Household Manager for Nerdy Family

Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves are the CTO and CEO cofounders of local tech startup Beeminder.com. They also have two adorable children — http://dreev.es/eli5 [actually they’re now 10 and 12] — in northeast Portland and are seeking a full-time or close to full-time assistant.

Initial pay would be $20/hour if you don’t have experience with this kind of thing and more if you do. In any case we expect it to rise as you learn how we work and are able to noticeably increase our efficiency with minimal management required. To the contrary, we’d like you to manage us.

The job will initially involve lots of cleaning, cooking, kid-schlepping, etc, but as you learn the ropes we’d like you to be in charge of outsourcing as much of that as possible. You’ll have a generous budget and lots of autonomy to do anything that saves us time! It’s a lot of responsibility and stress so you should thrive on that. But not long hours and you can set your own schedule.

Duties and skillz and example tasks:

  1. Keeping on top of the kids’ school calendar and noticing and scheduling events for upcoming school holidays
  2. Procuring a new desk, making reasonable trade-offs between time and money in researching the purchase
  3. Booking a hotel and planning an itinerary for a trip
  4. Triage and making tricky tradeoffs about what to work on
  5. Logisticizing
  6. Uncanny responsiveness on email (during your work hours, not day and night)
  7. Accounting and budgeting
  8. Hiring and managing others

We especially want someone who geeks out about new productivity systems. And ideally someone ambitious who would value our mentorship and might want to eventually work their way up to being Beeminder’s COO.

Finally, to make sure you appreciate the crazy you’d be walking into, check out Bethany and Danny on, embarrassingly, Fox News:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3207381490001/could-bidding-on-chores-help-your-marriage

(Also you should probably think Beeminder is the bees’ knees.)

——- Definitely read this part ——-

We need a way to filter responses down to something manageable so we’re only going to consider applicants who reply with a subject line like “X: Y the Z” where

PS: Eep, lots of responses! New requirement: follow the above meticulously and please don’t send a long cover letter yet. Just a tweet-size summary of why we seem like a good fit. If you want to spend time impressing us, read some of our blog and match our style in what you say in the tweet-size blurb. Thanks so much, everyone! This is exciting!

DRAFT: The Paradox Of Personal Assistance

Say you’re a personal assitant (PA) doing a task for someone. We’ll call that person the delegator. Being non-clairvoyant, you need to ask a lot of questions to do the task the way the delegator would do it. But those questions can easily engage the delegator to the point that they’re not spending much less time on the task than they would be if they were doing it their dangself. Especially if the delegator is nitpicky and prone to micromanagement. Since that defeats the whole point of delegating, you make your best guesses and don’t ask the delegator for input. Of course it doesn’t feel good to be told after it’s too late what could’ve been done better. But you do need that feedback.

So there are tricky tradeoffs to be made and conventional wisdom is that you have to accept that a delegated task won’t be done as well as the delegator would’ve done it. Which may be true, but here’s a strategy proposal for getting as close to the best of both worlds as possible. First, be sparing with questions and think about how easy they are to answer. Second, be prolific with FYIs like copying the delegator on emails. Or just frequent updates on what you’re doing and did. This keeps the feedback loop tight and lets the delegator jump in if they really want. But, crucially, it’s not time-consuming or stressful for the delegator because they’re only being asked isolated, easy questions, not questions that draw them in to thinking about the entire process of completing the task.

In short, maximize the delegator’s awareness while minimizing their involvement.

I think it’s easy to accidentally do the opposite. Dumping lots of information on the delegator seems like it might be overwhelming. And many questions seem so simple to ask. But information dumps are easy to ignore or skim or save for later reference. And simple questions can be like pulling on a loose thread of a sweater. They’re connected to other questions or things the delegator feels they should clarify before they can answer properly and before you know it the whole process unravels and you and the delegator are both in a pile of yarn up to your necks, hashing out together the best way to accomplish the task.

To make all this more pragmatic, my proposal is that you, as the PA, ask all the yes/no questions you like with the understanding that the delegator will only answer with an immediate yes/no. In my case, my smartwatch makes it extremely easy to answer with a yes or no, with no way to compose generic replies. So answering from my smartwatch may serve as a sufficient commitment device against getting drawn in and defeating the point of delegating.