My wife and I recently hired a cleaning person to clean our home twice a month. We have no kids and we’re not so busy that we can’t do it ourselves, but we both work hard so we figured why not remove one source of aggravation? It isn’t that expensive anyway…

Cleaning services are very easy to find, at least in Montreal, and they’ve been readily available for a long time. Interestingly, thanks to the Wonderful Wacky World Wide Web, there are now many other (often inexpensive) services available online that can allow you to delegate or “outsource” all kinds of everyday tasks, to let you focus on… well, anything else.

Do you have a bunch of stuff that you’ve been meaning to put up for sale on eBay, but you just can’t seem to get around to it? Well, just hire an eBay trading assistant. eBay provides a directory of experienced sellers that you can search through by geographic location. Just contact them and negotiate a fee. They do recommend that your items be worth at least $50 for the sales to be worthwhile for everyone involved. Get rid of stuff and make some money without actually doing any work! What’s not to love?

Have a specific manual task that you don’t want (or can’t) do? TaskRabbit allows you to post a  job on their site, like “buy groceries”, “put up shelves” or “walk pet tiger”. Once your task is posted, it is matched to Taskers with relevant skills. Each Tasker is vetted by the site and rated by previous users. You pick a Tasker, agree to pay for at least one hour of work and there you go. You canclean out the junk in your garage without lifting a finger! You’re welcome.

Do you have some kind of writing, drawing or recording task to delegate? Maybe you want help advertising something?  Check out Fiverr. It’s a marketplace for selling (generally online) services starting at $5. Of course, all of the sellers offer the option of making the service they render more elaborate if you pay extra, but you could just stick to the strict minimum if it is good enough.

Delegating away tasks seems like an easy way to reduce my stress level, and the price isn’t necessarily very high at all.

On the other hand, if you actually like selling things on eBay, running errands or if you have a specific skill you’d like to rent out (kudos!), all of the above sites are also for you! Just sign up as a trading assistant, Tasker or seller and start making some money. Possibly some of my money!