17 ms·
How I automated the boring parts of life
- GotAnyMegadeth 14y agoAccording to my works content filter this is NSFW
- stevencorona 14y agoIt's because of the "run naked" post I wrote a few months ago.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoWell that sucks! That post doesn't seem that lewd. Are you going to ask Websense to undo that categorization? Do people even do this?
- mhd 14y agoVery interesting, wish more of this would be applicable in Germany, especially the virtual assistant part, most of which seem to be English only. Although in the case of FancyHands, it's not due to English being more well known in the former colonies, for once… And apparently Steve uses 10 Q-Tips per day.
- mmahemoff 14y agoI also wish Mech Turk was available to providers outside the US. But thankfully oDesk is, and I've found it's possible to find great VAs there with some patience and trial-and-error.
- ebiester 14y agoThere's a business opportunity here, at least for French and German... The German work could be outsourced to Turkey, and the French out to Africa.
- mhd 14y agoGermany itself has some pretty lenient wage policies if you hire long-time unemployed people. But I doubt that there's a big demand for it. Germans don't like to delegate in general, even if it's with a pretty trivial matter. When Walmart first arrived, they tried to have your groceries bagged for you, just like they do in the US. Quickly dropped that, as people complained about employees touching their stuff or doing it the wrong way. Never mind that for a lot of people the ghosts of the Stasi (or even Gestapo) are still lingering, so e.g. sending people you don't know your bills and other personal data is a bit taboo.
- bluetidepro 14y agoFirst off, great article! Although, it's just a few quick tips, there was some solid advice in there and some new tips I had never heard. For example, maybe I've been living in a cave, but Amazon Subscribe is new to me, so I appreciate the great tip there! 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.
- stevencorona 14y agoThanks! Fiverr was great. I had FancyHands find me a high rated proofreader on there and ask him if he'd be willing to do a 62-page, 15,000 word doc (the guy normally was doing 1500 words for ~$5). He said sure, for $50, and that the turnaround time would be two days. 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.
- wahnfrieden 14y agoLiving in NYC makes it easy to automate some more boring things, thanks to its population density: - 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.
- stevencorona 14y agoSo jealous, I would kill to have access TaskRabbit/Uber/FreshDirect/etc, but it seems like those types of services only make it to NYC or SF. Living in Charleston, SC has its perks, but getting new tech first is not one of them. 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.
- michael_h 14y agoI'm surprised Charleston doesn't already have these - I live in a mid-sized city nowhere near NYC or SF and we have versions of these. You should check around for alternates.
- mikkow 14y agoDont kill, move :)
- sliverstorm 14y agoif 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)
- wtallis 14y ago
- whalesalad 14y agoI love Steve's posts because I can always relate. 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!
- SiVal 14y agoWhen you figure out how to outsource going to the dentist, let us all know. That's one of those services that pg talks about that everybody needs but nobody wants to provide: great startup opportunity.
- Timothee 14y agoPut a dentist in a van and drive to wherever you'd need?
- petercooper 14y agoHere in the UK, a group of Hungarian dentists did this with inflatable surgeries (and could offer Eastern European rates too): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1051660/Deflated-charges-blow-dental-surgery-Travelling-Hungarians-offer-half-price-treatment-UK.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1051660/Deflated-c...
- bubbleRefuge 14y agoLike mobile dog grooming. I like it.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago"Yeah, my dentist is a guy in a van." There would definitely have to be some great marketing for this to not seem shady.
- patrickgzill 14y agoDentists seem to have about 5 different rooms, pay dental hygienists to do 90% of the work, then stop in for about 5 minutes during the course of the 45 minutes you are there. A van wouldn't cut it - you would need a bus.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoIt's not automation, it's hiring other people.
- stevencorona 14y agoI wouldn't say it's full blown hiring. Maybe micro-hiring. Is that a term?
- reddit_clone 14y agoIt is now ! Not a bad one either.
- BenoitEssiambre 14y agoWith Fancy Hands, how do you deal with tasks (such as buying tickets) that require the use of your credit card, password, account info etc. 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.
- GrumpySimon 14y agoFrom their website: "Fancy Hands can purchase things for you. Yep, if you ask us to buy toner cartridges, lunch, or tickets, we can handle it. 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)." http://www.fancyhands.com/help/payments http://www.fancyhands.com/help/payments
- bvdbijl 14y agoAlthough... "While we can make purchases for you, we cannot do certain things including reservations (at hotels, etc), and airplane tickets." So fancyhands couldn't have helped the writer of the blogpost with his airplane ticket problem
- ivankirigin 14y agoThey could set up the itinerary for him to purchase quickly.
- eli 14y agoI've had corporate travel services place tickets on a 24 hour hold for me before (i.e. the itinerary is reserved, but not yet paid for). I assume that's still possible, at least for the legacy carriers.
- Jolandatsv 14y agoImmediately I think of that Robot in Rocky 3 that serves them food and the like..
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoI got all excited about Fancy Hands, then realized that this is just a post to farm referral dollars and give free advertising. 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."
- stevencorona 14y agoI'll change the link, I don't care about the referral dollars, it was to get you 50% off for using the link. Anyways, I'd rather it didn't detract from the message of the post. BTW- I love FancyHands and have 0 ties with them.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoThanks for doing that. I'll leave my original comment up in shame--I shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly. 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.
- benmanns 14y agoOr try running an A/B test on it, and submit a blog post with the results to Hacker News!
- e28eta 14y agoI think the referral link is a great idea - both from a discount perspective and because you are referring us. 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.
- danso 14y agoIt'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.
- stevencorona 14y agoFixed the error, thanks :) Obviously I did not have Fiverr proofread the post for me! 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 ;)
- 4clicknet 14y agoI've found MT results quality to be a problem. 95% of the workers are great, but you do have occasions where you get a bot completing the task or someone being deliberately careless in the hope that the HIT will get automatically approved. To combat that, I give the task to different workers until 3 answers match and that works well. It's worthwhile once you've automated, but that's worthwhile only if you've got a fairly large number of tasks.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- crntaylor 14y agoI think you should make it clear that your link to FancyHands is a referral link.
- liamondrop 14y agoAmazon, too. Seriously, Steve!
- stevencorona 14y agoI removed the aff link since a few people think it's detracting from the message of the post. I could care less about the referrals, the point was to get my readers 50% off by using the link.
- liamondrop 14y agoThe point was that you were doing it in an obfuscated way, (using shortened links), without disclosing. I don't think people generally mind when they are explicitly made aware.
- jsloat 14y agoI'd actually really appreciate the affiliate link, thinking about trying it out. Would you mind posting it in the comment thread here?
- stevencorona 14y agoSure, it's http://fncy.it/RvrAPd http://fncy.it/RvrAPd You get 50% off your first month, I get 10 bucks.
- kami8845 14y agoI wouldn't worry about it, they're probably the same ones that still disable JS or use NoScript in 2012.
- piyush_soni 14y agoI think no one would mind if you just state that it is a referral link, and secondly, if you want, you can give both with and without referral links. That improves the credibility of the post.
- Poiesis 14y agoI'm trying to outsource some tasks myself--mostly home repair--but I'm running into quality problems. I end up with a result that is not up to my standards, and it feels like I have to spend overly much time vetting people or dealing with tha back and forth about quality issues, etc. If I'm paying good money to get a task done, I don't want it to take up my time. If it does, I feel like I might as well have done it myself. I'm working on changing this mindset but it's proving difficult.
- whileonebegin 14y agoThat's kind of what sites like Service Magic (Home Advisor) try to solve. But, I think their biggest benefit is the user comments and reviews, not their service. I prefer to just DIY. Then when it breaks again, at least you're empowered and know what happened.
- didsomeonesay 14y agoThat is not automation. That is delegation.
- scdc 14y agowith the Amazon subscribe and save, it is automation. I use it for diapers. The arrive automatically every month!
- lukev 14y agoThereby exposing a problem with subscribe and save... we did the same thing, but it turned out to be more hassle since the baby changes sizes just about every month anyway.
- kennu 14y agoI was going to say exactly the same thing. It's automation only if you remove the biological elements from getting tasks done. Delegation is just getting someone who earns less money than you to do your boring stuff for you.
- acuozzo 14y ago> 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.
- driverdan 14y agoWhen I first heard of Amazon Subscribe I really wanted to use it but the bulk sizes are just too large. As a single guy all the quantities they have are about double what I need. 40 rolls of toilet paper, for example, would last me a year or more.
- mkrecny 14y agoI love this. And I think being in the business of Automation is pretty cool too : http://edu.mkrecny.com/thoughts/automation-as-a-service http://edu.mkrecny.com/thoughts/automation-as-a-service
- qwerta 14y agoI have daily job and children. On side I have an huge open-source project. Procrastination was my huge enemy. I solved it by 'will'. TODO lists, monthly shopping, booking everything on time... It is easier than you think.
- jongold 14y agoI've been interested in a virtual assistant since 4HWW came out - never thought I was busy enough to justify something like GetFriday. 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?
- vinodkd 14y agosince nobody has posted it yet, here's the obligatory link to an old esquire article that takes this idea to the extreme. Presenting: "My life outsourced" http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0905OUTSOURCING_214 http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0905OUTSOURCING_214
- juddlyon 14y agoThis is a hilarious and informative read.
- ivankirigin 14y agoThe things I want to automate are expensive to do so. I'm talking about things like the dishes and the laundry and commuting. I have a house cleaner that comes periodically, but I'd be spending a lot more (and have a lot more intrusion on my privacy) if it were daily / nightly. 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.
- jacquesm 14y agoThe dishes, the laundry and commuting have already been automated. Washing machines, dish washers, cars and public transport all made our lives so much easier that we seem to have forgotten the amount of labor that went into such simple tasks in the past. 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.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago"Spoiled" is a funny way to describe avoiding doing things that I don't mind doing, but still are taking my attention away from other things I should be doing instead.
- ShawnBird 14y agoWell we have huge populations with shrinking labor markets, it is starting to make sense to hire people to do things like this.
- enraged_camel 14y agoYes, but what you call the "remnant" still takes too much time. Laundry requires me to sort clothes, put them in a bag, carry them to my building's laundry room, load up and configure the machines, then set a timer so that I don't forget to go back and pick them up. I then need to fold the clothes and put them in their corresponding drawers or hang them in the closet. The worst part in all this is that even though I am not doing the actual task of washing the clothes, I still need to block off a time period, meaning I can't actually be in another location doing other things while laundry is getting done. 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.
- padobson 14y agoMy sweet mother, subscribe and save? Hacker News pays for all the productivity it costs, one hundred times over.
- hornd 14y agoJust an FYI: websense seems to be blocking your domain, classified as adult-and-pornography.
- stevencorona 14y agoit's because of my run naked post from a few months ago, haha
- enraged_camel 14y agoHow does FancyHands deal with task failure? For example, if I make a request and the result turns out to be "sorry, we weren't able to do it because..." does that count towards your monthly total?
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago> CTO at Twitpic Does Twitpic still not allow you to export your own pictures or did they give up on that?
- dutchbrit 14y agoAre there any FancyHands competitors in Europe?
- nessus42 14y agoHow does Fancy Hands differ from the "concierge" service that already comes with my credit card for free? Is it just that I can make a request via a web form, rather than via a phone call?
- Antiks72 14y agoIf I didn't have my wife I would so do something like Fancy Hands. For those of us that have ADHD, procrastination is a real killer on our quality of life.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoAre you suggesting http://www.fancywife.com/ http://www.fancywife.com/ ? In all seriousness having a SO that can remind you and help out with important reminders and things in life is pretty handy.
- mehulkar 14y agoI'm curious if anyone else is curious about the distinction between automation and delegation. It seems like a better description of OPs life hack is the latter. I'm not sure if this is relevant, but if you take the universe or the world or a society and the amount of work being done as a zero sum equation, handing off buying plane tickets isn't really automation because you're not reducing the total work in the system; you're just changing where the resources come from. 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.
- piyush_soni 14y agoProbably he just meant that it is in effect 'automated' for him for a cost.
- sliverstorm 14y agoI'm not even sure it can be considered a "life hack"; it is literally a service provided by a company. At that point, is it really novel enough to call a hack?
- mehulkar 14y agoWhen I buy goods and services, I am hacking my life ;)
- stephenhuey 14y agoA couple years ago, I listened to an interesting interview with Ted Rosen on the Founders Talk podcast: http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/2 http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/2 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.
- chimeracoder 14y agoUnless I'm gravely mistaken, the cost is dramatically understated. $25/month will only buy you 5 'requests'. 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).
- wildmXranat 14y agoSo basically, pay for and outsource the tasks that you don't like or find mundane. This is cost prohibitive and a way around or optimising them would be better. I just need to get busy enough to feel forced to.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- spuz 14y agoI would love to have a service like Fancy Hands. Is there an equivalent in the UK?
- Tipzntrix 14y agoI think delegating is a little different than automating. Granted it's out of your hands either way though.
- hanginghyena 14y agoAmazon automatic shipping.... Of course, you could probably rig a replenishment system using python, some hardware, and the Amazon API... An erp for your home...
- gasull 14y agoYou can automate tasks in the house (e.g. a maid) with http://redbeacon.com http://redbeacon.com (disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Redbeacon). I also automate groceries at http://shop.safeway.com http://shop.safeway.com . In San Francisco you can automate laundry with http://sfwash.com http://sfwash.com . Great service.
- bduerst 14y agoI like how when I signed up for redbeacon, it gave me incremental input fields. When I signed up for Safeway, I hit an input wall, of the same size, that almost made me close the tab.
- rcsorensen 14y agoFinding personal services professionals sucks, but I'm unsure of how I'm supposed to use redbeacon. I load up the site (in Los Angeles), and find maids, set 1 bedroom, see it's $114 avg, see comments for deep cleaning, find the "reoccurring" checkbox, and get no results. Automation would imply a scheduled event to me, but it looks like this is more for one-off transactions?
- dx4100 14y agoYeah, I did the exact same thing. No love for LA :(
- gasull 14y agoDoes anyone else find useless virtual assistants? Isn't it easy enough to buy your plane ticket at hipmunk.com and book an apartment at AirBnB? I think it takes me longer to describe what I want to the assistant than doing it myself.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoIf you have an infinite amount of money, so that you don't have to choose a good offer then yes, booking flights and apartments probably takes you 3 minutes, not 30.
- joonix 14y agoWe've gone full circle. 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!
- aymeric 14y agoI have been using virtual assistants for the last 3 years, and I will never come back. A VA in the Philippines cost $5/h and can be very helpful. (disclaimer: I run the outsourcing marketplace http://taskarmy.com http://taskarmy.com where you can find screened virtual assistants: http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-outsourcing http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-outsourcing)
- elliott99 14y agopython+iMacros
- ShabbyDoo 14y agoI wish my bank/brokerage/etc all had the equivalent of "valet key" logins where I could set-up and manage accounts for others which only had a subset of my own rights. For example, I'd like to hire an assistant to reconcile/aggregate/classify my financial records, but I'd either have to take a lot of time to gather everything up or expose the ability for this person to steal from me. My brokerage account includes the right to buy/sell securities, but I only want my bookkeeper to be able to view my transaction history. 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?
- bruceboughton 14y agoCredit n cents, and they still do. 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.
- ShabbyDoo 14y agoThey're verifying that I created a PayPal account which links to a bank account to which I have read-level transaction ledger access. It's a better-than-nothing proxy, but it doesn't prove that the person setting-up the PayPal account has the legal right to withdraw funds from that account.
- nazgulnarsil 14y agoHow I automated non-essential purchases: 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.
- mseebach 14y agoSomething I'd pay to have "automated": a "ghostwriter" to help me organise my thoughts and experiences into blog- and tweet-sized chunks. I think I have something worth sharing, I just don't have the discipline to get it written down.
- smackfu 14y agoI like the idea of Amazon grocery subscriptions but practically it just feels like the time you would need to spend managing the subscription and figuring out the optimal schedule is more than the time it takes to replenish the stocks every 4 months. Or dealing with stuff like Amazon directly selling citrus Listerine but not mint Listerine. (Except cat litter, that is totally worth getting delivered from Amazon just to avoid carrying it.)
- lazyjones 14y agoSubscriptions for things like toilet paper are a bad idea. Unless your consumption is 100% constant and you know exactly what it is (unlikely if you ever have any people visiting you). Ordering such things every couple of weeks takes just a few minutes and you will always get exactly what you need. 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.