Tasks I’ve tried delegating to TimeSvr so far

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Things that I think would fit into 15 minutes

  • Find me a virtual credit card that I can link to my Canada-based Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal so that I can outsource payment and buying things without exposing my real credit card details on this site
  • Find me multifunction black-and-white laser printer/scanners
  • Log on to Facebook and approve all the pending friend requests EXCEPT FOR people who found me through Friend Finder.
  • Log on to LinkedIn and approve all pending connection requests.
  • Log onto LinkedIn and e-mail me a list of the 5 latest questions in the Professional Networking category, including question text (click on each question to get to the full question text) and links to the questions.
  • Use search.twitter.com to search for tweets about “sachac” and e-mail me the contents of that page.
  • Find me a Firefox extension that lets me open Google results using access keys (pressing numbers to view the search results in the background). The extension must be compatible with Firefox 3.
  • Can you take the list of birthdays and contact information below, split it up by week, and send me each week’s upcoming birthdays and contact information every Saturday? Thanks!
  • Can you find me a free service that will automatically e-mail me or make an RSS feed for a website each day? That way, I don’t take up 15 minutes of TimeSvr’s time with something that can easily be automated, and I can use your service for more interesting things. =)
  • Please log into Facebook and add … to my Family list.
  • Please contact Pathable and ask them for a quote for a small event (~16 people)
  • One week from now, please submit http://interfacematters.com/atom.xml to http://www.feedvalidator.org. If the service reports that the feed passes, e-mail me that it passes. If not, reschedule this task for one week later, and keep trying until I cancel it or the site passes. Thanks!
  • Please contact Pathable and ask them for a quote for a small event (~16 people)
  • Please log on to Facebook and respond to the messages I’ve indicated below. My responses are in bold. =) Also, please find … and … and friend them (they’ll be in Toronto), if I haven’t friended them yet. Include the following personal message in each of those invitations
  • Please log onto Tungle and offer … Thursday and Friday afternoon slots for next next week. Thanks!
  • Please put together a simple set of Powerpoint slides with white text on a black background, with the following text as slide titles (one line per slide)
  • Please reply on Facebook as follows: …
  • Can you find out what % of Canadian jobs are created in technology companies?
  • Please email me a list of software program used by TimeSvr people so that I know what kinds of files you can work with and what tasks you can do. :) Also, does the company have people with graphic design or illustration skills? Thanks!
  • Please reply with the following, and also send him a link to the Study Hacks blog. Thanks!
  • Please send me an HTML email suitable for posting into a blog post, containing
  • Please encode the e-mail addresses, comments, and ratings in the attached ZIP of scans and send them to me as a spreadsheet, in an e-mail with the title “Making a name for yourself: evaluation forms”. Thanks! =)
  • Now that I’ve delegated a number of tasks to TimeSvr, can you give me specific feedback on how we can work together more effectively?
  • On Monday, can you look for immigration lawyers in Toronto with experience in handling Canadian Experience Class and family applications, preferably near … or …? Thanks!
  • Please find me a few dental hygienists around … or … and send me their prices for dental cleaning / scaling.
  • Please log on to the library, renew all my books, and email me the list of remaining items that are due this week.

To improve this:

  • Ask them to do time tracking?
  • Figure out some way to integrate with RememberTheMilk? Ooh.
  • Write down processes
  • Set up recurring tasks
You can view 6 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

6 comments

It doesn't directly save me that much time, but it gives me a couple of other results.

<ul>
<li>I usually send those kinds of tasks on my iPod Touch, where Safari refuses to open things if I have more than eight tabs open (which I usually do). When I'm on my computer, I don't mind clicking on the Facebook reply link as much. I suppose I _could_ wait to respond until I get back to my computer, but if I have a few free moments, I may as well respond. =)</li>

<li>Sites like LinkedIn require you to log in each time you reply, it seems, and I'd rather not go through the trouble and wait for each one of those items.</li>

<li>I don't get distracted by other Facebook or LinkedIn features if I don't go to the website myself. ;) This is surprisingly useful.</li>

<li>I can ask them to send the link to a relevant blog post or make a list of groups and send that over, without having to look up the URL myself (which is inconvenient on the aforementioned iPod).</li>

<li>If Facebook and LinkedIn used proper Reply-Tos, I'd do less of this, but as it stands, TimeSvr provides a useful e-mail interface to services without one. ;)</li>
</ul>

I've shared a spreadsheet of tasks I've delegated to Timesvr - 80 or so tasks spread over 12 days. Some include the actual text of my requests (sensitive information scrubbed, I hope), and others have summaries I put in.

Eventually I'll get to fill out the rest of the columns... =)

Nicole Simon

2009-04-05T15:23:42Z

Thanks for the overview and your list. A note: you can use tweetlater.com for the reply thingy, it is not obvious at first but I found this to be useful for more than one account. If you mail me I can give you a forward of one of the mails.

Ciara: I rarely unapprove comments, but there was a comment here that sounded a little strange, and didn't match up with the geographic location or the writing style. I don't approve of people pretending to be other people in order to mess up social media opinions. In case that was really you, please get in touch with me through e-mail.

I've started using timesvr myself and was wanted to look at your spreadsheet link above. However it seems to be expired. Do you have a new link?
Thx.

A little confused - is this a list of ideas you could delegate out, or a list of things you have successfully delegated out?

Stuff I delegated, with varying degrees of success.