When your job becomes your survival kit: Moving countries as an EA

There is a particular kind of overwhelm that has nothing to do with the volume of work in front of you. It's the overwhelm of being the person who holds everything together for everyone else, confronted with a moment where the everything is yours.

I moved from Dubai to New Zealand earlier this year. On paper, an international relocation is a project like any other: a set of interdependent streams, a fixed deadline, a list of things that must happen in sequence and a longer list of things that can run in parallel. In practice, standing in my Dubai apartment surrounded by boxes — visa paperwork on the table, shipping quotes in one browser tab, my bank's account-closure process in another, and a folder on my desktop dedicated entirely to the bureaucratic requirements of moving one small dog across the world — I was not thinking in work streams. I was just overwhelmed.

What happened next wasn't a decision, exactly. It was more of a default. I opened Notion, built a project board, and started breaking the move into tasks with owners, deadlines, and dependencies. The same thing I would have done on a Monday morning for a CEO with too much on his plate. The relief was immediate, not because anything had changed, but because everything that had been living in my head was now on a page. Externalised, visible, navigable. The complexity didn't shrink. It just became something I could work with.

This is, I've come to think, one of the quieter advantages of doing this job for long enough. It's not that EAs are more resilient than other people, or more organised, or less affected by stress. It's that we have a set of processes we've tested under pressure, and those processes are portable. When the complexity is professional, we reach for them instinctively. When the complexity is personal, they're still there — if we remember to reach.

The move had a fixed departure date determined by a personal commitment in New Zealand. That single immovable point became the project's anchor. From it, I worked backwards: when did I need to submit the visa application to have a realistic chance of approval in time? When did I need to give notice on my flat, or request a short extension if the timing didn't align? When did the shipping company need confirmation to hit my delivery window? Each dependency found its place in the sequence. It is, I recognise, exactly how you would structure a CEO's preparation for a board meeting or a funding round. The methodology is the same. What changes is the subject matter.

The dog was the hardest stream, and the one that refused to resolve on schedule. Importing a dog into New Zealand is a process of notable complexity with MPI requirements, titre testing, approved veterinary checks, a timeline that has its own logic and answers to no one else's. Her timeline extended beyond mine. I arrived in New Zealand without her, and I am still, from here, coordinating with the relocation company to bring her across. It is a loose thread in an otherwise closed project (aside from my shipping but that’s something that is completely, utterly, totally out of my hands), and that’s ok. Part of managing complexity professionally is accepting that not every stream closes when you need it to. You hold the thread, you stay in contact with the right people, and you trust the process you've set up.

What I didn't fully anticipate was how quickly the professional self would stand down once I arrived. The project was done, or as done as it was going to be, and some other part of me took over — relieved, disoriented, glad to be somewhere new. Within a few days of arriving, I noticed I was moving through the house making mental notes of what was missing, what needed to be sourced, what small gaps existed between the space as it was and the space as it needed to be. I didn't register it as work. It was just what my attention did.

Thirteen years of making other people's environments function apparently leaves a mark.

I've thought since about what the difference is between navigating something like this as an EA, and navigating it as someone whose work has nothing to do with operational complexity. I don't think the answer is that EAs are simply more capable. It's something more specific: when the pressure arrived, I had a methodology to default to, a tested process I'd used hundreds of times in professional contexts.

I’m starting a new role at the end of May. A new organisation, a new culture, a new set of priorities to understand and a new executive to build a working relationship with. Another project, in other words. Another Notion board, in all likelihood.

Some things travel well.