Sometimes that someone can be a thing, not a worker.

I know that a couple of carefully crafted email filters increased my productivity almost twice and cut down unnecessary screen time almost completely. Knowing your vices can be more than half of the solution sometimes.

I managed to cut down the team lead's daily mail ingress from 3000 mails to sub 300 buy pushing the changes through the org to use a named distribution groups and other minor tweaks.

It's not easy to make the same on a personal account (at least without a personal domain name) but still can be done.

I don't think an assistant is something you afford, so much as something your job requires.

not to mention living in a time you didn't need an email to get a driver's license. heck in brazil, southafrica and some parts of india you cannot even get one without a freaking whatsapp (which you cannot get without a mobile phone account (which you cannot get without a bank account (which...)))

the other day i also had to take a selfie in a government owned app which required a phone with active google play store service, to allow me to see my own data, with no alternative method (being implemented so they say)

Ugh. Sorry to hear that, what a nightmare. First world countries tend to be better in this respect. I'm in the UK, and the worst that I've seen is that you need a phone to receive text messages for 2FA from the bank. What if you're abroad and can't receive those text messages??

Secretaries were part of academia (something that came with his professor job). What is unique to Knuth is not the existence of a secretary, but his (attempted) refusal to receive emails except about bugs (but those he gets thousands of, as everyone in the world is encouraged to report bugs to him about every page he has ever written).

Anyway, Knuth's secretary (shared with several other faculty members) retired from Stanford several years ago (he dedicated one of his books to her), and although he hasn't updated the page, in fact he does all his own email now. (There is someone who comes in once a week to send his replies in the post — if you email Knuth about a bug you may get a reply a few months later from this person, asking for your postal address to mail you the reply: this will be a printout of your email, with Knuth's reply in pencil… and an enclosed cheque if your report/suggestion was accepted.)