A lazy man’s exposé: tasks I dead set refuse to do.

Living
by Afterpay
Oct 09, 2022      5 min read

I’m not much of a procrastinator, truth be told – until it comes to finishing odd jobs around the house, and then I’m a top-notch professional.

You know, the kind of task that would take an hour tops but, for some reason, feels like such a mammoth commitment that you’d honestly rather just pay someone else to do it. Well, the good news is that you can! For my fellow Small Task Procrastinators, I’m sharing a list of jobs that I dead set refuse to do (and I bet you do, too) so that you can get some absolute legend on Airtasker to do it. Game changer.

Cleaning up after a party



Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. How very dare the fact that after a great night spent with friends, enjoying a drink and eating good cheese, you have to clean up after everyone???

Ugh.

Let me tell you, the moment I realised I could hire someone to clean up the aftermath of a house party was one of the greatest moments of my life. They can collect the empty bottles and vacuum the crumbs off the floor and you can pay them for a job well done. That’s a veeery fair trade in my books.

Repot the plants your ex-housemate abandoned when they moved out



You’re either a plant person or you’re not, and if you’re not then you probably accidentally kill every plant you try to take care of. And take it from me, you don’t want to be responsible for keeping a plant alive when your leafy greens knowledge starts and ends with - “plants need water”. But how much water? Can you overwater plants? Oh no, have I drowned poor Felicity? (Yes, that’s what I named my fern.)

If you don’t trust yourself with the plants in your house that are in need of a little TLC, don’t risk tending to them by yourself. Leave it to the professionals. You, your housemates, your partner and the plants will thank you.

Setting up the Christmas tree



If it was up to me, we’d only ever use those miniature Christmas trees. The kind you can fit neatly on a shelf and then stash in a cupboard for the rest of the year. But my partner loves Christmas and so I want to surprise her with a big tree. But here’s the catch: I don’t want to set it up myself.

This year, I’m planning on manifesting a real life Christmas miracle (aka, paying a good human at Airtasker to set up my gigantic plastic tree and expertly decorate it, then taking most of the credit for myself). So cheers to the people at Airtasker - you have no idea how much the stability of my relationship depends on you. 

Building flat-pack furniture



Speaking hypothetically and not at all from experience from the last time we got a new wardrobe – if I did this myself, it would probably end in me crying manly tears, crumpled in a heap on the floor, surrounded by instructions that I can’t decipher and tools that I tell everyone I can use but definitely can’t. Again, hypothetically

Just trust me, it’s safer for everyone if an expert is brought in. They can do it in a fraction of the time it would take me, and I won’t need to stress that the furniture might collapse one day in the (near) future.

Sorting out messy black holes around the house



I know tidiness is important but it’s far easier (and honestly - more satisfying) to just shove everything behind the TV unit/wardrobe or into a miscellaneous drawer and forget about it. But I recently managed to buy a PS5 and was forced to come face to face with an actual cable labyrinth behind the TV, and I realised it was time to rally and do something about the black holes of random mess that have grown in the shadows over the years. They’re hidden right now, but they’re expanding, and I fear that they will one day take over… 

I did my best to tidy up the little disaster zones, but if I’m going to fix something then I want it done properly. This way I could pay someone who has all the right tools and knows the little hacks to keep things neat and tidy for the long haul. Once again, my many thanks go to the straight-up skillful Airtasker people I’ve hired over the years. They just get me. 

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