We’ve talked to a lot of people about their thoughts on hiring an assistant to outsource small tasks and projects, and two of the major points of friction for people are whether it’s worth the trouble to outsource tasks form a to-do list, and also whether the results achieved will be high enough quality and easy to check.

Problem 1: Is it worth the time and trouble to outsource my tasks?

Delegation is a skill that improves with practice. There are some tasks that make more sense to delegate than others. We’ve made our service flexible enough for a 10 minute phone call, or hours of event-planning or research, and we’ve seen users get value from both ends of that spectrum. But some things just take too long to explain to make it worth delegating – it’s a very case-by-case sort of thing that takes getting used to.

A lot of Perssist’s first-time users, especially people that have never used an assistant before, send in tasks that aren’t really the right thing to ask an assistant to do. For example, “find me an apartment, this is what I’m willing to spend.” There are too many taste-based variables involved in that process to come away with a good result. However, “find me all the apartment buildings with an in-house leasing office in these neighborhoods, then make sure they fit my budget and allow dogs” is something that would make a lot more sense to ask an assistant to handle.

Problem 2: Checking and coordinating the results of another person’s work is yet another distraction

We hear you loud and clear that you don’t always trust someone else’s work, and the process of checking it can take as as doing it yourself. We train our Perssist Assistants to present information in a way that tries to answer any initial doubts/questions a user may have when they see the result. For example, providing sources and (briefly) explaining their process to get to the answer. Secondly, it’s important to understand that no one can do a task the exact way you would do it yourself, and figuring out what types of tasks that’s ok for, and what types it’s not, is part of learning to delegate.

Get started learning to delegate with a free trial from Perssist, and remember if you’re new that you should try request a few different things rather than one big thing so you can get a better feel for outsourcing the mundane tasks from your life.