Spending money on time-saving services is the secret to sustaining happiness. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that people who invest in time-saving services report greater life satisfaction than those who don’t, regardless of their economic status.
Buying time significantly improves your life satisfaction by enabling you to:
- Spend more time doing activities with friends and family
- Do old hobbies and try out new ones
- Explore new places
- Take time to slow down and relax
Here are the top six time-saving services to boost your happiness.
1) A Managed Virtual Assistant
If you’re a busy professional, the most cost-effective time-saving service is a virtual assistant through a managed VA service. They will become an essential part of your team and, in addition to handling all the tasks you give them, they’ll proactively find ways to save you extra time so you can work fewer hours.
Virtual assistants can handle any process-driven task including:
- Inbox management
- Sales support
- Filing expenses and doing basic bookkeeping
- Professional networking support
- Research
- Data entry and cleaning
A managed virtual assistant will save you time by maximizing your value while minimizing your time and monetary overhead. Unlike freelance VAs that you need to vet, train, coach, and replace if they suddenly quit, managed virtual assistant services assume full responsibility for your VA's success.
At Prialto, all of our assistants work at our offices and receive ongoing training and coaching from their managers. Whenever you’re not 100% satisfied with your assistant, simply notify your Engagement Manager, and they’ll ensure improvements are made. Additionally, we offer backup support so you’re never without assistance on a business day.
2) Meal Prep Kits
The best time-saving techniques aren't always professional. They're personal too. Cooking healthy meals from scratch for your family can easily take an hour or more. Add in the time required for recipe planning and grocery shopping, and you can easily spend 10+ hours per week just preparing meals.
After a long day at work, spending a lot of time cooking dinner can be exhausting and prevent you from doing relaxing activities at the end of the day.
Meal prep kits from companies like HelloFresh, Terra’s Kitchen, and Green Chef enable you to prepare dinners in about half an hour since all the ingredients are pre-cut and immediately ready to be cooked.
With the time you save, you can do more of the things that make you happy during the week.
Read More: The Complete Professionals Guide for Improving Productivity
3) Grocery Delivery
Grocery shopping can easily consume an hour or two a week, especially when the only times you’re available to do it are right after work and on weekends when lines tend to be long.
Signing up for a grocery delivery service can give you that time back, plus a couple of additional hours each month for planning, if you set up a schedule for basic items like toilet paper, soap, and toothpaste. In fact, a virtual assistant can also help by managing your routine deliveries and schedule.
If you combine this time-saving service with meal kits, you’ll free up several hours a week to focus on the activities you enjoy most.
4) An Intern or Entry-Level Associate
If the reason you lack enough time to do the things you love is that you’re constantly having to work late, hiring an intern or entry-level associate can free up significant amounts of your time and enable you to work fewer hours.
Since they’re college students or recent graduates, they’re eager to learn new skills, make professional connections, and build their portfolios. As a result, many of the tedious, non-strategic projects that take up your time are exciting to them. Here are some examples:
- Creating PowerPoint presentations
- Writing and/or formatting reports
- Helping plan events
- Managing correspondence with non-urgent contacts
- Improving file organization structures
- Completing other projects that don’t require your authority or expertise
Though these kinds of tasks may seem boring, they expose young professionals to a lot of information that helps them better understand your business and profession overall. So, hiring an intern or entry-level associate will not only save you time but also let you support a young person’s career.
5) Home Improvement Folks on Handy
Handy is a network of freelancers offering a variety of house cleaning and handyman services, so you can spend more time enjoying your home and less time maintaining it. The site connects you with local professionals who can handle tasks including:
- Cleaning your home
- Assembling and mounting furniture
- Remodeling your kitchen and bathroom
- Painting
- Repairing your fence, deck, roof, flooring and other parts of your home
- Trimming trees, fixing sprinklers, and wide variety of other tasks
So, instead of spending your weekend cleaning and handling home repairs, you can spend time with friends and family, focus on your hobbies, and participate in other activities that make you happy.
5) Helpful Neighbors on TaskRabbit
Besides regular chores like cooking, grocery shopping, and home maintenance, many other miscellaneous tasks take up your time and distract you from more meaningful activities.
TaskRabbit is a freelance platform that lets you hire people to do time-saving services ranging from building your Ikea furniture to planning, staffing, and bartending your office parties.
Popular tasks that people offload to save time include:
- Dropping off donations
- Yardwork
- Waiting in line
- Planning and staffing parties
- Returning packages
- Mounting TVs
You can find someone on TaskRabbit who will do just about any chore so that you can spend your weekends doing what you love instead of all of your random to-dos around the house.
Investing in these kinds of time-saving services will enable you to live a happier, more fulfilling lifestyle.