Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

When DIY’ing Doesn’t Make Sense

The fact is many of us are not the best people to do the things necessary to make our lives work, nor is our time best spent learning how to do those things if we don’t know how. In many cases, we’re much better off outsourcing the operational aspects of our lives.

TaskRabbit allows you to do just that, offloading virtually any type of task–from washing windows to HTML coding–to someone who has the time and skill to do the task most efficiently.

It works by posting your task to their site. You can either say what you’re willing to pay or if you don’t know, they’ll give you a price range of what that task typically costs. The task is then bid out to a number of TaskRabbits (i.e. humans who will perform the task). The lowest bidder gets the job.

Criminal background checks are done on all of the Rabbits and ratings are shown from past clients. The task charge depends on its level of involvement–from $30 for a quick house cleaning to $1000 carpentry jobs. Popular tasks include IKEA assembly, pet sitting, dealing with customer service and heavy lifting. You can add in costs the Rabbits will incur while performing your task, for example the cost of dry-cleaning they’ll be picking up. You can also get Rabbits with cars. Right now, TaskRabbit is available in most (but not all) major metropolitan areas.

The LifeEdited team has used TaskRabbit on a number of occasions, mostly for cleaning. Beside being very friendly and helpful, what’s nice is that you hire a Rabbit for the job, and nothing more. When we needed one hour of cleaning the other night after a dinner party, we paid for one hour, not four.

Outsourcing daily life might seem like cheating, but consider a few things:

  1. Are you the best person to do the tasks in your life? Do you have the skill, time, inclination? Perhaps the reason you don’t do certain things is because the answer is no.
  2. What are your time and attention worth? If you have to spend an inordinate time doing something–time better spent doing something else (or even nothing else)–perhaps having someone else do it makes a lot more sense than doing it yourself.
  3. You are providing income to people who need it. You aren’t throwing money away, but rather supporting people happy to have flexible work.