I paid someone to take over my family's to-do list for a month. It got me hours of my life back.

I paid for a personal-assistant service that helped me with family admin and (mostly) made my to-do list disappear. Amy Lombard for BI Contrary to what FindFaye.com suggests, I did not find Faye — Faye found me. She found me in the way most goods and services discover you these days: ads the algorithm giddily serves up to a woman whose search history is mostly "How do I not lose it on the phone with our stupid health insurance?" and "Why do after-school clubs sell out at 9:02 a.m.?" Faye is a service that pairs you with a dedicated family advisor (a real person, not the chatbot you occasionally go to for advice about your marriage or this month's unusually strong menstrual cramps), who takes over the life admin you don't want to do yourself. From paying bills to checking on insurance claims, I hoped this advisor would free up time for more enjoyable parts of my life. To be clear, there are many websites that can help you hire a virtual personal assistant — Athena, Magic, and Wing, to name a few. However, I liked that Faye is specifically designed for families, and treats domestic life admin as the real work it is. My husband and I both work full time. He is an involved parent, but I still carry the majority of the anticipatory mental load — the noticing that something needs to happen, then completing or delegating every step until it does, whether it's the glamorous work of making sure we have enough toilet paper or organizing playdates. So in addition to alleviating my own stress, hiring a Faye advisor was partly an experiment: What happens when the invisible work of parenting becomes visible, documented in a real-time database, and monetized? Would it change my husband's perception of housework? Faye is a monthly subscription with three tiers of support: Four hours is "Peace of Mind" ($169 a month), eight is the "Free Time Finder" ($299 a month), and for one month, I paid for the holy grail of 16 hours ($569 a month), promising to be a "Game Changer." I was very ready to get 16+ hours of my life back. Offloading the invisible labor As soon as you sign up for Faye, you get access to its online database, and you're encouraged to start adding items to "Tasks" for your advisor. I experienced something magical the first time I typed every "to-do" in my head and on my phone into my Faye task list. I added not only the ones flagged "GIRL, DO IT TODAY OR ELSE", but the evergreen lists labeled "Personal", "Health", "Kids," and even ideas for "Fun!" that would still require some administrative planning. I found using Faye to be fairly straightforward. Faye; Julie Kling Every task in the database had a section where I could clearly define the task, expected outcome, and deadline, and label it as low, medium, or high priority. It was delightful to watch these tasks land in someone else's database, in a pleasing font, as if they were now someone else's problem entirely. Of course, I understood that more would need to be said and done before any of these tasks got executed. However, for a moment, I believed my advisor would take it all off my plate, not unlike the delusions of a new romantic relationship. Within 30 minutes of signing up, I got a text from my Faye advisor, Julia. We scheduled an onboarding call for the next morning. Julia was also a mom, lived 45 minutes away, and, based on her photo, looked eerily similar to me. She had a professional track record that instilled confidence, but my honest first concern was whether my husband could keep "Julie" and "Julia" straight in his mind. (My second thought was that dear Nora Ephron is bored out of her mind up in heaven and playing a fun joke on me.) During onboarding, we ran through a quick slide deck showing how to get the most out of Faye, including granting full calendar access, completing a brief questionnaire about your family, and loading key logins and at least one credit card into Faye's encrypted "Secrets" tab. Julia and I agreed to use the Faye task manager as command central, but she encouraged me to always text or email her if something came to mind and I didn't want to formally enter it as a task. She would capture the fleeting thought and then take care of it for me. For example, I forwarded a birthday party e-vite so she can RSVP on our behalf, add the party to my calendar, and then have a wrapped, age-appropriate gift delivered to my house. This is the closest thing to parenting witchcraft I have encountered as an adult, and the only thing left for me to do was beg my children to write their names on a card. Faye runs occasional free workshops for members, and I got a lot out of "The Art of Elite Delegation" led by Jennifer Mickel, founder of The Third Shift, which brings management consulting frameworks to the invisible labor of family life. Mickel reiterated that the most exhausting part of most family labor takes place before you delegate a single step — it's the noticing, tracking, and reminding that modern parents, usually moms, deal with. S