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Comment by coenhyde | Hacker News Reader

Even though we have many luxuries, modern life does require a lot of admin. Most of which needs be be conducted during business hours. I recently took a two week vacation and spent half of it catching up on BS life admin that I had neglected over the last 6 months / year due to a hectic work schedule.

I'd imagine many of us are not wealthy enough to afford a personal assistant but live complex enough lives to warrant it. Modern life kind of requires a 4 day work week, if you are salaried slave.

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Yeah, I think this is a good point that doesn't appear often enough in discussions about work in modern life. For example, when talking about work week length or women joining the workforce, people rarely stop to debate about the historical evolution in the time required for other tasks. On one side nowadays we have some nice appliances like washing machines that save us a lot of time. On the other we have increased bureaucracy to deal with. We need more complex machines like cars and smartphones and computers. There's more to choose, and also more to decide. There are some mixed elements, like food delivery. It can save us time, but it also lowers the quality of life for most people. If you have kids, the modern expectation is that their time should be 26 million times more structured than it used to be 30 years ago. And as clothing and other goods are more readily available, there are also higher expectations around that, and around the food they eat, and around pretty much everything. The activities they do, the activities we do, the related requirements, keeping in touch with the news, etc. Sure, you might not care or ignore some of those, but in general, there's an inflation in life complexity and decisions unrelated to our jobs. And even inside jobs, there's this trend of ever-growing expectation of productivity and inflation of expected education and whatever. When we discuss work, we need to discuss it in the context of the current world, not compare it naively to a part of what we did in the past. And we often make silly comparisons that don't really account for how much the world has changed in a few years.

"... if you are salaried slave."

The fact that I'm a salaried slave means I'm expected to work more than 5 days per week sometimes. I swear, half the time I take vacation I either need to work extra before/after it or even log in while on vacation.

So at least in my situation, if I had a four day week I would probably be working more than just those 4 days. Hopefully it would be a reduction from current levels.

This is the #1 reason I have not entertained the 4-day week idea myself. While I'm confident my productivity per day worked would be at least as good and my post-tax finances would be fine, I don't trust my colleagues or customers to respect the boundary.

If you don’t trust your colleagues to respect your boundaries do you still trust them as colleagues?

In some cases, no. In most cases, it is more accurate to say that I don't anticipate other people in the org being considerate, due to a lot of the interactions we have being one-off rather than an ongoing relationship.

Well, if I may be blunt, environments like that typically aren’t good to work in. Sounds like too little trust for great work to happen. Any thoughts about going elsewhere?

You’d be surprised how affordable and effective a virtual personal assistant can be. Mine handles almost all of my life admin stuff and it’s the best $500/mo I spend.

$500 per month is a lot for most people.

Indeed. People run entire families on like $300 a month, where I've been.

It is likely that a part-time assistant can be hired for much less in low cost-of-living regions.

What kind of stuff is that? Don't think I can come up with anything I do that I could see someone else handle for me or that would be worth paying for.

The sort of stuff that feels silly to delegate but 10min here, 10min there adds up fast.

Big ongoing thing is that she helps with my inbox, deals with ordering stuff online, random annoying tasks like booking travel, some customer support, stuff like that. Oh also makes calls for me when I don’t wanna deal with it like booking appointments and such.

Kinda wishing I could afford someone in the same city so they could help with physical tasks but maybe later.

The reason I spend time booking travel is either because I want to save a few bucks (and then paying someone makes no sense) or because I'm exploring options to know what I want (again, makes no sense having someone else do it). If it were pure business travel as in "I have to be at a conference in city A from X to Y" I could see the value, maybe. But for personal? No.

I spend literally a minute with customer support a year, I think it would be easier voicing my issue directly than having to explain it to a third party and having multiple follow ups..

I don't get this at all. I'm so at the opposite I would almost pay money to be able to do this myself instead of having others in control. Can't fathom paying for the hassle of having others do this.

You’re not scared that someone has access to your emails?

This is kind of like Visa Concierge, although they don't handle your inbox :)

I find I have to constantly tailor my requests with additional details, otherwise it's a back-and-forth email tag which rapidly diminishes the usefulness of the service. But I suppose that's to be expected when each time you contact them you get a different agent helping you..

Yeah this only works if you have your person not "some person". A fantastic example recently:

Some newsletter sent a book recommendation list. Instead of clicking links, finding the right format, and dealing with all that, I just slacked my assistant "Hey can you get me all the books from X newsletter on audiobook". Feels silly to delegate, instead of a task I put off and think about and finally waste time on eventually, it's a 5 second thing and I can move on right away.

The "not have to think about it" part is the bigger benefit imo.

I’d rather spend this 500/month on a bigger rent.

Is it always the same person? How do you build up the trust to let them mess with your bills/tickets/money?

It’s been the same person for almost 5 years. Trust was built over time.

She doesn’t have direct access to my money, only credit cards. Those are easy to cancel or chargeback if things go screwy. She does know my SSN which is a bigger concern, but then again you give your SSN to all sorts of people and services in USA, it’s very not actually a secret.

Oh and she doesn’t know passwords to anything. LastPass sharing only.

Doesn't that mean she knows the shared passwords?

Most password managers let you share passwords without actually revealing the password.

I struggle with this concept. Suppose a password manager's password sharing utility allows me to login to a web service in my browser. Couldn't I open the Network tab and observe the network request that displays the plaintext username and password?

Probably. It’s not meant to be bullet proof I don’t think, but most people who aren’t developers don’t know that the network inspector is even a thing let alone how to use it.

How can they possibly login without the password being available to them?

yeah this is one of my concerns with virtual assistants. Do you trust them with your identity and privileged information? eg SSN, CC's, passwords etc

This was a major plot point in the movie "Where'd you go, Bernadette". Wife of a Microsoft executive hands over all the family information to a virtual assistant that is actually a Russian identity fraudster.

What kind of stuff is your “life admin stuff”?

For me, it’s usually house stuff. If something breaks or needs maintenance that I can’t handle, it’s often a chore lining up contractors to get it surveyed and repair. Other than that, I’m also curious what people’s life admin stuff is.

How'd you go about finding and choosing one?

> Modern life kind of requires a 4 day work week,

I think if applied globally, a large number of things that I want to do on extra free day will also be closed. If everyone gets friday off it will be just like saturday where I can't to bank, dr, therapist appointments and so on because they also closed. This new holiday must be mandatorily floating

The other reply was on the money (i.e. people would take different days), but also don't let the threat of "if everyone did it, something bad would happen" stop the immediate gains during such a transition.

If your scenario was to happen, it would be 10 years at least, even with a quick change in habits. That's a long time before such problems come into play.

Similar arguments are made against the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement - if everyone stopped buying things wouldn't the economy slow down? Sure, it probably would, but such large changes in behaviour take time, and adjustments would be made during that time if the trend continues.

I’m confident the distribution of people that take different days off would be fine.

Some would take Monday (me)

Some would take Friday

Some would take Wednesday.

Hourly employees would still take whatever day fits the official schedule

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