We often recommend that working moms delegate family tasks to other people (and we’ve talked about it in the context of the “do, delegate, or NOPE” game), so earlier this year I decided to buy 20 hours at TaskBullet (the minimum amount you’re required to buy) to see if it would be possible to delegate family tasks to a virtual assistant. (Note: I did not work with TaskBullet at all on this as a blogger, so this is not a sponsored post — just an honest review.)

Notes on the competition: TaskBullet is not the only kind of service you can use for this; Fancy Hands, Zirtual, Fiverr (which I once wrote about over at Corporette), and other assistant services exist. I had just always wondered about using virtual assistant services for personal tasks (probably ever since I read the now classic Esquire piece, “My Outsourced Life“) and decided to try it out.

Notes on cost/timing: I bought the minimum “starter” pack, which was around $200, which meant we were paying around $10 an hour. I don’t think I realized quite the 20 hours expired in ninety days — near the end I was asking the VAs to do a lot of things I had not originally intended to ask them to do, like help me with a new online hobby. I WILL note that they seemed to be pretty efficient — tasks that would have taken me an hour only seemed to take them 20 minutes.

Notes on TaskBullet’s setup: As soon as I bought the hours, I was invited to Basecamp, a project management software I’ve had some experience with through the blog. Every time I had a new task I had to type it into a certain place in Basecamp and be sure to assign it to the project manager, who would assign it to 1 assistant (out of 6–7 possible ones). They always asked me for a due date and for how long I thought the project should take, which I liked. None of the assistants I worked with were American, as near as I could tell, but I didn’t have any tasks involving calling companies or businesses. (It’s entirely possible one of those 7 assistants would have been able to take on such calls, though.) Basecamp kind of unfolds like a conversation — I would write a few paragraphs and attach a few documents and then they would respond with more written questions, attaching PDFs or Word documents. I’ve used Trello and Basecamp and prefer Trello personally, but Basecamp itself is very easy to use, and I liked the app — it made it very easy to ask questions on my phone or upload images.

How I Used Virtual Assistants to Delegate Family Tasks 

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