It's been a personal goal of mine to make it a habit to write scripts to automate a repetitive task, no matter how minor or rare the task. As long as the solution takes 9 minutes to code to deal with 10 minutes of grunt work. I'd argue, though, that the benefits of practice (and habit building), that it's worth spending 12 minutes of scripting time per 10 minutes of code, even if you never have to run that script again. Obviously, TMMV.

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.