36 Things You Can Get Your Virtual Assistants To Do To Make Your Life Easier. | Hacker News Reader

36 Things You Can Get Your Virtual Assistants To Do To Make Your Life Easier.

joelsnews.com

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This is a terribly-formatted, poorly-worded article.

Maybe he should have gotten a VA to clean it up some before it was posted?

Note: it was written by a Filipino.. maybe his english wasn't great.

Come on, give him a break.

This could almost be a list of "36 Things You Can Do with Shell Scripts To Do To Make Your Life Easier".

Of course that means that you have to write the shell script, and then you have to maintain the box that runs that shell script, and then you have to fix that shell script when it stops working, then, inevitably, you end up rewriting that shell script because it sucks, then you have to move that shell script to a new box, assuming that you didn't forget about it, ad infinitum... I'm guilty of all of these. =)

Shell scripts aren't pixie dust, they're just more code that you have to maintain.

In the same vein, virtual assistants are not pixie dust, they are employees that you have to maintain.

I think that the biggest amount of time in creating scripts to do tasks if writing and debugging them. It could be avoided by contracting a programmer to do it for you. I am not sure that this would decrease maintenance time, though.

Agreed, but many of these seem like they might be one time, or very rare, tasks.

And I have fun writing scripts :)

This one especially bothers me:

"11. I had a long list of emails that were not separated by commas. I had the VA “clean it up” so that the emails were separated by commas."

... this is achievable in so many ways without resorting to a virtual assistant that it's counter-productive to assign the task, not to mention that even in the Phillippines, grep is cheaper.

I've never used a VA, but from what I've read, it seems that they can do your menial tasks for you really well (spreadsheets, basic research, etc). In other words, they offload a lot of of the stuff you have to do and let you focus on real work.

But expecting them to be good at “creative image selection” and “positioning of text for posters for better readability” is silly. That's important user-facing stuff. Check their work before printing or get an expert.

Based on the those tasks, seems like hiring a lot of cheap VAs would be helpful to spammers.

Finding good VAs is more challenging than it seems. I've tried using asksunday with poor results. I asked for some market research.

Can anyone recommend a good VA firm?

It depends on what you're looking for but if you want Filipino VAs rather than Indian or elsewhere then onlinjobs.ph or bestjobs.ph are the places to look.

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