Have you hired a personal assistant as a programmer?

There's dedicated services for almost everything these days. A cheap PA is a generalist, probably not very good. If you want to talk to contractors, go through an agency that handles that. If you want someone to do laundry and fold it nicely, there are cleaners. If you want someone to pick out nice clothes for you, there's personal shoppers. And so on. Mturk and fiverr handles a lot too.

A good PA, the type who can read your mind, would also be making really good money. They'd be about the rate of a lawyer or so. I've dealt with people who had dumb PAs and they were just really frustrating.

A good part of the Four Hour Workweek covers on how to utilize virtual assistants, and there was a boom in PA demand shortly after that. But it's receded since.

I've hired people to do stuff like research a good mouse for me and it was great. But you miss out on the satisfaction of doing such things. I mean I could get GPT-3 to write a perfectly good comment in HN from just bullet points, for about 6 cents. But where's the fun in that?

For the wealthy these are called House Managers, and they generally oversee the work of either specialist contractors (working for a “job rate”) or full-time staff who handle cleaning, laundry, cooking and catering, gardening/landscaping, property repairs or enhancement projects, personal training, interior design, tailoring, event planning, etc.

For the ultra-wealthy there’s also often a Family Office who might be responsible for acquiring and running private jets, yachts, a property and investment portfolio, etc.

If you want someone to handle all the “boring” you’re closer to the former, but you get what you pay for, and you will either get someone who’s done this before (and probably charges accordingly, since your competition in that hiring market is usually versus people looking for House Managers) /or/ you may spend a LOT of time setting up mechanisms and coaching someone without experience to be successful (and does your definition of “boring” also include this type of effort?).

“I can’t get things done” in this context may also be termed “executive dysfunction” and may be indicative of ADHD (among other things, see a psychologist or psychiatrist for an actual diagnosis).

No idea where you are in the world, how much you earn or your net worth and ability to pay, but for Seattle or Bay Area, a decent agency-managed PA might be around >= $75/hr (usually the agency is also looking for 20 hour a week minimums, ~$6k/mo) or a House Manager on an FTE basis inclusive of benefits will be >$100k for anyone remotely competent. In both cases they usually have expectations or restrictions on job duties; they’ll often only do “light cleaning, tidying and arranging” and beyond that they will supervise cleaners (inc. paying them, if you set them up to do this, but the cost for additional contractors is not included in the $6k/mo cost for the PA) if you want someone to spend 6 hours getting into every nook and cranny, scrubbing ovens and cooktops, etc.

Virtual assistants are virtually useless (in my experience).

Well now you have two problems.

With a personal assistant, you'll need to provide very detailed instructions for success. The list of items you list for your PA will take roughly the same amount of time as actually just doing the work.

Drycleaning, handling returns, that stuff is easy. But if you're like me, that's only 10% of what you need to get done.

I'm wired similarly, have tried PAs, and I try to use services that have a PA aspect to them. (StichFix, Uber, wedding coordinator) -But unless you're putting in the work to really get value and automate the things you need a PA for, you'll find yourself just shifting the boring tasks to dealing with the PA, and shift the problem.

I have not, although I have thought about it a few times.

Rather, I look for vendors and suppliers that "get it", are actually helpful, and can be trusted to deliver the outcome, instead of just their part and require supervision.

It's not always easy to find, many, many companies focus on providing a cheap headline price, but then they push a lot of the work and risk onto you, employ dark patterns, don't answer the phone or emails, etc.

I keep looking and trying different options until I find someone that actually gets it, you can tell them what you want and they figure out the details, can deliver to you, etc. It's not always easy, but I think it probably works better than paying for your own assistant to deal with vendors that are basically unhelpful and disinterested.

With a PA, it seems like it's still pretty much up to you to figure out what needs to be done.

It seems like companies like Google are always trying to solve the problem by pretty much managing your whole life, to the point of building company towns.

I wonder if there's a way to implement that in a way that doesn't lead to the usual horrible abuses one expects from a corporation running your life.

Some celebrities seem to have their personal lives managed pretty extensively by a manager.

I can definitely see the appeal of environments where you have one job, and some of the planning of random everyday stuff becomes a specialist position.

My wife says “it’s work, just do it”.

You work as a problem solver, why you think you wouldn't be able to?

I used Magic for awhile when my time was at a premium, it worked quite well, for some things it saved time, for others it just changed the workload to something more engaging.

That sounds like ADHD.