Lifestyle

How to outsource your life

If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing yourself, right? Wrong. Time-poor Londoners are handing over banal and bizarre tasks to professionals paid to be better, faster and more efficient at their lives than they are. It’s time to make your day someone else’s problem...
Lotte Jeffs
14 December 2015

CHANGE MY LIGHTBULB

Q: How many Personal Time Saver concierges does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One. Because this isn’t a joke. You can actually pay someone to come round, stand on a chair and replace the defunct 60-watter in the bathroom. No more showering in the dark! Servants (the company’s term, not ours) are on call 365 days a year: the team of 20 are experts in different fields, so there’s always someone available to clear out your coal bunker, sort your broken dishwasher, send your tatty leather briefcase to be repaired and even bring a bottle of Lucozade to your sickbed. From £75 per hour.

MAKE ME LOOK POPULAR

Five pounds barely buys you a sandwich and a bag of Popchips these days. What it will get you are the services of cash-strapped techies who offer their skills on Five Squids. It’s a small price to pay to look more popular online — ‘Dreamer’ will get your YouTube video 200 likes and 2,000 unique views; ‘TwitterExpert’ promises to tweet your message to his 400,000-plus followers; and ‘786zeeshan’ will add 1,000 fans to your Facebook page in just 48 hours. How do they do it? We don’t know. Is it ethical? We don’t know. Do we need real friends any more? Hell, no!

PICK ME UP AN OSTRICH EGG

The days of having to get up, go to Whole Foods and buy your own ostrich egg are over, thanks to Taskhub. The website unites people who will do pretty much anything for cash with people in the same neighbourhood willing to pay them. Log on, post your request and price (at the time of writing, someone was looking to have an ostrich egg picked up from the Kensington branch of Whole Foods and delivered to Hammersmith for £30), and wait for someone to accept your commission. One man is currently offering £25 for someone to queue to buy The Book of Mormon tickets for him, while ‘bharat_kv’ is willing to pay £1,000 for a ‘front-end expert’. We thought we could help with that one, but further enquiries revealed it to be something to do with websites, actually.

BREASTFEED MY BABY

Wet-nursing is nothing new. What is new is sharing breast milk via social media. The Human Milk 4 Human Babies network puts lactating women with a surplus of breast milk in touch with those who are unable or unwilling to breastfeed. Find your local chapter on Facebook, post on the page if you would like to donate or receive breast milk, talk to other mothers about the experience, and if you see a post from someone who’s a potential match for you, contact them directly via private message — it’s up to you to come to a financial arrangement*.

*HM4HB has asked us to make clear it is a non-commercial network and does not condone the sale of breastmilk.

UNPACK MY SUITCASE

Picture the scene: you arrive back from a week in Greece with the family, schlep on to the last Gatwick Express, stumble into a taxi and get home at midnight, bleary-eyed, with suitcases full of dirty clothes and muddy trainers. Now imagine, just imagine, waking up the next morning to find the clothes washed, ironed and put away, the suitcases back on top of the wardrobe, your toothbrush in its pot and all the sand that poured out of the bottom of your bags swept away without a trace. Welcome to life with a butler — a butler trained at the UK’s only butler academy, no less. An expense, sure, but making your partner wear white gloves to put the shopping away just isn’t the same. One-off hire from £660.

ADD TO MY ART COLLECTION

Buying art can be such a drag. Especially at auction, when you have to keep raising your arm. Exhausting! Time to put in a call to Bon Vivant, a luxury concierge service that among a wide range of options — including getting you on the guest lists for top clubs, upgrades at hotels and tables at the hottest restaurants — will manage your life as an art connoisseur, hooking you up with art experts who will offer advice, curate collections and even oversee purchases for you. You’ll be charged commission at their discretion, but what’s an extra £20,000 when you’ve snapped up a Damien Hirst, eh? Membership from £250 per month.

FEED ME QUINOA

After a long day it can take every last ounce of energy simply to stick an M&S ready meal in the microwave and unscrew a bottle of wine for dinner. For those with money and calories to burn comes The Pure Package, a food delivery service of super-healthy meals tailored according to whether you want to detox or lose weight, or for pre- or post-pregnancy. Each day, a chiller bag is left on your doorstep by 6am, containing your daily quota of healthy food (tomato, avocado and cottage cheese on organic rye bread for breakfast and chicken noodle salad for lunch if you’re on the Weight Loss programme). There’s no need to plan meals, go food shopping, weigh ingredients or count calories. That smug feeling really is priceless. The five-day Slim & Trim programme includes all meals, one personal training session and a goody bag, from £195.

PICK ME A CUTE OUTFIT

If you’re wondering who in their right mind actually enjoys shopping, head to Westfield Stratford City on a Saturday. The answer is no one. Even the 13-year-old girls who thought they’d love spending the day with their BFF and a Claire’s Accessories voucher are curled up in the foetal position on the giant playmat outside Nando’s by 4pm. Clothes shopping sucks. Unless, that is, you have signed up to Matches’ Private Shopping Service, where a glamorous room is reserved for you at the store’s Marylebone townhouse for the most hassle-free shopping experience of your life. After an initial consultation with an expert shopper, a carefully selected edit of clothes is paraded before you to choose from while you enjoy a glass of champagne. There’s no rummaging through rails, elbowing craven shoppers or scavenging for the right size. There’s not even an obligation to buy anything you’re presented with — and the service doesn’t cost a penny.

HOST MY DINNER PARTY

Entertaining friends and contacts is a must for any social butterfly, but who can be bothered with all the hard work? We’ve all seen Come Dine With Me; we know it rarely ends well. Estelle and Vincent are two people you can’t afford not to invite to your next dinner party, because they’re doing the cooking. This dynamic gastronomic duo will arrive at your home (or even come with you on holiday) to whip up artichoke and quail’s egg salad with truffle broth, roast loin of lamb with gnocchi, and English strawberry Pavlova for pudding. They will shop, cook and serve for up to 15 and adapt to any size kitchen. They do canapés, too (dashi and spider crab, anyone?), and even clean up afterwards. £110 per person all-inclusive.

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Outsourcing