The idea behind personal outsourcing is to free up more of your time by delegating tasks that don’t require your personal touch to complete. I’ve heard of people outsourcing reading to their kids and even arguing with their spouse, but the whole point of personal outsourcing is to free up time from unimportant tasks to focus on family and other things of high importance.
In this list we are going to look at 100 different ways you can use an assistant to save you time. Some will work with a virtual as well as an on site assistant, some will only work with on site help. Obviously you need to match the job with the skills of your assistant, but this can provide a valuable starting point of ideas if you are interested in outsourcing some tasks and saving time.
One word of warning. Don’t expect an assistant to save you time on every task at first. Unless your needs are very mundane, you will probably want to invest some time in letting them learn your preferences and the style in which you like things done. As they learn what you need, they can start to make decisions based on how you are likely to make them and this can be one of the greatest time savings of all.
- Grocery store trip – It may or may not be efficient to send someone to do your detailed shopping, trips to pickup milk, bread and other staples can be handled by someone else.
- Meal planning – This can be nicely coupled with grocery shopping. You could even set certain targets you want to hit regarding nutrition.
- Meal preparation – If your assistant can cook, this might be a good time saver for you. Obviously this doesn’t work very well with a virtual assistant.
- Deposits – With a rubber stamp, you can give someone else the ability to make bank deposits for you. Obviously it needs to be someone you trust.
- Scanning – If you are trying to implement a paperless office, having someone else do your scanning can save you a lot of time.
- Filing – If you haven’t gone paperless.
- Proof reading – A second pair of eyes can often spot issues much faster than you can yourself.
- Contacts cleanup – If you have a setup that syncs contacts from your computer, phone and other devices, it is likely that you have a bunch of duplicates or incomplete contacts. Let someone else clean them up and make sure your information is up to date and accurate.
- Send handwritten letters – Using a font like vLetter, you can give someone else the ability to print and send handwritten letters for you.
- Pay bills – You may or may not want to give someone else access to your online bill payment service. If you still use checks, someone can save you time by getting everything ready so you just have to sign the checks.
- Get your oil changed – The 30 to 60 minutes it takes to get your oil changed can easily be handed off to someone else.
- Transcribe voicemail – Depending on your workflow, it might be much more efficient to have your voicemails transcribed and sent as email.
- Shred sensitive documents – This can be particularly important if you are scanning in a lot of documents that can’t be thrown away due to the information they contain.
- Buy airline tickets – This can be tricky because there is a lot that usually goes into picking out tickets that requires your personal attention. However, if your needs are simple, this can be a small task that you can delegate.
- Wait on hold – It is easy to waste a lot of time just waiting for someone else to answer the phone. While you can’t hand off every phone call to an assistant, the ones that you can will save you time.
- Tech support – If you deal with a lot of electronics you probably spend at least some time fixing problems, working with tech support and getting parts replaced. In some cases these are activities that could be delegated.
- Mailing letters and packages – It isn’t hard to mail a package, but it can be time consuming and that makes it a great canidate to delegate.
- Send birthday cards – Sending birthday cards is a great networking tool. An assistant can help by getting the cards ready, addressed, stamped and even signing them using a signature font.
- Birthday shopping – With a little organization an assistant can help you keep up with your birthday gift giving. If you give them a list of people, birthdays and a list of possible gifts they can make sure you never miss a gift giving opportunity.
- Finding deals – An assistant can help find the best deal (including shipping and tax charges) on a particular item you need to purchase. American Express’ concierge generally does a good job of this.
- Answer phone calls – Using something like Google Voice or Ring Central you can forward your phone calls to an assistant so callers get a real person during the times you would normally send them to voice mail.
- Library run – It is easy to order books off Amazon simply to avoid the inconvenience of going to the library. Sending an assistant to the library is particularly useful if you have a small library where a lot of specific books will need to come through library loan.
- Proof reading – A second set of eyes to look over things before you send them out can drastically reduce little errors. This can be a bit challenging if you are trying to use someone in India where they speak a slightly different version of English.
- Phone calls – Sometimes you need to get a message to someone and simply leaving a message won’t do. An assistant can keep calling until the person answers and give the message.
- Bill collection – If someone owes you money, having an assistant call and inquire about when to expect payment can help keep you out of the bill collector role but still get the payment in the mail.
- Researching lists – For example, if I want a list of the top 100 peer blogs to Productivity501 along with various stats about them, an assistant can gather that information easily into an document where it can be sorted and analyzed.
- Interviews – Virtual assistants are great for querying a large number of people and compiling their answers.
- Organizing personal library – Have you ever wanted to have your home library organized according to the Dewey Decimal system?
- Book index – If the Dewey Decimal system is to much, you still might like a master index of your library.
- Listing books on Amazon – If you have a bunch of books you want to get rid of, an assistant can get them listed for you on Amazon.
- Update phone – If you can’t sync your phone with your computer, consider having an assistant update the contacts.
- Locate photos and illustrations – A virtual assistant can save you a lot of time by locating pictures to illustrate blog posts and presentations.
- Transcription – Sometimes you want to have a text copy of an audio file. It could be the recording of a conference call, meeting or even radio broadcast. This time consuming process is a great candidate for outsourcing to an assistant. If you have a tremendous amount of audio to transcribe, you may want to look into using services that specialize in audio transcription.
- Categorize pictures – An assistant can help you categorize, rate and organize your pictures by adding tags or putting them in different folders.
- Mail merge – A good assistant should be able to take a spreadsheet and a letter and do a mailing with minimal intervention on your part. This could be anything from sending out your Christmas letter to 50 family members or a huge newsletter mailing for your company.
- Watering plants – This may seem trivial, but it is one other place that an assistant can save you a few minutes.
- Setting up appointments – If you need to meet with a large number of people an assistant can setup your meetings and update your schedule.
- Watching for news – An assistant can monitor various news sources and notify you when something comes up that you need to know about.
- Garage sale shopping – Garage sales are one of those things that you don’t know what you are looking for until you find it. However if you do know what you are looking for, an assistant can scour the garage sales looking for used books or whatever it is you need.
- Fill the car with gas – It isn’t a hard task, but it takes up your time. If you can send someone to fill the car up for you it will probably save you 15 to 30 minutes of time.
- Driving – Letting someone else drive you can free up your time to work on the computer, read, make phone calls safely, etc.
- Qualify leads – If your business generates leads that then need to be qualified, a virtual assistant can follow up by phone, ask a few questions and schedule a meeting with you. This helps you keep your time focused on the qualified customers.
- Twitter – Most of our famous quotes on Twitter were researched and scheduled by my assistant.
- Printing – It doesn’t always make sense, but sometimes it makes more sense to send your assistant a file and let them handle the printing, getting the right paper, printer options, etc.
- Summarizing data – This can be a great way to use a virtual assistant. Let them send you summaries of news or financial information that you would wade through otherwise.
- Article clipping – Instead of going through magazines and newspapers yourself, an assistant can clip the parts that are relevant to you.
- Setting up appointments – If you need to meet with a large number of people an assistant can setup your meetings and update your schedule.
- Watching for news – An assistant can monitor various news sources and notify you when something comes up that you need to know about.
- Office supply stocking – An assistant can help make sure that you don’t run out of paper, pens or toner.
- Reconcile accounts – Trying to find the missing transaction that is keeping your accounts from balancing is a great thing to delegate.
- Preparing expense reports – You give them your receipts with a note on the back and they handle filling out whatever forms you need.
- Sending out “good to meet you letters” – A great networking tool is to follow up with a physical letter. An assistant can handle doing this for you.
- Letter sequence – Similar to the above, but you may want to send people out a sequence of letters. Once again, a great thing to delegate.
- Wait for cable repair – Most cable companies give you a window of when they will come that is huge and keeps you sitting at home all day wondering when they will show up. Let someone else do the waiting.
- Wait for important packages – If you have a package coming that needs a signature, you don’t have to be stuck waiting for it.
- Locate and schedule carpet cleaners – You an give criteria such as: locate 3 carpet cleaners, get and follow up with references, choose the one that sounds like they will do the best job at a reasonable price.
- Answer emails – I’m not crazy about giving someone else direct access to my email, but there are some situations where it may make sense. In particular it may be good if you are away from email for an extended period of time.
- Transcribe written notes – Turn your written notes into searchable text.
- Negotiate – Sometimes having a third party negotiate for you can give you an upper hand. Give them the parameters you are willing to accept and let them try to negotiate for you.
- Accountability – Asking a virtual assistant to make sure you exercise, or make sure you leave work on time can help give you some accountability to do the things you know are important.
- Worry – I’ve heard of people delegating their worrying to someone else. The virtual assistant promised to worry about a big contract so he wouldn’t have to. Sounds silly but this person said it was very effective.
- Walk the dog – Of course this doesn’t help you get any exercise.
- Pickup medicine from the vet – Simple time saving errand.
- Mow the yard – Another timesaver.
- Write letters to politicians – If you want to let your voice be heard on a topic, let your assistant track down everyone who has any political pull in that area and mail them your opinion.
- Send out resumes – They can handle the printing and mailing part of things.
- Writing cover letters – Let them help customize your cover letters for each specific company.
- Customize resume – They can research each company where you want to apply and help tweak and reorder your resume to best appeal to that company.
- Mail newspaper clippings – A great way to network with people in your town is to clip out anything about them from the local paper and send it to them with a handwritten note of congratulations. An assistant can help identify and clip these for you. (It is best to only do this with positive news. You don’t need to send someone a note saying that you read about their DUI.)
- Confirm reservations – Let your assistant confirm you car rental, hotel reservation, etc.
- Send holiday cards – You can get cards for pretty much any time of year. Let your assistant help keep your name in front of clients by sending St. Patrick’s day, Easter, and Groundhogs day cards for you.
- Sell stuff on eBay – You will probably make a lot more selling old items on eBay than with a garage sale. Your assistant can handle the listing and shipping for you so it doesn’t eat up all of your time.
- Search craigslist.org – If you need something, have your assistant look for any new listings for that item on craigslist each day.
- Gather menus – Want to have better information in choosing a restaurant. Ask your assistant to get a copy of the menu from several different places ahead of time for you.
- Parking and getting the car – This is particularly useful if you live in a place where you can’t park near your house or office.
- Wait in line for tickets – If you want to get tickets to an event that will require a wait, send your assistant.
- Wait in other lines – Your assistant probably can’t get a drivers license for you or register your car, but they can wait in line and call you to come when your turn is approaching.
- Get quotes – Lets say you need to put a new roof on your house. Your assistant can locate a number of roofer and get quotes for you to look over.
- Transfer your phone – If you need to switch cell phones it can be a time consuming process. Pass it off your your assistant, they can deal with the cellular company and make the changes.
- Meeting minutes – This may be useful for things other than formal meetings. It might be beneficial to have written minutes of a conference call or other informal meeting.
- Wakeup call – I’ve heard of some people having a virtual assistant give them a wake up call along with the weather report and reminders of any important things coming up for that day.
- Keeping home items in stock – This could be your batteries, printer supplies, envelopes, trash bags, flour, light bulbs etc. Delegating responsibility to make sure you don’t run out of these things means you don’t have to think about it anymore.
- Place Ads to Sell Stuff on Craigslist – They can also filter through the large amount of spam you are likely to get and help qualify people whoa re likely to actually buy.
- Look for stuff to buy on Craigslist – Lets say you need a lawn mower. Once you determine the model, age and price you are looking for, an assistant can check for one that meets your criteria daily and do the initial contact to make sure that the ad isn’t a scam. (Hint: If they are trying to ship you a riding lawn mower from another country, it is a scam.)
- Play devils advocate – An assistant can offer valuable feedback by letting you test ideas and taking a contrary point of view. This will help prepare you for likely objections to your ideas and proposals.
- Get you off of mailing lists – Giving your assistant a stack of mail that you don’t want to get anymore, can save you a lot of time and reduce the amount of paper being used in the world.
- Creating a Powerpoint presentation – If you can provide the general outline, an assistant can look up relevant statistics and add graphics.
- Track loyalty program points – They can help you keep track of where you have existing points and how to make best use of them.
- Identify potential jobs – People without a job probably aren’t the most likely to hire an assistant, but if you are looking for a job and wanting to play the numbers in your favor, getting some help might be useful.
- Sending out resumes – An assistant can help you tweak your cover letter, mail out resumes and help you track where you’ve sent your information.
- House sitting – If you are going to be gone for a few days, it may make sense to have someone stay in your house just to keep it occupied.
- Online presence – Some people have an assistant do their updates to Facebook and Twitter. This might be useful for someone wanting to maintain a particular online image.
- Personal metrics – An assistant can help you compile and graph personal metrics. This could be anything to how many miles you’ve walked each week, to your weight over time or the number of calories you’ve consumed.
- Business metrics – Similar to above, they can keep track of how many sales calls you’ve made, how many deals you’ve closed, how many contacts you’ve followed up with, etc.
- Plan your vacation – It might seem silly to have an assistant plan your vacation, but if they know you and your family well, they may be able to come up with a better schedule and locate more interesting things to do than you could for yourself.
- Blog posts – If you need to maintain a certain style of online presence, an assistant can help you do that by writing about what you are doing in your voice. Not for everyone, but there are some people who might use this.
- Conversions – I had an assistant move a bunch of my sites from Drupal to WordPress. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but it was very time consuming and I had been putting it off.
- Suggest cultural events – An assistant can keep track of the events in your city and suggest things you might want to attend. If you say, yes, he/she can make the necessary arrangements for you.
- Comment filtering – An assistant can help you manage comments on your blog and make sure you keep spam out while letting legitimate comments through quickly.
- Fact checking – If you plan to use a piece of data for a publication or in a presentation and need to verify it, an assistant can do this for you.
It’s so obvious it must be a joke, but maybe you should delegate someone to proof-read this article… since ‘proof-reading’ appears twice on the list!
Actually it wasn’t a joke, but I didn’t have anyone proof it. If that is the worst mistake I made, I’m pretty pleased. :)
Cool list. Much of the things can be an idea for starting a new business in this times of crisis… ;-)
Among them my favourites are:
a) meal planning, because requires a lot of preparation and needs the compromise of accepting someone else deciding what you eat
b) Pay bills: because if you stop at first words, everyone love someone paying the bills for you and not only bringing the money to the bank :-)
c) wait on hold: because you have to stay there the same in case you don’t want to delegate also the call
d) wait in line for tickets: because is correct but assumes that you make lines in a “british” style, while in my country queues are more similar to a triangle :-)
I looked at this list and cracked up. I did all of this when I was an at-home wife, before I became a physician. I still do most of it, or make the list to delegate.
Mailing packages can be done by ordering on Amazon. Staples can be ordered online for most grocery stores. My daughter has grown, but one of my friends has the meal plan down by rotating 14 meals a month-one day is order out each week, the rest simple stuff. Put your phone on speaker while you are on hold.(Office phone)Put it on the timer mode. If you have been transferred twice, politely say so, and that now you need to speak to a manager. Keep a shredder under each desk in the house, and next to the printer-get the high capacity kind. Banks will pick up deposits for you for about $25.00 a month-but there are often kiosks for your bank at the the same mall as the grocery story-bunch your trips, so you are getting several trips done at once. Dog walker is a must, if your schedule goes out of control. If you do bill pay online from your bank, but write the checks from your connected quicken account, the checks are immediately accounted for, you always have a running balance of your expenses, and as long as you label what your checks are for as you go, your taxes are basically done at the end of the year.
Dragonware, lets you dictate easily, and you can set up your own form letters, and change them.
We can spot those “handwritten”computer notes a miles away. They go immediately in the trash. Don’t bother with the postage.
I don’t know a single friend who does not have a stack of unsigned birthday cards , and bank cards for various ages and genders, in their desk.
In short-you have defined what most wives have been doing forever.
Help is essential, but I have seen a lot of people who lost their jobs this year who were helpless without their secretaries, and as well as doctoring, was mentoring on how to get act together.In our times of plenty it is important NOT to lose track of how to do things ourselves-and if you don’t know, you can become overly dependent on someone(as a colleague did, who allowed her manager to deal directly with her accountant-and got $100,000 dollars embezzeled. She had gotten lazy and didn’t look at every credit card bill that came through.
Google has a meeting feature., so everyone can coordinate calendars.
I never wait for a repairman without doing other work-ie, plumber, fixit guy, window washer, or whatever, along with any delivery are scheduled for the same day. There are given my cell phone # and told to call when they are twenty minutes away, and I meet them.I make sure i get the name of the manager who agrees to this, so I don’t have to leave work until they are on the way.If the repairman arrives without calling first, I have the number of the manager, so they have to wiat until I get there.
Google calendar with text you with your schedule, and a wake up alarm. It will alarm you throughout the day for meetings. (I have my patients set this up for grandmother to remind them to take meds.)
Loyalty point for credit cards are easily seen online -my credit cards happened to come out from one of my bank accounts-and as I go to pay that bill they pop up. I used those points, using a portal to other “specials” from that credit card for Christmas sopping-getting some “free” presents.
I love the idea of a personal assistant-but be careful what you outsource,and don’t he helpless.
I think this list probably covers what a lot of people spend their time doing–wife, husband, or single. My idea of outsourcing is to let someone else handle things where you could be spending your time on something of better value. For example, if someone needs to be at the house to let the cable repair man in, I’d much rather be at the zoo with my kids than cancel our outing because the cablemodem is acting up and they want someone to be home for a 6 hour window.
Oh and I’m pretty sure you haven’t seen vLetter. It is very different from the handwriting font you normally see. (It also requires a very different process that won’t work with the way most people try to do mail merges.)
If you have found a way to get FedEx and UPS to call when they are 20 minutes away, I’d be very interested in hearing about how you do that.
This is without doubt, one of the most depressing productivity posts I’ve ever read. If one outsources everything, losing touch with the joys and frustrations and banalities of everyday tasks, you become a shell. I mean for God’s sake, what’s the point of having a dog and then outsourcing the walking. Just have it put down.
So if you are going to be gone for eight hours during a busy day and can’t come home to let the dog out, you’d rather see it put down than have someone else take it outside for 10 minutes? That is definitely a different perspective.
Apologies. You didn’t mention in the original post that the dog was also a companionship-neglected accessory. I withdraw my original comment.
Um. No. As most any of the regular readers here know, I work from home. Our dog gets plenty of attention. If she gets lonely during the day, she pushes the door open to my office and comes down and sits in my lap.
She has traveled with us to Canada, Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, Kansas, and pretty much everywhere in between. However, since she is normally accustomed to being around people all the time and going out every few hours, we usually try to have someone check on her, let her out and play with her for at least a few minutes if we have to be gone for what most people consider a standard work day.
I think your original suggestion to “put her down” just because we have to spend eight hours away from home a few times each month is pretty stupid. People like you who go around suggesting that people have their pets killed the first moment they become a slight inconvenience probably cause a lot of good pets to get euthanized for no good reason.
Wow! That’s a lot of ideas you have there. But I agree with you. Each of us have only two hands, and voluminous little things to accomplish within a given period of time. We need others to help us achieve our daily objectives.
At the same time, by outsourcing, we generate employment for people. As you progress further in your activities because of this help, you just might find yourself at the top of a big company.
There are just some people who cannot delegate, because they are afraid to do so. But for efficiency sake, these people might as well come up to their senses, and accept the fact that they need to trust others to help them in their work.
Mark. You are so right. I now see the error of my ways. Me and my dog Ironykins say a big “woof” to you and your canine.
By the way, your blog doesn’t seem to handle nested comments too well. You might want to have one of your productivity elves fix that.
This theme only handles nested comments three levels deep. Which is usually sufficient.
Bad theme! Bad! :-)
I found that list to be fascinating!!
Where do I sign up to outsource worrying? :-)
The person I heard about was using Brickworks India. :)
I heard this too, that an assistant listened to the client, and then told them to forgot about it. She’d worry about it for them…
Outsource meal preparation to a slow cooker and no I’m not joking. I became enlighted mid-thirties after many many years of getting home late and then preparing food at a most inconvenient time (when hungry!) – outsourcing doesn’t always have to be to humans… check out my blog for inspiration
I was googling ideas for personal tasks that I could delegate to a personal assist and while not every suggestion is one I would personally outsource, I got bummed out by readers comments. People can be really mean spirited and ridiculous, I’m sorry that you got so many senseless comments. Thanks for the list of ideas. =)