100% remote, 100% time-of-day flexible, 30 hour a week role helping people live happier and more intentional lives.
Job Type: Freelance
Pay: $50.00 per hour
Benefits: Casual dress, Flexible schedule, Paid time off, Work from home
Work Location: 100% Remote
Qualifications: Extremely concise and clear writing skills, advanced understanding of specific apps (see below), strong experience with AI + AI agents and (also) known as the fastest person at the dinner table to find that old photo everyone's talking about, super fast thinker-talker-texter, ability to not get overwhelmed by giant loads of incoming tasks and instead to calmly process them…
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Hello!
My name is Neil and I’m a writer, podcaster, and speaker.
Spiking anxiety, scrolling addictions, rising loneliness, exhausting news cycles, and plummeting trust makes life challenging for many.
I have spent 20 years trying to infuse positivity into the puddle of overwhelm.
I started because I needed it.
I still do!
And I need help.
I’m looking for someone extremely speedy, tech-savvy, detail-oriented, organized, literary-geeky, and generally excited by wild and unpredictable requests at wild and unpredictable times.
You need to have expert—like you could teach the "pro" class to a room full of “advanced” users—in 5 of the following 10:
1. Business Writing
2. Creative Writing
3. Claude
4. Gemini
4. Kit
5. YouTube
6. Wordpress
7. Squarespace
8. Twitter
9. Squarespace
10. Dropbox
You will:
1. Help manage my newsletters. I have four! A daily awesome thing, bi-weekly blog post (Neil.blog), bi-weekly podcast (3books.co), and monthly book club. You will help source content, linkify, edit, upload to Kit, be ‘first and last eyes’ on everything, etc. The eyes part is key. You are my helpful human second brain and our trust enables everything. (You are likely a "word nerd" with a list of favorite words somewhere and you are a keen reader who will pick up on this fairly-obvious hint to include your favorite 1-3 words, underlined in CAPS, are the verrrrrry bottom of your email to me.)
2. Help manage my podcast. You will research guests, help with questions, write show notes, prepare and edit audio / video files and transcripts, be ‘first listener’ and propose (thoughtful, storytelling-creating) edits, brainstorm (always alliterative) titles, etc. (Note: I also have a freelance podcast editor who is wonderful who you will help manage.)
3. Help manage … other. This is the biggest thing. It's always a grab bag of wild requests. I have ADHD, wild ideas, and can send random thoughts at random times. (Note: I do not expect nor desire you to work evenings / weekends and my system with my last super-amazing assistant was I texted her on Signal in evenings / weekends, an app she'd delete off-hours and text her on iMessage if something was urgent, which happened like once a month.) What kind of requests??? Uh: “Can you pull anything I’ve written on X for this book I'm working on as well as everything (say) the top 3 global researchers have said on the topic and tell me what the gaps are and how it might fit into the chapter we're writing about Y?", “Can you have books waiting for me in each of these three hotels next week?”, “Can you manage, organize, and send creative gifts to X, Y, and Z?”, “Can you propose three people we should interview on super-niche topic X?”, "Can you edit this garbled audio note I just sent to myself into a blog post?", etc.
Note this job is largely text based — you can be anywhere in the world — and the goal is for the most efficient, clear, tightest interactions possible. Like I said, I try very, very hard to avoid evening / weekend work (I have four kids!) and I have no desire to impinge on your evenings / weekends either — unless we are on different time zones or something.
OK, still here???
Do you really want to do this???
Everything in life is a "no or hell yeah" after all! Iff (#excelnerd) this is feeling like a hell yeah email me your 1-page max resume in PDF along with your tweet-length (i.e., <280 chars) answers to the hidden q's here PLUS i) What are your 3 most formative books?, ii) What are the last 3 podcast eps you listened to and what'd you get from them?, iii) What's your income / pay at current and past two jobs and what are your income and non-income goals for your next job?, iv) What's one problem — preferably a tech problem — you solved for yourself / someone recently and how did you approach it?, v) How do you organize your bookshelf or computer or inbox (pick one), vi) What are any leadership / manager needs or work boundaries you have?, and vii) What are the 3 most glaring typos in this job posting?
Lastly, please make the subject of your email I AM AWESOME and then an em dash and then a short alliterative phrase describing yourself that you came up with from your own head and then a second em dash and and then total number of minutes (no decimals) your entire app took you (and mention, just bf your favorite words, the time-measuring app / software you used to track it…)
Now, while I feel my views on AI changing — growing on me lately, like a good fungus? — I want writing, especially my own, to be human-based. There should be zero sentences in the email you send me that are not from your own head. PHrases, words, fine, but if your stuff sounds like AI, ugh, yuck. I need to love your writing as you’re the person whose text messages I will read more than anyone's except my wife! (Yann Martel gave me a great quote lately — "I don't need AI to help me write cause it would be like having AI have sex for you or eat for you — I'd rather do it myself." Btw, what's the timestamp of that quote on the YT video of our chat and how many seconds did it take for you to find it ... put that above your favorite words pls)
One more thing: I loved my last assistant, Sarah. She was a rock star. We worked together two years. She had two simultaneous undergrad degrees from NYU (literature / neuroscience), was a former founder w/ her own Substack, and while working for me she worked out every day at her gym in Queens AND read like 2 books a week AND wrote a big chunk of her first novel ... before leaving me to go to Fordham law school. Well done, Sarah! I never knew when / where she was—like she'd be in entirely different cities or countries—and I never asked. She worked for me 30 hours a week, every week, and we sifted perfectly into each other's lives. She had 138 hours every week to do whatever she wanted! I mention this bc she's made a bunch of videos to train you and b she's the person (for better and for worse) I have in my head as a best practice. You can see I think this role is perfect for someone super high-functioning and multi-dimensional ...
So, yeah ... still here??? Really ??? Reminder: I would like this all emailed to me. Last time I did this I got over 900 applications so I apologize in advance if you're in the 99% of people I cannot personally respond to.
That does not mean I don't love you.
I do.
You are awesome.
You are.
The world is overwhelming and complex and messy and we somehow just connected over a job posting.