Stacy-Marie Ishmael wrote this blog post about signing up for Fancy Hands: 

After years - years - of dithering, I signed up for Fancy Hands sometime around midnight on the Tuesday of a week during which my calendar, my inbox and my immune system all seemed to be conspiring against me.

It was similar to the situation that prompted me to sign up for Task Rabbit last year: three months of being silently mocked by the bag of clothes I'd earmarked for charity and which I failed, every single day, to deliver to Goodwill.

I quipped then that as I've gotten older, I've become more willing to exchange money for time. This continues to be true.

In the 19 hours or so since I coughed up for their basic service, the virtual assistants at Fancy Hands have:

• scheduled five meetings for me (which involved creating calendar invitations and sending them to all participants - this service is free with their subscriptions)
• sorted out a fairly involved but entirely solvable with a lot of Googling type-query that I've been putting off for not quite three months, but close. This is what I emailed my 'virtual assistant', whom I've dubbed (at least for the purposes of my address book) Patrick G Jeeves, to figure out: "restaurants eligible for DiningDough.com AND Either 3.5+ (preferable 4) stars or higher on Yelp OR higher than a 7.5 Explorer rating on FourSquare." I also asked that the list includ the Yelp and/or 4SQ link. That took “Ana R” all of 90 minutes.

There’s a certain amount of letting go required in all this. The list “Ana R” prepared would never be identical to the one I’d have put together…had I ever gotten around to trying.

And there’s an element of acknowledging that I cannot do everything, be everything, all the time.

If the first step is admitting you need help, the second is letting someone help you.

Stacy speaks the truth!