Outsourcing life, vodka, matryoshka

Outsourcing life is when you give away personal affairs to outsiders, such as:

• Organize a children's trip to the “Nutcracker”: call the girlfriends of the daughter and book tickets for all
• Find car service and repair the car
• Find German courses in Hamburg that start in early November.

In the article I will talk about the experience of using in Moscow , give examples of successful and unsuccessful orders and how much it costs.

Why do you need it

To save time bit by bit. You say it’s easy to make a few calls yourself. This is true, but it does not mean it is necessary . Imagine your wildest dream, the business of life.

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My last year
dream list - of course
not the largest

Where to find time for this? Save on calls to the car wash and millions of similar trifles.

The choice is this: a simple routine or a difficult dream .

What kind of things fit

Naturally, the case for which to charge faster than you do yourself. For example, cases that can be grouped are suitable: you save on re-describing the context:

Please call my mom and find out when dad flies and when flies. Looking for the number, time and flight number (or the name of the airline). Send the results by email. It is advisable to do today until 17:00.

In case dad flies away on Wednesday and later, just send information by email. If he flies away on Tuesday evening, call kassir.ru and cancel order # 94364699 in my name. In case he flies off earlier Tuesday night, call kassir.ru and change the order: let there be two tickets instead of three.

Thanks, you very much help me out!

By the way, this is the only case when I did not meet with understanding: my parents were offended that I myself disdain to call. I explained that we can always talk on the phone, and more pleasant things, rather than dictate the flight number. Explanations are accepted.

The play “The City” in the “School of the Modern Play”, tickets for which were in the order number 94364699.

Also, those requiring sequential dial-up are perfect:

Please call the stores “Firmato” on the street. Forest and "Fashion Point" on the street. Leninsky Prospekt, the retail network “Rendezvous” and ask to exclude me from the SMS mailings that are sent to my cell.

If the person who picks up the phone is not up to date, call the manager and promise him to take action. If this option is not technically provided, let them score a non-existent phone number.

Thanks a lot and have a nice day.

Or iterate over the options for a given criterion:

Please find German courses in Hamburg starting November 10-20. Course requirements:

• Proximity to Aussenlster - up to four kilometers around
• Light load - three to four days a week for a maximum of three hours
• The initial (but not zero) level.
• Plus, if you can pay weekly or for three weeks (and not only for a month).

I propose a search methodology:

1. Go to Google Maps, find Aussenlster, Hamburg
2. Ask searches like “German”, “German language courses”, “Deutsch” etc.
3. After that, call and find out if there are suitable courses and whether free places.

Please, when the cost of your services exceeds 500 rubles, pause the work and write me the current status of the survey.

Deadline - it will be great if you find all the schools today and to those that could not reach you, send an email to get an answer tomorrow. In any case, I expect results from you (which are) tomorrow at 14:00.

Thank you very much!

In this article I will not give answers. Usually they are strictly substantive and do not represent literary interest. I will give as the only example the answer to the last request:

Good day!
According to your application:

1. Goethe-Institut
Huhnerposten 1
20097 Hamburg, Deutschland
Tel .: +49 40 238543-0
Fax: +49 40 238543-99
hamburg@goethe.de
http://www.goethe.de/INS/DE/ORT/ham/kur/ru425855.htm

There are evening courses 3 times a week. 72 ac hours Terms of courses: 26.10. - 12/17/2009
Groups after passing tests to choose from the initial level to advanced.
Price per course: 576 euros.

And so on: three suitable and many of those that are tested, but do not meet the criteria.

Lake Alster in Hamburg, referred to above. Beautiful

What matters do not fit

• Things you can not do yourself . Do not expect miracles from the secretaries: they will not prepare a presentation for you and will not write an article.
• Cases that require constant calls with you. It becomes a little hell: the secretary calls you, calls back there, gets a question, calls you back, and so on. It is better to call yourself and decide in one go.
• Orders remind of something, plan and so on. The problem of one’s own razdolbaystva at the expense of others is not solved - believe me that there are few. In my childhood I forgot my briefcase at home when I was going to school.
• Naturally related to your professional field. No one will do the design for me and draw the icons (at least more complicated than the search magnifying glass ), will not present it to the potential client, and the layout will not be left to the customer. I told the idea to my friend in the bath, his first question: “Can she give me a presentation?” Answer: no.
• Urgent business , firstly, turns the expectation into stress and, secondly, reduces the performance:

Good day. The daughter for the puppet show needs bamboo sticks from half a meter to a meter long. It is necessary today until 4 o'clock, so you can not order via the Internet.

Sticks sell in flower shops - please call the flower shops near my work and at home and find the nearest one. If calling more than five stores will not bring results, please search the Internet and find the next two places in the city.

The application is relevant for an hour, then please stop searching.

It turned out that nowhere nearby the sticks are out of stock, and there was no time to order via the Internet. I had to go to the forest and find a birch branch - a colorful picture of the defeat of the ideas of the information society.

Less communication with the secretary

The less a secretary addresses you with intermediate results, the better. I try to paint all the steps:

Good day.

Two things to one courier service - Sibex, http://sibex.biz

1. Mom sent me the package, but gave me the wrong address (the old one on the Faculty Lane). You need to call and change the delivery address to the office address. The sender is the mother (if in Highrise), the invoice number is 0080401. Please make an effort to give out to my colleagues, not to me personally, on your passport: for example, by copy of your passport or let the sender call and make sure that he does not object, but I can't convince, I'll be at the office tomorrow from 17 to 19. If they have fines for an incorrect address - ok.
2. Send the package to dad (address in Highrise), the box is waiting in the office. Weight - 6 kg. We need the cheapest fare, how much will go - it does not matter.

Ideally, of course, one courier brings that package and takes this one away. Thank.

Underwater rocks

As it turned out, you need to put some kind of budget constraint :

Please buy and deliver me a charge for this Philips QT4085 trimmer. Budget - to go no more than the cost of a new trimmer . Thank.

Once I changed the date of the ticket so that a one-way flight turned out to be more expensive than a round-trip ticket. This in itself is not terrible: this one-time loss of several thousand rubles has long paid off.

Timothy Ferris in his book “The 4-Hour Workweek” advises asking them to summarize the task in their own words to make sure that it is understood correctly, but I find this practice inappropriate: it extends the chain into two letters, which contradicts my ideas for effective work. If someone ever misunderstands me (which happens every couple of months), they will redo this task, and it will be better for me to formulate thoughts. Voila! Save dozens of emails per year.

Yes, and Ferris himself can be blamed for inconsistency: he writes that he works with email once a week. But in this case he will have to read the summarized task only a week later.

The trust

You must trust the secretary and provide him with all the necessary information so that he does not tug you. For example, an order to call someone becomes unprofitable if you need to find and enter a telephone in the task. I gave the secretaries access to the following information:

• All contacts that are stored in a convenient Highrise system. The system can take notes on each contact, and contacting someone, the secretaries add a note. In the same place, in which case they update contacts. Highrise syncs to the iPhone, so the changes automatically fall on the iPhone.
  
  
  
  
• The credit card number , otherwise the order of flowers is extended three times (the courier must first take the cash), and the task of buying a ticket becomes almost impossible. Someday, perhaps, I will encounter problems - but, firstly, it did not happen, and secondly, even if so, then by that time the trust will pay off.
• Calendar , otherwise the timing to, for example, pick up the car on the tow truck, develops into a chain of calls: “Ivan Vladimirovich, can you do it Thursday? Not? Now we will call you back. ” There, in the calendar, the secretaries record events. I use the Google calendar - it sends SMS reminders for free, both in Russia and in other countries.
• All documents . I scanned all the documents: passport, international passport, license, registration certificate and posted on a separate page (I use Backpack). In the same place, the main data are laid out for copy-paste: for example, passport data.
  
  

How much is

There is a short and long answer. Short - I have a hundred dollars a month .

I asked not to inform me about the low balance, but simply to send the courier to the office for money, where they can easily get the amount they will call. In fact, they take as much as they see fit, but do not abuse it.

Long answer (I quote the letter for 2008):
The subscription fee is 800 rubles., Includes 100 minutes of work, an additional minute - 8 rubles.

Some services are charged at a fixed rate, for example, ordering a product in an online store is 150 rubles, and if you need to select a product and compare delivery terms, then 550 rubles. This difference in tariffs gives a comic effect when ordering books (books from the online store to the store do not differ much in price and delivery terms), so I asked to order them by default in one default online store and not search.

Invoice for some incomprehensible period

The last paragraph that nobody reads

The concept of life outsourcing is so easy to confuse with the media image of the secretary of a large chief: when entering the office, this should be thrown over a coat and sent for coffee. Such a secretary finds a moment to timidly insert “Sergey Raimondovich, the supplier called, what to convey?”, Squinting in case they wish to launch it with a telephone.

I am sick of the image of Sergey Raimondovich, “The Devil Wears Prada” and other sadists with poor time management.

• First, people need to be loved and treated politely, and errands to drive for coffee are humiliating.
• Secondly, coffee is faster than most. To call the secretary, you need to press three buttons on the phone, and to make coffee - one on the coffee maker. The same story with many other things that are decided to delegate.

However, this concept is very convenient because it allows you to change nothing. Maybe nothing needs to be changed, and maybe worth a try . What if:

• Try to write someone a task?
• Try to look at your business from a different angle, as if from the side?

After all, when you describe your work in a task, you describe it for an outsider. What will this observer see? Perhaps harmony in the affairs, some of which can be removed, to free up time for other pleasures. However, perhaps he will see chaos, which is covered by a high load.

Zoshchenko has a story about how Ilyich had a light bulb in a communal apartment. It was then that people saw what kind of dirt they live in, while most of the tenants rushed to launder, and one hostess unscrewed the light bulb. This article is for those who leave the bulb. And for those who twists. It is for those who try to screw in a light bulb and see what happens.

Update November 2013: three years later, I look through the article and edit the code for this article with such substitutions:



Yes, three years ago the article was published by an assistant. HTML helpers cannot be trusted either.