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Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Kaori-san.You can avoid frustration by thinking about the type of request Kaori-san will be able to do and how long it will take her to do it.

THE TYPE OF STUFF WE CAN DO

• Find a doctor or service person in a specific area
• Translate a business email (Additional cost required as we use Gengo.com )
• Research an aspect of a blog post
• Buy and send flowers to your loved one
• Arrange for a housekeeper to clean your apartment
• General research gathering
• Make reservations & appointments on your behalf
• Distill product reviews into recommendations
• Make a list of businesses/vendors/venues for you
• Find hotels and get price quotes for you
• Find the lowest-cost flights for a trip
• Purchase something up to $200 on an online shop which does not require membership registration
• Try to track down an item that you lost
• Call your cable, phone company, or any vendor
• Schedule conference calls
• Add appointments to your Google calendar

 

THE TYPE OF STUFF WE CAN’T DO

• Anything that requires your credit card number
• Write and post an entire blog post for you
• Sales lead generation – cold calls, spam emailing, wholesaler negotiation, etc.
• Make list of more than 10 (we can’t make a list of all companies in Japan)
• Book flights, hotels or rental cars (we can get info & price quotes)
• Paint your house (but we can find you a painter)
• Pick up your laundry (we can find a place that delivers, though)
• Extensive travel planning
• Tasks involving a language other than English or Japanese
• Highly technical tasks (software support, programming, HTML, etc)
• Give you legal and/or financial advice (we can provide you with non-binding research)
• Recurring tasks or tasks with a strict, near-term deadline
• Find confidential contact information for high-profile individuals
• Break our Terms of Service or those of other businesses
• Anything sexual including research on sex related services

The key to effectively using a outsourced assistant is to break request up into small chunks. Come into the office with a list of 10 things you need to get done, and assign 10 separate task to Kaori-san instead of one huge task with 10 request.