
How I automated the boring parts of life - mmahemoff
http://stevecorona.com/how-i-automated-the-boring-parts-of-life
======
wahnfrieden
Living 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.

~~~
rubashov
Food prep is by far the most time consuming and drudge heavy daily task, but
it remains pretty much impossible to eat healthily if you don't cook daily.
Short of paying a personal chef or landing a full time housewife there doesn't
seem to be a solution. Restaurants and prepared food just don't have the
economic incentive to use high quality ingredients.

~~~
pnathan
> Short of paying a personal chef

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.

~~~
Erwin
A poor student here has offered something similar: you pay for the food, he'll
come cook for you, if he can join you for dinner. He got thousands of requests
(see [http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE1778538/halvfattig-
tilbyder-a...](http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE1778538/halvfattig-tilbyder-at-
lave-mad-til-dig-hvis-han-maa-spise-med/) )

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!

------
mehulkar
I'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.

~~~
sliverstorm
I'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
When I buy goods and services, I am hacking my life ;)

------
BenoitEssiambre
With 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
From 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>

~~~
bvdbijl
Although... "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

~~~
eli
I'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.

~~~
beagle3
Continental used to have that, but dropped it shortly before the United
merger. I think other companies did too. Instead, they let you cancel with no
cancellation fee within 24 hours. (Although the funds may take up to two weeks
to go back to your account).

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.

~~~
nowarninglabel
American Airlines still has this feature (or at least it did last night when I
was making a booking) Edit: By this feature, I mean the ability to place a
hold without the credit card.

------
bluetidepro
First 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
Thanks! 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.

------
chimeracoder
Unless 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).

------
rmrfrmrf
I 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
I'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
Thanks 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
Or try running an A/B test on it, and submit a blog post with the results to
Hacker News!

------
ivankirigin
The 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
The 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.

~~~
enraged_camel
Yes, 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.

~~~
sliverstorm
What is "too much", really? More than zero? You make laundry sound like a
daunting chore, but I know I don't spend more than ten minutes a week on it.

~~~
drewcrawford
Laundry is definitely a pain point. You first have the chore of removing and
subsequently installing fitted sheets, which are certainly not zero-insertion
force. And the folding and sorting of the clothing (distributing towels to
bathrooms, etc.) This requires enough seek time to at least hit each room
once, and in the case of suboptimal routing, probably twice.

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.

------
mhd
Very 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.

~~~
ebiester
There'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
Germany 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.

------
whalesalad
I 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
When 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
Put a dentist in a van and drive to wherever you'd need?

~~~
mbrameld
I'm surprised nobody has done this, actually. I live in Alaska and have a
friend who is a dentist. He works exclusively in remote villages with a
portable kit of equipment he flies around with on small chartered aircraft. It
would definitely fit in a van.

~~~
maxerickson
There aren't very many licensed dentists that have to bother much about
finding customers.

~~~
davorak
I think the idea would be to charge a large amount to make it worth the
dentists while to do so. So high population density high income areas. New
York and maybe San Francisco?

------
didsomeonesay
That is not automation. That is delegation.

~~~
kennu
I 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
> 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.

------
Antiks72
If 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
Are you suggesting <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.

------
vinodkd
since 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>

~~~
juddlyon
This is a hilarious and informative read.

------
crntaylor
I think you should make it clear that your link to FancyHands is a referral
link.

~~~
stevencorona
I 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.

~~~
jsloat
I'd actually really appreciate the affiliate link, thinking about trying it
out. Would you mind posting it in the comment thread here?

~~~
stevencorona
Sure, it's <http://fncy.it/RvrAPd>

You get 50% off your first month, I get 10 bucks.

------
andrewljohnson
It's not automation, it's hiring other people.

~~~
stevencorona
I wouldn't say it's full blown hiring. Maybe micro-hiring. Is that a term?

~~~
reddit_clone
It is now !

Not a bad one either.

------
qwerta
I 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.

------
Poiesis
I'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
That'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.

------
danso
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._

~~~
stevencorona
Fixed 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
I'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.

------
smackfu
I 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.)

------
gasull
You can automate tasks in the house (e.g. a maid) with <http://redbeacon.com>
(disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Redbeacon).

I also automate groceries at <http://shop.safeway.com> .

In San Francisco you can automate laundry with <http://sfwash.com> . Great
service.

~~~
rcsorensen
Finding 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
Yeah, I did the exact same thing. No love for LA :(

------
ShabbyDoo
I 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
Credit 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
They'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.

------
Tipzntrix
I think delegating is a little different than automating. Granted it's out of
your hands either way though.

------
gasull
Does 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.

~~~
joonix
We'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!

------
nazgulnarsil
How 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.

------
lazyjones
Subscriptions 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.

------
aymeric
I 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> where you
can find screened virtual assistants: <http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-
outsourcing>)

------
dutchbrit
Are there any FancyHands competitors in Europe?

------
stephenhuey
A couple years ago, I listened to an interesting interview with Ted Rosen on
the Founders Talk podcast:

<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.

------
jongold
I'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?

------
padobson
My sweet mother, subscribe and save? Hacker News pays for all the productivity
it costs, one hundred times over.

------
driverdan
When 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.

~~~
__abc
Eat more fiber

~~~
jdechko
Yes, but the productivity gains from not having to buy TP but once a year
would more than be offset by the additional time spend on the can.

------
mkrecny
I love this. And I think being in the business of Automation is pretty cool
too : <http://edu.mkrecny.com/thoughts/automation-as-a-service>

------
Jolandatsv
Immediately I think of that Robot in Rocky 3 that serves them food and the
like..

------
mseebach
Something 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.

------
enraged_camel
How 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?

------
nessus42
How 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?

------
hanginghyena
Amazon automatic shipping....

Of course, you could probably rig a replenishment system using python, some
hardware, and the Amazon API... An erp for your home...

------
hornd
Just an FYI: websense seems to be blocking your domain, classified as adult-
and-pornography.

~~~
stevencorona
it's because of my run naked post from a few months ago, haha

------
spuz
I would love to have a service like Fancy Hands. Is there an equivalent in the
UK?

------
wildmXranat
So 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.

------
GotAnyMegadeth
According to my works content filter this is NSFW

~~~
stevencorona
It's because of the "run naked" post I wrote a few months ago.

~~~
skeletonjelly
Well that sucks! That post doesn't seem that lewd. Are you going to ask
Websense to undo that categorization? Do people even do this?

------
MatthewPhillips
> CTO at Twitpic

Does Twitpic still not allow you to export your own pictures or did they give
up on that?

------
elliott99
python+iMacros

