The only concierge service I know about, which I somehow got access
to, is completely useless to me because it assumes I’m super rich, and
I’m not, and also the people who work there can’t follow basic
directions or handle anything at all non-standard.
This is my experience, too, with almost any form of assistance. Actual
thinking about the task is absent.
It’s annoying, because an obnoxiously large proportion of life goes
towards 1. doing all the fiddly stupid bits, 2. procrastinating about
doing all the fiddly stupid bits, and 3. worrying about procrastinating
too much about doing all the fiddly stupid bits. I would love to not
have to deal with that. I’ve automated or outsourced everything I can,
but it’s never enough.
I suspect the degree of life-competence needed to be good at “personal
assistant tasks” is scarce enough that anyone capable of doing it well
is also capable of getting a job that pays better. General personal
assistance requires non-cached thought, and most people can’t do that on
demand, if ever. Task-specific assistance can often be had at a
reasonable price, because trainable habits can make up for thought.
Sadly, in most cases that just replaces the original task with a
more-difficult acquire-task-appropriate-services task, so it’s only
worth it for long-term maintenance, like cleaning.
...having written that, I wonder if there’s a task-specific assistant
service for “finding good task-specific services and arranging their
help.” Probably not. Knowing who’s good at X often requires being good
at X to begin with.
(unimportant, but related and maybe interesting: I get my groceries
curbside or delivered. I’d rather pay for delivery, most of the time,
but the curbside service is significantly more accurate and less
interaction-required. I think it’s because curbside groceries are
collected by store employees who can proxy-shop the store by habit,
while deliveries are third-party and less familiar with the specific
store)
Much of the difficulty in outsourcing is a simple result of principal-agent problems. Almost nobody can pay enough to get someone as competent as they to think about their problems as deeply as they. Only tasks with a pretty significant repeatability and efficiency premium (that is, actually takes less time when done by someone else, without loss in quality) can trivially be offloaded. Everything else takes a fair bit of analysis and meta-planning in order to get someone else to do tolerably.
This changes for the VERY rich—if being your PA/Butler pays well enough to be done by a smart, motivated person, you can shed a lot of things. From what I can tell, it’s not a smooth transition, though—normal people have to do most of their crap chores themselves, medium-rich people can outsource the trivial ones (gardening, grocery shopping, some parts of cleaning) and not the difficult ones (travel planning, making the grocery list to shop from, organizing things), and only the super-rich can really just forget the things they don’t care about.
This is my experience, too, with almost any form of assistance. Actual thinking about the task is absent.
It’s annoying, because an obnoxiously large proportion of life goes towards 1. doing all the fiddly stupid bits, 2. procrastinating about doing all the fiddly stupid bits, and 3. worrying about procrastinating too much about doing all the fiddly stupid bits. I would love to not have to deal with that. I’ve automated or outsourced everything I can, but it’s never enough.
I suspect the degree of life-competence needed to be good at “personal assistant tasks” is scarce enough that anyone capable of doing it well is also capable of getting a job that pays better. General personal assistance requires non-cached thought, and most people can’t do that on demand, if ever. Task-specific assistance can often be had at a reasonable price, because trainable habits can make up for thought. Sadly, in most cases that just replaces the original task with a more-difficult acquire-task-appropriate-services task, so it’s only worth it for long-term maintenance, like cleaning.
...having written that, I wonder if there’s a task-specific assistant service for “finding good task-specific services and arranging their help.” Probably not. Knowing who’s good at X often requires being good at X to begin with.
(unimportant, but related and maybe interesting: I get my groceries curbside or delivered. I’d rather pay for delivery, most of the time, but the curbside service is significantly more accurate and less interaction-required. I think it’s because curbside groceries are collected by store employees who can proxy-shop the store by habit, while deliveries are third-party and less familiar with the specific store)
Much of the difficulty in outsourcing is a simple result of principal-agent problems. Almost nobody can pay enough to get someone as competent as they to think about their problems as deeply as they. Only tasks with a pretty significant repeatability and efficiency premium (that is, actually takes less time when done by someone else, without loss in quality) can trivially be offloaded. Everything else takes a fair bit of analysis and meta-planning in order to get someone else to do tolerably.
This changes for the VERY rich—if being your PA/Butler pays well enough to be done by a smart, motivated person, you can shed a lot of things. From what I can tell, it’s not a smooth transition, though—normal people have to do most of their crap chores themselves, medium-rich people can outsource the trivial ones (gardening, grocery shopping, some parts of cleaning) and not the difficult ones (travel planning, making the grocery list to shop from, organizing things), and only the super-rich can really just forget the things they don’t care about.