How I automated the boring parts of life
stevecorona.com
stevecorona.com
- Drop off my laundry at the laundromat's wash and fold service to pick up the next day. There are even a bunch of services and laundromats that will come to your apartment to take your laundry and drop it back off for you.
- Seamless has about 100 places that deliver to my apartment, about 400 that deliver to work. You can schedule your dinner delivery time.
- I've had friends my age hire a maid to clean weekly apparently without costing much, or just Taskrabbit for one-off things.
- Fresh Direct for delivery groceries.
- No need for a car, so I can be productive on the train or at least read depending on the commute.
- Cabs are incredibly cheap here.
Laundry & Maid service is next on my list, though. I figure, if they save me even 2 hours a week, I've already made my money back.
(This depends on whether they save productive hours or idle, underutilized hours)
It sounds cheeky to describe grocery delivery as "life changing" but it really is.
So you can't have it delivered in the middle of the night and fetch it in the morning, but you certainly can have it delivered after work - but not have to hurry home to make sure you get it right as it comes off the truck.
I wouldn't leave them out all day on a hot day, but for a few hours in typical Seattle weather, no problem?
Of course they didn't have fancy web frontends, but they still picked up and dropped off laundry (charged by weight), cleaned the house every week or two, delviered groceries (most UK supermarkets will) Etc.
These things are not expensive and take much of the annoying drudgery out of life.
What pros/cons have you found in using them?
Thanks!
The minimum order value can be a problem. With their £10/month subscription service, it drops from to £40.
Ocado's customer service is excellent, and they're very good at timekeeping — you just schedule an 1-hour delivery slot.
Pro - food comes to you and you only get what you want (not random hungry puchases). Con - you have to be in when they arrive, unsure what the windows are.
Laundry - I was living in NE London at the time (about 3 years ago) so I used http://www.theironingboard.com/ There must be more of these around in other parts of town.
Pro - somebody washes, dries, folds and (optionally) irons your clothes. Con - ???? (OK so it costs money instead of time, what you think is good value in this department is probably very subjective, and you have to be there to accept delivery, but they did deliver in the evenings :)
Cleaners are an odd one because you're allowing someone access to your property, often when you're not there. It may be best to find a trustworthy cleaner by word of mouth.
Cleaners are £8-£10/hour (in SW London anyway), ours takes 2.5 hours for our 3 bed flat. They'll often do ironing too.
Couldn't ever go back to living without a washing machine though!
Haha, agreed :-D
Ding, I smell a business idea:
OurChef: You want good dinners, and you want a life. We want to sell you good dinners. OurChef is your personal caterer, with authentic quality ingredients.
The only problem I saw was that their meals were typically fairly expensive, to the point where you could probably eat out every day for less money.
Someone has taken the idea and try to scale it since: http://www.facebook.com/cook4food
It's social, it's local, it's mobile, it's cooking!
UK: housebites.com
Even if you are cooking something relatively hands off in your oven.. how often do you leave your home while your oven is on? You are locked down to that location for the duration of the cooking time.
But still, preparing the food once or twice a day is a distracting pain. It would be great if I could just stop off at street vendors or fast food stores and eat well, but as it is that stuff will kill you.
You don't have to stand over a stove watching stuff fry. You only have to clean one dish. You make enough for leftovers too.
Personal chef makes it sound like it would be somewhat fancy, and thus expensive, but in that post it was just somebody who was cooking at home but make more and bring it to them. That could be something to look into if you're really interested.
edit: I believe it was this post http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/the-price-of-my-d... At least that's the idea. (I can't believe there's no date on that post)
Maybe it's an attitude thing?
I mean, sure, if you want some fancy-pants meal you're going to have to put in some effort. But if you don't want to spend time and still want something healthy, it doesn't take long. (Heck, how long does it take to make a sandwich?).
Frankly, anybody suggesting a personal chef must be off their rocker or living on a different planet than me. It's not hard to cook, even if you're lazy.
Bulk bake some fish, chicken, whatever, for protein (or your favorite vegetable protein source). Store.
One of the healthiest dinners imaginable (quinoa, chickpeas, and lentils are wonderful) is now as easy as placing these two items on a plate and microwaving.
Sure, you'll get bored after a while, but just mix it up next time.
Do services like seamless deliver food that follows certain diets. Like Ketogenic/No-Carb, Paleo, Vegan, etc?
Some restaurants do cater to specific diets, yes, especially in NYC. It totally depends on where you are though. I'm pescetarian (and 98% vegetarian) and there're tons of options in this city, and a bunch of vegan places I'll order from sometimes too. There's also a macrobiotic place that delivers to work.
Is that a joke? A 10 minute cab ride with light traffic can approach $20.
Americans don't realize how cheap they've got it.
You could say that delegating work to "experts" means the work is done more efficiently so you save resources, and that's a step in the right direction towards automation, but not automation.
Note: I'm very interested in words and the contrast between what they mean and how people use them.
If there is a solution, they should mention it on their front page because I'm sure half the people who go there ask themselves: "Wouldn't I have to give my credit card info to complete strangers for this to be useful?"
This seems to be the weak link with these services.
First off, security is our number one priority with this feature and it's totally baked in from the start. At no point, does your assistant, or anybody else at Fancy Hands have access to your credit card number. Not bad, right? You don't have to worry about a rogue assistant using your credit card information, they'll never know it (plus, we don't have any rogue assistants)."
So fancyhands couldn't have helped the writer of the blogpost with his airplane ticket problem
So essentially, FancyHands can book it for you with their card, and cancel it if they can't charge you within 24 hours - but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't want to go that route.
That's what takes the most time, once you have that, just go and buy. Sure, having someone that could do everything would be good.
But you could do that with a travel agent.
So this can be confusing. We can definitely purchase things for you. Want us to order flowers? Have someone come install your air conditioner? No problem, we can even handle the payment for most things.
However, we do this by billing you securely (just like iTunes, etc), and then letting the assistants use "the company card." So the assistant won't actually handle your credit card information, but we can still make these purchases for you.
So users never have to expose their Credit Card information to their assistants. The assistant will never ask for it. If you need us to do something that actually requires knowing your entire credit card number for some reason, that's the type of thing we can't do. But making purchases doesn't fall under that umbrella.
Here's the whole comment:
Nope, at this point, we don't take any percentage or fee. We even pass along any discounts we receive (we get up to 15% off flower some purchases for example and we pass that along to you).I mean if the flowers cost $60 (from the florist), how much would they cost the client via your service? I mean outside of the normal cost for using the service.
Essentially what I'm asking is if there is a "service fee" on purchases?
Unfortunately, I don't think I could extract $25/mo out of the service myself. Do you have any plans for alternative pricing structures? I would definitely pay $100 for a block of 20 requests that I could use over the course of a year, say.
In my previous job, this was precisely the structure the firm evolved to give to certain customers who were on the fence about the service. (B2B - financial Services)
We had one tweak to it, and once people used it, they never got out.
Granted, it's only been an hour, but that silence doesn't make me feel good.
Nope, at this point, we don't take any percentage or fee. We even pass along any discounts we receive (we get up to 15% off flower some purchases for example and we pass that along to you).
I, personally, had a bad experience using "Fancy Hands" and cancelled my subscription just the other month. Although, I do admit it was mainly because I just couldn't get the $25/month out of it (like you did).
I am curious, how did Fiverr work out (quality wise) for your proofreading? I have debated using this service before for proofreading, but had not yet actually tried it.
Two days later, I had a fully edited and proofread copy of my document, above and beyond what I expected to get for $50.
Mechanical Turk was way cheaper (even though $50 is already pretty cheap) but the quality varied greatly... from super-low to super-high. I would love to build an automated, nearly real-time proofreading tool that harnessed MT, though.
Related: $1/day is a really bad way to present a pricing plan of $25/5 requests. Yes, that's technically correct, but I don't want to amortize the cost over the number of days in the month; I want to amortize it over the number of days I actually use the product (or, better yet, the number of times I use it - so $5/task).
FH had a message on their pricing page that immediately turned me off. Sometimes, it's better to not be so dynamic (i.e. I would have signed up had I not seen the message below):
"Steve Corona knows you'll love having Fancy Hands. Sign up now and get 50% off your first month or 5% off your first year."
BTW- I love FancyHands and have 0 ties with them.
A note for the FancyHands team, though (I know the founder is hanging around here somewhere): I didn't notice the referral link at first; my first reaction when I saw "Steven Corona knows you'll love FancyHands" was that Steven worked for the company, which detracts from the authenticity of his blog post. I'd seriously consider removing that 'feature' and making the referral process more inconspicuous, leaving it up to the bloggers to disclose their participation in the referral program.
I'd propose just disclosing exactly that: "here's a referral link, and you get 50% off the first month by using it." If folks are uncomfortable with using it, they presumably can find Fancy Hands' website on their own. Or offer both direct & referral links.
The automated driving component might work. Maybe if I lease a black hybrid, have the driver be my employee, and let him do uber on off hours, it could actually net money. But setting this up sounds complicated. If only I could automate it.
So now we look to automate the remnant of actually having to operate the machinery. It's interesting because it shows how spoiled we've become. Even loading or unloading a washing machine or dishwasher are now considered work.
Similarly, doing the dishes and commuting can still be annoying despite the automation. Loading and unloading dishes takes a fair amount of time. Commuting requires having to schedule one's time around bus and train schedules.
In the case the laundromat, you have the carting of multiple baskets of clothes and materials, often down flights of stairs, into a vehicle, and at some distance. Materials experience spillage. A community (e.g. apartment complex) laundromat eliminates some travel, but your quarter supply may vary unexpectedly, requiring unexpected travel. This probably amortizes to eliminate the gain.
In the case of doing laundry at home, you have both an infrastructure cost and a pipelining problem. Speaking for myself, I can rarely accomplish anything useful during a laundry cycle, leading to a near-total loss.
And yes I'm talking about the 30 to 120 minutes I spend daily on these things, as if a >10% increase of free waking hours isn't a big deal.
And apparently Steve uses 10 Q-Tips per day.
I definitely need to start using FancyHands (got the email from the guy who created it recently about how he was killing an old company and putting all effort into FancyHands). Unfortunately some of my current tasks require calling my lawyer and doing some other things that really only I can do.
I do need a dentist though, and a handful of other things. Time to delegate!
There would definitely have to be some great marketing for this to not seem shady.
A van wouldn't cut it - you would need a bus.
Can a hygienist practice independently?
I assume it shows up once or twice a month.
If you're just talking about, "we come to you", that doesn't seem like a real compelling service. Dentist visits are rare and important, so I'm willing to invest a little more, and it seems like dentistry in the back of a truck would be limited. Much of the equipment at a dentist's office can't exactly be thrown into a truck.
(PS: Sounds like you were an enjoysthin.gs user, thanks for that!)
Delegation is just getting someone who earns less money than you to do your boring stuff for you.
They don't necessarily have to earn less money than you.
In all seriousness having a SO that can remind you and help out with important reminders and things in life is pretty handy.
You get 50% off your first month, I get 10 bucks.
You are reading their writing. If you are reading it, it must be somewhat interesting. If you click on a link leading to a list of items the author included in his post, he probably just saved you some time. If you buy one of those items, you probably would have bought it anyway. Why not let the author benefit too? Why complain or question? Why do you care?
/rant
The web is full of affiliate spam, so every time I see an affiliate link I wonder if the article is just a very elaborate form of spam.
....But both allow referral links. Call me a cynic, but it strikes me that this person had a referral link to Fancy Hands, threw in Amazon's obscure service because Amazon also allows referrals, and gave it a catchy headline of "automation".
I didn't think Refer.ly had any target market, but it appears we found one potential customer.
I'm not against bloggers using referral links, but I think they should make it clear when they're using them. Their recommendation carries less weight if you know that they're getting paid for everyone who signs up through them.
Also, this line:
If you buy one of those items, you probably would have bought it anyway.
If this was true, no one would ever need to pay for advertising or referral links. But clearly, people do pay for advertising and referral links. Ergo...
The worst problem is that incentives distort belief. Watch friends who sign up for some network marketing thing. They find ways to be excited about their products. Basically, they end up liking the stuff they're pushing more, because otherwise the cognitive dissonance is too painful.
When I worked as a consultant, I never took vendor kickbacks like these. At the very best, they created the appearance that I was working for somebody other than my clients, so that I'd have to work a lot harder to maintain client trust. The worst case was that they'd distort my thinking without me noticing, meaning that my clients shouldn't trust me.
I think it's the same deal for writers. The whole point of incentive systems is to distort behavior. It's not unreasonable that people assume that they work.
Not a bad one either.
I solved it by 'will'. TODO lists, monthly shopping, booking everything on time... It is easier than you think.
I'm working on changing this mindset but it's proving difficult.
I prefer to just DIY. Then when it breaks again, at least you're empowered and know what happened.
Using Mechanical Turk for proofreading/editing has always appealed to me. I wonder what the OP's results were with that that led him to choose Fiverr instead? As a writer, I would be paranoid about throwing any of my (commercial valuable) work online to the crowd...what if you wrote a script to break your manuscript into sentences and paid 2 cents per sentence? You could only catch within-sentence grammatical errors. But you'd vastly reduce the fear that your work is floating out there for someone to misappropriate.
[pedantic]
There's a grammatical error (I think) in the last sentence of the post ("half an hour an Amazon"):
> You can automate almost all of the boring parts of your life, today, for less than 25 bucks and half an hour an Amazon. And make sure to have your assistant email me telling me how much time I saved you.
I used Fiverr over MT because of the spin-up time involved in setting up the MT project. I only tested Fiverr with one 62 page chapter, which I was able to send to my guy in one document. If I used MT, I'd have to split up all of the content into paragraphs, create tasks, and review all of the work, etc.
I'll probably test MT again in the future and use some sort of system to.. automate it ;)
(Except cat litter, that is totally worth getting delivered from Amazon just to avoid carrying it.)
I also automate groceries at http://shop.safeway.com .
In San Francisco you can automate laundry with http://sfwash.com . Great service.
When I signed up for Safeway, I hit an input wall, of the same size, that almost made me close the tab.
Automation would imply a scheduled event to me, but it looks like this is more for one-off transactions?
One problem I see is that access to one's financial records sometimes is used as a proxy for identity, much like the presumption that, if you can read an email sent to a particular address, you must "own" that email address. Didn't PayPal once (or even still does?) debit N cents from one's bank account and then ask what amount was charged as a way of verifying new users?
What else would you have them do? They are verifying this is your bank account and this is the best way to do it. Think of it like feature detection in JS vs. user agent string matching.
I think it takes me longer to describe what I want to the assistant than doing it myself.
People used to book through travel agents. They'd call them and tell them when and where they want to go and the agent books something for them.
Travel agents disappeared because people would rather take the time to do it on their own in order to save money.
Now people are too busy to book flights on their own and want some form of assistant to do it for them. On comes a novel new service!
create an account on slickdeals
set up a deal alert for your desired keywords
don't think about it again until you get an email alerting you to a good deal
This removes a cognitive load for me. I no longer waste time researching trivial outlays.
IMHO, the whole post is not very useful and the 2 affiliate links are pushing it ... How much does one earn with such a HN post? Please disclose.
(disclaimer: I run the outsourcing marketplace http://taskarmy.com where you can find screened virtual assistants: http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-outsourcing)
I still haven't become a Fancy Hands user, but I do remember him saying lots of new parents turn to them for help when a baby arrives, so perhaps that'll be me someday.
I dealing with general fake-work but seems like there's just as much work involved in getting someone else to do these things as just doing them yourself?
Also - any recommendations for other services to compare to?
I think I have something worth sharing, I just don't have the discipline to get it written down.
Is it just that I can make a request via a web form, rather than via a phone call?
Of course, you could probably rig a replenishment system using python, some hardware, and the Amazon API... An erp for your home...
Does Twitpic still not allow you to export your own pictures or did they give up on that?