The chief of staff's job, translated for brand work

Over the next 30 lessons you'll set up an AI agent that prepares your workday. It drafts briefs, meeting prep and follow-ups, and you approve every one. Before you open any AI tool, you need a clear picture of the job you're handing over.

A chief of staff works for one person, called the principal. Usually the principal is a CEO. Here, the principal is you. The role exists to make the principal as effective as possible. Depending on the organization, the work can be mostly administrative or mostly strategic.

The clearest public picture of the role comes from McKinsey. It ran forums with more than 200 chiefs of staff over five years and published a 2024 podcast with senior partner Andrew Goodman. Harvard Business Review's 2020 article "The Case for a Chief of Staff" (Dan Ciampa) starts from one premise: CEOs need more support than an executive assistant can give. We cite it for that premise only, because only its summary is public.

You probably have no CEO and no staff. But your week has the same parts: requests arriving, deadlines colliding, approvals stalling. This lesson puts names on those parts so you can delegate them clearly later.

McKinsey describes a set of standing duties. These are things a chief of staff does every week, not one-off projects:

1. Information flow. Prepares and filters what reaches the principal, so only what matters arrives, already organized.
2. Air traffic control. Andrew Goodman's own phrase for managing the flow of the principal's work and activities so nothing collides.
3. Meeting prep and the record. Makes sure the principal walks into meetings prepared, and writes down what was said and agreed.
4. Peripheral vision. Acts as eyes and ears so there are no surprises. That includes reporting bad news, because people tend to bring the boss only good news.
5. Calendar in step with the business cycle. Lines up time with the big planning moments and scans the horizon, weekly if not daily.
6. Priorities and lists. Holds the principal to five or six priorities and keeps a now/soon/never list.
7. Follow-through and handover. Tracks what was agreed and records key past decisions.
8. Adviser and sounding board. Gives candid feedback and pushes back when appropriate.

Most of the course turns duties 1 to 7 into routines an AI can prepare for you. Duty 8 stays a conversation you have with yourself or your team.

Here's a worked example: a one-person template shop that sells social templates to independent bakeries, plus some client design work.

• Information flow → request intake. Monday's inbox has three design requests, a supplier invoice, two order questions and a partner pitch. Information flow means each request gets logged with its size, deadline and copy, and the rest gets sorted.
• Air traffic control → the content calendar and publish dates. A client's carousel publishes Thursday and your own launch post publishes Friday. Both need review time, so you schedule the work around them.
• Meeting prep and the record → approval meetings. On a call, the client agrees to "move the logo up and change the date to the 14th." The record turns that into a numbered change list before anyone forgets it.
• Peripheral vision → stalled approvals and slipping dates. The story set has waited six days for sign-off and publishes Friday. Someone needs to notice that today.
• Calendar and business cycle → seasonal planning. Bakeries buy holiday templates well before December, so horizon scanning means planning that bundle weeks ahead.

You already do all of this, mostly in your head. Writing it down is what makes it possible to delegate.

One chief of staff in McKinsey's forum kept the principal to five or six priorities, split into two groups:

• Outward-facing priorities involve clients, buyers and partners. In brand work, that means client launches, your own product launches and partner campaigns.
• Inward-facing priorities keep your own work running: the template library, brand kit upkeep, size guides and your request process.

The limit is the point. With five or six priorities, every incoming item can be checked against them. If a request serves none of them, it goes into a "can wait" pile.

For the bakery template shop, this quarter's list might be:

Outward: 1. Holiday bundle launch  2. Client A's spring campaign
         3. Partner co-promotion with a flour supplier
Inward:  4. Clean up and rename the template library
         5. Update the brand kit with the new accent color

Draft your own list now, with no more than six lines. You'll paste it into your agent's standing instructions in a later lesson. Inward items tend to slip because no client is waiting on them, which is why they need a place on the list.

Another chief of staff in McKinsey's forum kept a three-column list: now, soon and never. The "never" column records things that came up but won't be done. You write them down so they aren't forgotten or quietly dropped. A request nobody answers still feels open to the person who asked. A "never" entry closes it on purpose.

Try it with your real week. Open your inbox, calendar and request list, and pick 10 items from the last seven days. Copy this and fill it in:

NOW (needed this week; serves a priority)
- [item] | priority # | due [date] | source: [email/cal/tracker]

SOON (real, but not this week)
- [item] | priority # | revisit on [date]

NEVER (decided not to do)
- [item] | reason | who needs to know | told on [date]

Worked example: "Resize the bakery menu for a print flyer, due Thursday" goes under NOW. "Supplier asks for a TikTok version of last month's promo" goes under NEVER, with the reason "serves no current priority" and a note to tell the supplier.

Checkpoint: every item sits in one column and has a source. If you can't decide, mark it "needs decision" for now.

McKinsey is just as clear about the limits of the role. These limits will become rules for your AI.

• It doesn't decide for the principal. Decision rights are agreed up front. Your agent can propose that a client's date change is fine. You decide.
• It doesn't blur whose voice it is. People respond to a chief of staff because of halo authority, meaning authority borrowed from the boss. So it must be clear when it speaks for itself and when it speaks for the principal. For your agent, every outgoing message is a draft for you to send.
• It doesn't cut the principal off. Guarding your time is part of the job. Hiding the copywriter, the video editor or the client from you is not.
• It doesn't play politics or make itself the story. One chief of staff in McKinsey's article said the job is to make the principal look good, not yourself.

The short version for the rest of the course: the agent prepares; you decide and send. In the next lesson, you'll sort your actual duties into what to hand an AI and what stays yours.