#319 The First Five Tasks I’d Hand Off to a VA Today ft. Peter Kim, MD

The Line You’re Still Standing In

Peter opens with a story about Ben & Jerry’s free scoop day. Back when he was a student in Baltimore, he’d walk down to the Inner Harbor and wait 30 to 45 minutes for a free cone. At some point, he did the math. An hour of his time for $5 worth of ice cream stopped making sense, so he quit doing it. Simple enough lesson, but he noticed later that he never really stopped standing in lines. He just swapped ice cream for email, calendar management, and research rabbit holes he was spending 90 minutes on instead of handing off in 10.

That’s the premise of the whole episode. Peter says the doctors he talks to aren’t skipping VAs because of money. You can find one overseas for $7 to $10 an hour, so cost is pretty much off the table as an excuse. The real problem is the setup. Physicians look at the task of training someone and convince themselves it’ll take more time than it saves. In the short term, that’s actually true. But Peter argues that thinking only holds up for maybe the first few weeks.

The episode is built around making this concrete, not just making a case for VAs in theory. He promises 5 specific tasks, what a clean handoff looks like for each one, and how to actually get it done. No philosophy, no grand framework. Just a starting point for people who’ve been putting it off.

Start With Your Inbox

Peter calls inbox management the highest-leverage starting point, especially for physicians who have investments or a side business on top of their clinical work. He’s not just talking about reading email. He means the full triage loop: deciding what needs a response, what can sit, what can be deleted, and doing that across dozens or hundreds of messages a day. For a lot of people, that’s an hour or two gone before they’ve done anything that actually requires their judgment.

A VA can own the first pass. They flag what genuinely needs the physician’s attention, draft replies using templates built together over time, and sort everything into folders so the inbox isn’t just a wall of noise when the doctor finally sits down. The mental shift Peter describes is that handing this off isn’t about giving up control. It’s about not being the first line of defense on things that don’t need a specialist.

He’s honest that the first couple weeks cost you something. You have to train your VA on your response style, what matters, what categories exist. That’s real work. But after about 30 days, he says the system mostly runs on its own. The front-end investment pays back fast once it compounds.

Guard Your Calendar

Calendar management gets its own section because Peter thinks the real cost of scheduling is invisible to most people. It’s not the time to book a single meeting. It’s all the back and forth before that, the mental energy of holding open slots in your head while waiting for someone to confirm, the double checks to avoid conflicts. That friction adds up, and it’s almost entirely delegatable.

His own setup is straightforward. He has Tuesday lunches blocked off with his wife, and everyone on his team knows it. His VA protects that block. Nothing gets booked there unless he’s explicitly approved it. For everything else, he sat down once and gave her a clear policy: what she can book without checking with him, what needs his sign-off, and what’s completely off the table.

That one conversation, done once, means he mostly stops thinking about scheduling. It tends to pay off in the first week, which makes it one of the faster wins compared to something like inbox management that takes more time to train properly.

Research and Travel Logistics

Peter groups research and travel together because both share the same underlying problem: they’re tasks that feel personal and specific, but most of the actual work is just gathering and organizing information that doesn’t require a physician’s brain.

On research, he describes a common situation: you’re looking at a potential investment sponsor, you want to know their track record, or you’re trying to find the best property manager in a particular market. You could spend hours going down rabbit holes online, and with AI tools available now, you can still spend hours going down rabbit holes. His fix is writing a brief for his VA instead. She gathers, evaluates, and fact-checks what she finds, since hallucinations in AI output are a real problem. He gets a summary back in 24 hours and makes the actual decision. His judgment is the asset. His time on Google and Yelp is not.

Travel has the same logic. Every trip carries 3 to 4 hours of logistical overhead when you account for flights, hotels, ground transportation, and conference registrations. Peter hands his VA a brief with dates, budget, and preferences, and she comes back with 2 or 3 options. She also uses a checklist to make sure nothing gets missed. He’s been on the receiving end of forgetting a detail and scrambling at the last minute, and that’s exactly what a thorough handoff prevents.

Content, AI, and the Bigger Picture