Quick snapshot from the job board this week:

Meta- Executive Administrative Partner(SF, NY)
100,610-$144,602

Runway- Executive Assistant (Remote- SF, NY)
$100K – $150K

GitLab- Executive Assistant (Remote)
$78,000 - $130,000

These are pulled from the same system I use to track roles across 20+ platforms.

Instead of bouncing between LinkedIn, company sites, and random alerts, you can search everything in one place all for free!

Happy Friday, folks!

It's been a minute. Life did what life does, but I'm back in your inbox and glad to be here.

No long explanation, just a good issue and a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Let's jump in. 👇

You wrap the project, you exhale, you move on.

That's how most of us were trained to operate. Fix it, close it, next.

But there's a meeting that high-functioning teams rely on that most EA and CoS pairs never schedule: the postmortem. It might be the highest-leverage hour you're not blocking.

Something goes sideways, or goes well but leaves everyone quietly exhausted. The exec moves on, you move on, nobody names what happened, what caused it, or what you'd do differently.

Six months later, the same fire, just a different project.

The postmortem breaks that cycle.

It's not a blame session, It's not a debrief that turns into venting. It's a structured look backward so the next version goes better.

Five questions, one hour, written down somewhere it won't disappear.

You are the institutional memory of your executive's office.

You remember the venue was wrong, the briefing doc went out too late, the stakeholder who said nothing in the meeting had a lot to say afterward. You hold all of that, and then it evaporates because there was no structure to capture it.

A postmortem gives that knowledge somewhere to live.

If you're facilitating these, format matters more than you think.

A discussion-only postmortem puts all the weight on whoever speaks first. The loudest voice sets the narrative. People who avoid conflict just nod along.

Try running it with async input first, a shared Figma board, a simple doc, sticky notes before the conversation starts. Anything that lets people write their observations down before the room shapes their memory. You'll get more honesty and a better outcome.

The postmortem is not about what went wrong. It's about whether your team's hard-won learning gets captured or disappears into the next calendar quarter.

EAs and Chiefs of Staff are positioned better than almost anyone to run these well. You saw the whole project. You know what was said and what wasn't. You have the full picture, use it!

We're working on something, and it’s all for you!

The EA Restaurant Map is getting an upgrade, and we want your spots in it. Not influencer picks, not Google's top ten. The places you actually use when it matters, the client dinner rescue, the last-minute reservation that saved the offsite, the hidden gem your exec now takes every VIP to.

That knowledge lives in your head. We want it on the map.

Send us your recs!

This month Cat is breaking down Gemini season, the chaotic energy, the hyperfixation spirals, the twelve ideas before 9am, and somehow still being the most interesting person in the room. She's also got strategic alignments for how to actually harness it at work instead of getting lost in your own labyrinth.

As a Gemini myself, I should clarify: this is not a season for me. This is just my permanent setting. 🫠

Cat Dean is a contributor at Office of the EA.

Because sometimes you walk into a room and just know. You're the one holding it all together and everybody feels it when you're gone.

Full playlist linked here.