Overview
Personal assistants are nothing new. Rich people as well as businessmen have had them for years and years, and some even think that great artists like da Vinci and Shakespeare had their own army of assistants working on their various projects.
With the advent of the Internet and a global workforce it’s gotten more and more popular for ordinary people to hire what’s known as a virtual assistant. Anything that can be done remotely can now be outsourced to people living in parts all over the world.
AskSunday is just one of many different outsourcing websites, and managed to secure itself a good amount of publicity, likely through a clever PR campaign.
The Claim
AskSunday claims to be the world’s largest virtual assistant company. They claim that with their service, you’ll save time. By giving tasks that you would have to do to your virtual assistant you are freeing yourself up to do more important things with your time.
The Hype
Time magazine voted AskSunday the number 2 website of the year back in 2007. This was before getting a virtual assistant became more mainstream, and it no doubt seemed cutting edge at the time. The hype is that soccer moms don’t really need a personal assistant, they just like the thought of having one.
The Cost
If you go with their “most popular” plan it’s $200 a month and you get 20 hours worth of work. Doing the quick math this is $10 per hour.
The Commitment
If you
Another thing you have to commit to is actually delegating the work. This can be a task for some who have never done this. It can be hard because your ego gets in the way. “Why should I get them to do this, they won’t do it better than me.” is a common thought process. Once you get good at letting other people do the things you don’t feel like doing, you open up a whole new world of possibilities.
Even complex jobs can be broken up into smaller parts, and then those parts can be assembled by you, saving you time and possible headache from starting at an overwhelming project. You have to be creative and learn to accept good enough rather than perfect.
Evaluation
Compared to trying to find a quality outsourcer on your own, the AskSunday service is nice. You won’t have to worry about getting burned, or by people wasting the time you are paying them for. They may be a bit pricier than going direct, some workers in developing countries will work for a few dollars per hour, but if it comes without the hassle of finding them, training them, and keeping tabs on them, it could be worth it.
Tim Ferriss says that if you get other people to do things for you, letting you stick to what it is that you do that makes you money, then it makes sense. So in this case if you outsource what is boring or mundane to the folks at AskSunday, and you get back to being the visionary of your business or your family, you can spend time on what matters most to you.
Our Recommendation
If you can quickly designate a task to your assistant that would take you an hour or more to complete, you should do so. The problem arises when you get into the habit of delegating things that would only take you a few minutes. This is wasteful because in the time that it takes you to tell someone else what you want done, you could have already done it.
To tear apart the example they give of having a virtual assistant set your doctor’s appointment, by the time you tell a VA your availability, and they make the appointment, and they confirm it with you, you could have made a quick phone call to the doctor and had it set yourself.
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View Comments
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but AskSunday is a disaster. I signed up hoping for a service that would make my life easier, but instead, I found myself in a whirlwind of frustration and incompetence.
First off, they couldn't find me a web developer. That's a pretty basic task for a virtual assistant service, right? You'd think so, but apparently not for AskSunday. They just couldn't get it done.
And then came the gas connection debacle. Here's a tip - if you can't handle the simplest task of booking a gas connection, you're not in the right business. It's not rocket science, but AskSunday seemed to struggle with this basic task.
The final straw was their inability to follow up on a user community I asked them to monitor. It's not like I was asking them to crack the Da Vinci Code. Just simple, regular follow-ups. But no, that was apparently too much for them.
The level of incompetence is astounding. I'm not sure what they're doing over there, but it's clear they're not focused on providing a quality service. In my opinion, you'd be better off doing the tasks yourself rather than entrust them to AskSunday. Save your money, time, and sanity.
DO NOT SIGN UP WITH THIS COMPANY. They stole $260 from me and won’t refund me or give me the work I paid for. Their phone lines have also been down for almost a year. I messaged them on 5 different platforms getting no response. Finally got one on messenger and now they’ve stopped replying. It’s been an ongoing issue since April. Don’t let them take your money like they did mine.
I've tried AS in the past and could not find what they could do for me that would actually save time, or that they could do adequately. They certainly cannot do any skilled work, they can't shop around for good prices, they can't really do anything without you available to answer questions. I honestly don't know what practical services they can provide to most people that would actually save any time. I suppose if you don't care about something being done a certain way it might be helpful, but I can't imagine anyone with important things to do having such a lack of pride as to hand those tasks off. I asked them once to find the least expensive of an item near me, they did a Google search and sent me the first result they found. Not worth it and nothing I couldn't have done myself more quickly/cheaply. These days a smart assistant like Siri or Alexa are just as useful and a whole lot cheaper in the long run.
If I need to outsource work on a certain project I will definitely consider using their services in the future. There are certain things that I just can't do myself and I'm sure a virtual assistant could solve much of those problems. But how about the other way around though? Would it be an ideal job becoming someone's virtual assistant? I might consider that route as well.