to Athena: the promise of more time to focus on what really matters.

Why delegate

Whether you measure success by your accomplishments or having the freedom to live life on your own terms, you can only achieve so much by yourself — you are the rate limiter. True potential is unlocked by teams. And by working with an Athena EA, you can do more while doing less. But transformative delegation isn’t a toggle switch. Becoming a top-tier delegator requires significant preparation and input — it’s your life, after all.

Why we built Playbooks

Even the most proactive delegators are not delegating nearly enough, artificially dividing their lives into fixed domains — professional and personal — and limiting the scope of their own potential. Limiting your EA to foundational tasks — managing your inbox, maintaining your calendar, booking your travel — misses out on the vast leverage available to you. So the Playbook Library isn’t just a collection of step-by-step blueprints showing how your EA can predraft your emails or manage your network; it’s a window into what’s possible when you delegate across the portfolio of your life.

Athena believes delegation should reach across the full spectrum of your life.

Each playbook is organized into one of six pillars — Essentials, Career, Lifestyle, Health, Fulfillment, and Relationships — and designed to illustrate the outcomes that can be achieved by expanding your EAs reach. These range from recurring daily actions —staying on top of your medical appointments, tracking macronutrients, shopping for groceries — to goal-oriented facets of your personality. We have playbooks to help you set a new personal best, reinvent your listening habits, cook better food, and learn a new instrument. And we’re making new ones all the time.

What is a playbook?

Each playbook captures a delegation process between you and your EA in step-by-step detail.

Think of each playbook as a recipe, articulating a linear process that will yield the best results — better than what you could have achieved with your original tried-and-true method. Each delegation is created, vetted and tested by Athena clients and EAs, who have more than 120 million hours of cumulative delegation experience. The EA is the playmaker of the delegation process, but each playbook shows you when and how to get involved by transferring important information, reviewing inputs, and, most importantly, delivering candid feedback to ensure each version of the process is better than the last. The more playbooks you unlock, the more comfortable you will become with the science of delegation — and the more effective you will become at it.

How playbooks help your EA

Of course, this isn’t The Matrix — your EA can’t learn kung-fu in milliseconds, or by following through a one-page series of steps. Playbooks were created to look deceptively simple and be quickly interpreted by busy clients. The playbook itself is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, there’s a rigorous, proprietary curriculum that teaches our top-one-percent EAs how to succeed and thrive, articulating the process, skills and pro-tips behind each playbook to an almost absurd amount of detail.

Every single playbook is backed by a rigorous curriculum that equips your EA to act as your point person.

Athena has hundreds of these manuals ready for your EA to activate. And we’re constantly developing more alongside our team of in-house problem solvers, researchers, and process engineers. Playbooks are the key to unlocking this vast archive of information and possibility.

This is just a small snapshot of Athena’s library of proprietary training materials.

How to activate a playbook

The Playbook Library Beta is live right now, so you can start putting these playbooks into practice with your EA. It’s currently pre-loaded with our first batch of 40 playbooks.

To get started, check out the Library and send your EA any playbooks that stand out. You can even take the first step of the delegation while your EA reviews the matching playbook curriculum. Then, you and your EA will proceed through the steps together until your EA fully has the controls. Playbooks are meant to be completed once and run perpetually in the background; some will take a few days for you and your EA to master; others will take longer. All will require your input to be effective. And with more playbooks being added to the library throughout the year, the scope of what you can achieve with your EA is constrained only by the amount of time you want to recapture—to focus on what really matters to you.

Check out the Playbook Library here. And if you already have a killer delegation practice with your EA and want to add your playbook to our library, send us an email.