“My Outsourced Life” (A.J. Jacobs, for Esquire) is still one of the funniest articles I’ve ever read. Go ahead; it’s a great read.
If you don’t have time to read it, you could have a “virtual assistant” summarize it for you. TimeSvr has “virtual assistants” for the low, low price of $69/month. For 30 days, that’s only $2.30/day for: “Unlimited basic Tasks on your behalf. No limit on phone calls, reminders, reservations, bookings. Up to 8 hours a month for complex time consuming tasks(long web searches, transcribing, etc.).” They’ll manage your contacts and calendar.
The first thing I’d do is schedule a daily wake-up call. Who wants to hear an alarm, when you could have some foreign college girl wake you up?
The second thing I’d do is offload my RSS aggregation duties. I have a number of websites I like to check, and I just hate poking through them. Copy the content into a well-formatted PDF and email it to me every morning. RSS is such a great idea, but all the aggregators suck. Honestly, can’t you just specify content to automatically be inserted into a paper/newsletter format? XeTeX plug.
That includes my email. The 4-hour-a-week guy who makes a living out of not actually doing anything has a guide for outsourcing your inbox.
That also includes my finances. List the prior day’s checking account activity. Stock prices. Weather forecast. Current house price on zillow.com. A daily newspaper of things relevant to me (and mostly only me). [Yahoo! Pipes can do much of this, but I'd prefer better formatting, and there are some things it can't do.]
The third thing I’d do (“up to 8 hours of time-consuming tasks”) is to get a monthly meal plan amenable to all parties familia. Aldi (I love Aldi’s!) has a great starter meal planner (the chicken corn tacos rock). The first month, I think, would pay for itself.
I might try it for one month….