Hello to 27 subscribers of this newsletter. Last week’s issue received 52 views, and 8 new people signed up.
In this issue
Outsourcing your energy now is easier than ever
Some interesting things I read/watched/listened to lately
📝 Outsourcing your energy now is easier than ever
A set of services started popping out lately that help people take care of some aspects of their lives entirely. I call these “Services to outsource your energy.” I told you, I’m awful at naming things 🤦🏻♂️
I first experienced it myself with house cleaning. I haven’t used any specific service per se but hired a cleaning lady after a friend’s recommendation. At first, I was a bit skeptical. That would save me how much, three to four hours? Meh. That won’t crush my schedule; I can easily find four hours once in two weeks, but I realized that it’s more than just four hours.
First of all, four hours is just cleaning in itself. Besides that, you need to prepare, make sure you have the necessary supplies. You definitely won’t be as efficient as a professional cleaning lady. And second of all, those four hours aren’t just lost time. It’s lost energy. And you can pay someone to outsource this energy. To take care of all the necessary thinking, planning, and doing. That was a bliss.
Then I turned to food. Cooking at home was a fun activity for weekends, but doing it every day was a nightmare to me. It required lots of planning, thinking ahead of how to stock up my fridge five days into the future, knowing what I wanted to cook. It required lots of energy. Luckily, the delivery services came around—first, restaurant delivery, then ready-to-made ingredients delivery, and then 15-minute grocery delivery. With them, I got to save my energy for something else.
And this can go on and on and on over to other common, mundane tasks. In Moscow, there was a car repairing concierge service. They make a copy of your car keys, and whenever there is something needed to be fixed, you just have to text them. A few hours later, your car would be waiting for you set and ready to go. You don’t have to waste time driving somewhere, finding the right car service, and bargaining for a reasonable price. They’d take care of all of it.
Technically, this idea of delegating some mundane tasks to someone existed long before. But it was available only to the privileged. Thanks to the tech and the economies of scale, it’s now available to the masses.
In 2021 you can outsource your energy for nearly any task in your life. Some to AI (like planning your schedule or writing blog posts), some to real humans (house cleaning, preparing food, car maintenance, car ownership, travel planning, visa submission, you name it).
This is a magical moment in history. Now we can preserve all that energy and put it to good use. Take some time off, build something or learn something new. Hopefully, not to spend more time in front of our black rectangles.
There are still some blind spots in this market that are just too complicated to execute well. One of them is taking care of your health. And this is precisely what we are trying to tackle with our new company. But this is another story. We’ll get to that in 2022.
👓 Things I've been reading/watching/enjoying
Beyond Smart
I’ve been catching up on my reading queue lately and got to this new(ish) piece from Paul Graham. Remarkable as always.
Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I would. The choice makes me uncomfortable, but when you see the two options laid out explicitly like that, it's obvious which is better.
AR for cooking
😮 Wow!
The White House: Improving Customer Experience and Service Delivery for the American People
The White House announced a federal customer experience initiative. In short, Joe Biden will sign an Executive Order that would:
Include 36 customer experience (CX) improvement commitments across 17 Federal agencies.
Create a sustained, cross-government service delivery process that aligns to the moments that matter most in people’s lives (e.g., turning 65, having a child, applying for a business loan).
Interesting to see how this unfolds and whether or not that would make a significant impact on online government services in the US.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. Until next week 👋🏻