We're happy to announce a new integration with Trello, a project management system that keeps you organized even better than your Trapper Keeper did. Remember those? 

When you synch your Trello account to your Fancy Hands account, you can assign items from your Trello to-do list to your Fancy Hands assistants, freeing up time in your day to keep working on the important things you need to do. 

Or, maybe you can use the free time to hit the gym. 

More fun, even - free up time for happy hour! 

Well done, Old Sport!

Interested in becoming a new Trello user? Find out more about them here. 

Lifehacker wrote about them here and Techcrunch has the behind-the-scenes dish here.

Already a Trello client? Connect your account to your Fancy Hands account right here. 

Find out about all of the platforms that Fancy Hands integrates with and other cool bells and whistles here.

It warms our hearts when people blog about their experience as a Fancy Hands client. Here's what Keith Korneluk has to say:

"Quick. Make a list of the top ten things you have to accomplish this month but have absolutely no desire to start or finish them. Now take that list and circle the tasks that could be accomplished if you were a Hollywood celebrity with a personal assistant. Got the list?

Great.

Guess what? You can have that personal assistant working for you without the burden of paying them thousands of dollars and selling your underwear to TMZ. Because your assistant is in the cloud.

Enter Fancy Hands.

Fancy Hands bills itself as “assistants for everyone”. They’re a company of virtual assistants based only in the United States that can take care of almost anything for you. They’re quick, responsive and (usually) accurate. You submit tasks via your computer, mobile device, email or by telephone. Then, the team of assistants at Fancy Hands goes to work for you and updates you along the way.

So here are my tasks for my first month using Fancy Hands and the result:

• Task #1: Please call Honda Financial services between 8a-7p CST on Monday and schedule my lease-end inspection for this Friday (4/26) after 3pm. I gave Fancy Hands all of the information needed to schedule the inspections.

• Result: My inspection was scheduled first thing Monday morning and my assistant confirmed the appointment before I even checked my email. The inspector came to my house that Fridan and I’m all set to go.

• Task #2: I recently started cycling to work. Please calculate approximate weight loss with biking 5 miles per day, 4 days per week. The five miles are split into two sessions of approximately the same distance. Please see attached photos for reference on today’s ride. Please calculate approximate weight loss per month in pounds. Assume a normal (mostly) healthy diet.

• Result: My VA used a calorie calculator to find my basic calorie needs. They then calculated my average speed on the bike (generated by an app on my iPhone) to get calories burned per day by cycling. They put it all together to let me know that I’ll be losing 1.18 pounds per month (better start back on p90X).

• Task #3: I need a 24 hour transcription service that can also type written PDF’s. Needs to be US-based and offer round the clock rush service (if needed).

• Result: My virtual assistants made 17 calls on my behalf (they list the phone numbers called in your Fancy Hands Dashboard). I received a list of three companies that met all of my requirements.

• Task #4: Please find me a donation center for gently used baby toys, clothes and a stroller. Preferably a place that does not re-sell but gives the items to people that need it (ie, battered women’s shelter, needy families, etc.). The donation center should be no farther than 10 miles away from zip code 90010 in Los Angeles, CA.

• Result: At first my Fancy Hands assistant did not come through, giving me the name of a shelter that only accepts clothes and not toys, etc. I emailed my assistant back re-clarifying the original task and they updated the list with organizations that met my requirements.

• Task #5: Please find me a couple of photographers that shoot one hour sessions at the Santa Monica Pier in Santa Monica, CA. The total cost should be $300 or less and MUST include digital files at no additional cost. We are a family of three.

• Result: My VA first offered to check Groupon and LivingSocial. They expanded their search and gave me a couple of reasonable options for our first family portrait.

Bottom line: These tasks would have either not gotten done or taken me a couple of hours to complete. Instead, I didn’t have to take time out of my busy day or my evening with my family to do it. It’s just worth it. There are a number of tasks they can accomplish for you like setting appointments, making reservations and coordinating with TaskRabbit to get errands run for you. I didn’t realize I needed Fancy Hands until I wrote out my own to-do list, and 50% of it was tasks I didn’t want to do.

So let’s get down to dollars and cents. What does it cost? For five tasks a month, I paid $25 bucks. Not bad considering it would have cost me a thousand dollars in mental anguish. If you need more tasks, you can upgrade your plan (which I’m doing).

This is a no-brainer. Get yourself a virtual assistant and put them to work for you. I did and I love it. If you’re interested in signing up for Fancy Hands, click this link. I get a referral fee so feel free to go directly to their web site if that’s not your bag."

Check out what Amanda Steinberg, CEO of Daily Worth, has to say about Fancy Hands: 

"When it comes to work-life balance, it’s not just about making time for each, but making sure that both to-do lists (for work and home) are getting done. Not only am I the CEO of DailyWorth, I'm a divorced, now single mom of two, and I spend at least 10 hours a week commuting between my home in Philadelphia and DailyWorth’s main office in New York City. So my mind is constantly racing with things I need to do at home.

In a recent week, those included:

• Make a dentist appointment for my 6-year-old son to replace a tooth spacer.
• Buy same child a raincoat (the coats I saw in a local store were $40-$60! No way).
• Replace the t-ball hat he lost.
• Plan my business trip to L.A.
• Find a small, cheap beach rental on Jersey shore for August.
• Find the most cost-effective way to frame my new Michael Yoder painting.

These thoughts ping-pong in my brain with no consistent repository or time to deal with them.

So when I heard about Fancy Hands, a $25-per-month subscription service to help me research and do anything from a computer, I jumped on it.

Fancy Hands’ homepage explains the problem/solution so simply: “Do what you love. We’ll do the rest.” It’s a website and iPhone app that allows you to delegate any task that can be done over the phone or computer to a team of assistants on-call throughout the nation. They provide a simple dashboard where you can communicate with your virtual assistant, and manage the tasks you assigned.

Between conference calls, I rapidly banged out the first request:

Call dentist Dr T****** in Philadelphia to find out how much my son’s tooth spacer costs to replace (it fell out again!) and book an appt any Friday morning after two weeks out.

The response, within the hour: Dear Ms. Steinberg: The doctor you mentioned doesn't exist (oops! I'd given them the wrong name!) and I need your son’s name, please, to make the appt.

So basically, I'd given her zero helpful information. But after a quick email reply with clarifications, they had what they needed and the appointment was booked. Done. I didn't have to wait on hold, leave a message, follow-up, or even add the event to my calendar. (They do that, too.)

It’s been a huge relief to be able to check this off my to-do list. And it didn’t stop there. My virtual assistant not only found me the most cost-appropriate raincoat for my son, she researched discount codes as well. And the list went on.

For me, having a virtual assistant was less about saving time than saving myself from feeling guilty. Truthfully, so much of this stuff doesn’t get done for weeks -- or at all -- and it weighs on me. (It also saved me money--nearly $40 on the discounted rain jacket alone, compared to the price tags I'd seen earlier in the store.)

I still plan on hiring an actual assistant, like a recent college grad, in our Philadelphia office in the near future (know anyone?). But for the small stuff that eats away at my conscience, I’m sticking with Fancy Hands.

I wonder if they’ll help me manage my entire to-do list. Maybe I’ll ask them to."

Is fear sabotaging your productivity?

The CEO of FacileThings, Francisco Sáez says: 

We all know what fear is, since we live with it every day. We are afraid of changing jobs, public speaking, starting or ending a relationship, confronting people, being rejected…fear can make you abandon your business or the love of your life.

It is shown that when companies use the fear factor in the workplace (fear of not achieving goals, fear of conflict, fear of not being good enough, fear of not seeming productive), employees work harder but worse. The anxiety this climate generates affects people’s memory and ability to concentrate.

Types of fear

Fear of failure occurs especially when you do something you had not done before, something new, unique. Sometimes it is hidden by an extreme perfectionism that paralyzes work and prevents completion of projects.

To conquer it, you must understand that this fear is merely a misunderstanding of the learning process. When you try to create a new future, there are no molds, you have to experience. Consequently, failure is a part of the process that should not stop you. Simply, you must analyze what went wrong and make it work.

Fear of success is, if anything, even more common. It prevents you to catch the good opportunities. It makes you believe that you won’t be able to deal with such a challenging situation.

To conquer it, you must improve your self-esteem and the best way to do that is to act. Try to do the best you can and you will be satisfied although ultimately you would not get the best outcome. This way your self-esteem will be enhanced for future challenges.

Sleeping with the enemy

To make matters worse, when you try to make changes in your life, it turns out that the most important people for you - those who are supposed to stand by you - often don't entirely agree. They are accustomed to interact with you in a certain way and breaking that pattern of behavior bothers them. So you need to add the fear of worsening your relationships to the natural fear of the new.

If this is common and usually ends in your passivity, you should start questioning your environment. Are people around you willing to help you grow? Or are they negative thinkers who make things difficult?

If you stand firm in your intentions to overcome your inner challenges and give good example of this - not in an aggressive way -  people who love you will find the strength to go with you.

Moreover, it is natural that, little by little, negative people will shy away from you, and you, almost unconsciously, move towards more motivating people that are willing to support and inspire you. Connect with people who have already gone through something similar. They will help you see the path and fear of the unknown will be minimized.

Conquer your fear

In general, we are afraid of things that are beyond our control. So we must find ways to develop more confidence in our ability to handle any situation.

Acting is the best way to gain that confidence. Visualize the result, define the next actions and take the first step. Incorporate into your life the trial-and-error mechanism as a natural way of getting things done. Act, measure your progress and correct what does not work. Adapt. Repeat. 

It is possible there are some fears at the moment preventing you from doing many things, forcing you to accept work you should not do and, ultimately, undermining your productivity.

A little fear can keep you motivated, but uncontrolled fear will kill your productivity.

Feel your fear and move forward anyway.

In James Fallows' interview with David Allen of "Gettings Things Done" fame for the Atlantic, David replied with this when asked how we can all get our busy lives under control:

"All the stuff that is coming in needs to be externalized. I don't know that I could get it any simpler than that.

You need to capture the stuff that's potentially meaningful, you need to clarify what those things mean to you, and you need to keep a series of maps of the results of all of that so you can step back and see it from a larger perspective. That's the only choice: you're ultimately going to have a lot more to do than you can do, so the question is, do you want a half-empty or half-full life?

Really, you can only do one thing at a time with conscious attention, so you either are saying "That is the thing I need to do" or you're going "Shit, I'm not sure this is what I need to do." And one is stress-free productivity, and the other is an ulcer. Right? In a way, it comes down to that.

So, what do you need to feel comfortable about what you're doing and, maybe more importantly, what you're not doing? Well, you need to have a map of all the possibilities.

I just spent four hours with the head of [a large government organization] last week, and all we did were two mind maps--one for his job and one for his personal life, just to do the 20,000-foot areas of focus and interest and accountabilities about all of that--and then spent time making sure he got all the projects he needed ... to make sure he wasn't letting anything fall through the cracks, and then did a triage on some of the projects he needed to get rid of and hand off to associates. He just needed to externalize that, be more objective about it. He's buried, as is everybody.

So in a way, it really does come down to that: stop using your psyche as a place to try to collect and organize what you care about. If you try to keep it in your head, then it becomes like quicksand in there. So the good news is that all of this is forcing us to learn that lesson. And then, in the great, glorious future, we'll have nothing on our minds and can develop our inner wisdom. Why not?"

If you don't know what a "mind map" is, here are some examples: 

You see that they range from fancy ones with drawings and logos to simple, hand-drawn ones. 

The point is not how it looks. When you need to find more time in your life, spending a lot of time drawing a map is NOT going to help!

The point is to get everything that's floating around in your head out and capture it into one area. That way you can decide what your priotrities are and what your next steps should be to complete them. 

As a Fancy Hands client, one section of your mindmap can be "Delegate to Fancy Hands". As you write down the things that need to be done, but can be done by anyone - things that are not specifically in need of your personal touch, draw a line from that task to your "Delegate" section. 

• Get quotes on fixing camera.
• Order cedar blocks from The Container Store.
• Send Mother's Day gift by May 7.
• Make haircut appointment.

These are the things on my to-do list right now that I can delegate to someone else, and I'm happy to know that my Fancy Hands assistants will handle them for me. 

What can your assistants do for you today? 

Briana's been working as a Fancy Hands assistant for a few months now, and we're happy to have her on the team. 

Here are some recent requests from clients that she's handled: 

• I need to get a social security card the fastest way possible. Can you call the office closest to me and find out what that entails, and if there’s an application to fill out, please send it to me? 

• Can you find a professional organizer to come into my home, downsize some items, and pack me up for a move? 

• Please call my doctor’s office and give them my new insurance information below. Make sure that they accept that plan and if they do, schedule a check-up appointment for me next week. 

• Please send me quotes for reputable swimming pool cleaners to come clean the algae from my saltwater pool. 

About Briana: 

What are your interests?

I started playing piano and flute when I was very young.  I picked up the guitar in high school and immediately felt like I met my soul mate.

What are you good at? 

I am great at changing my mind - excellent, really.  I’m also good with computers, creative writing, and working under pressure. 

What is your worst quality? 

My friends would tell you that my worst quality is my everlasting addiction to Harry Potter. 

What is the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? 

Packing up and moving to Pittsburgh, not knowing anyone in the city but my mom.  I pretty much just quit my life in Pensacola, decided I was going to get on a plane and see how it went (it went very well, by the way). 

What’s the most memorable request you’ve seen from a customer? 

The first one that comes to mind for me is when a client asked me to research whether or not drinking a glass of water before a cup of coffee would make the effects of the coffee last longer.  It was a unique question, and I learned a lot while researching it.  The answer is "no".

Who is your spirit animal? 

I took a test once that said I was a hawk.  That’s fine with me - I would like to be able to fly! 

What are you most proud of? 

My daughter, Melody.  

What are you normally doing on a Saturday night? 

If I’m not with Melody, I am usually singing with my uncle's band.

What advice would you give to the 16 year-old version of yourself? 

I would tell myself to stop it with the tunnel vision and look at the bigger picture.  Oh, and "GO TO CLASS!"

(click to enlarge image) 

(Click to enlarge)

Executives are employed for their unique skillset. If you're their boss, you're paying them for their expertise. If you're the executive, you're being paid to perform and deliver based on your expertise. 

However, often times, executives find that half of their day has been spent mired in the muck of administrative work. 

With Fancy Hands' "TeamWork" plan, an entire company can reap the rewards of having a team of assistants handle the pile of mundane, assistant-level work that must be done; for a discounted price - a fraction of the cost it would require to staff the office with full-time assistants.

This allows executives to stop getting tied down with silly stuff and focus on what they're good at. 

Check out what some of our TeamWork clients are saying: 

• Fancy Hands enables me to get more work done every day. TeamWork allows me to give that power to my entire team. It’s really incredible. - Tony Halle of Chartbeat

• Fancy Hands has fundamentally changed the way I think about getting things done. In other words, they really changed my way of life. - Gabriel Weinberg of Duck Duck Go

• The line between what's possible and impossible, feasible and inefficient, changes substantially in our favor when we use Fancy Hands. - Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird 

As this New York Times article points out, providing an employee with a perk that helps alleviate some of their stress at home is becoming a more and more popular practice.

If, as a boss, you give your employee, Carl, a Fancy Hands membership, and he's able to delegate things like calling his cable company, scheduling a plumber to fix his guest room sink, and ordering his wife flowers, Carl will be less distracted with personal matters at work. And Carl's wife won't be nagging him that he never gets anything done. 

Of course, Carl's Fancy Hands assistants will also be helping him get actual work-related tasks done, like scheduling, conference calling, and research. 

With Fancy Hands, Carl is transformed into a productivity machine! 

Get started here now, and your entire company can be working smarter before everyone leaves the office today. 

The update to our iPhone app is out! It fixes login issues, location services, and there are some other goodies in store for you.

Don't let it getcha!

I don't have kids, but our founder Ted does, and if the amount of times his son has ruined a road trip or a night of sleep by throwing up is any indication, it seems like being a parent can be quite a challenge. 

Our clients with children rely on Fancy Hands to help them with all of their kid-related inquiries. Here's a sampling of their recent requests:

My daughter is 10 months old and she has outgrown her Graco 35 car seat. Can you research the next seat that we should buy, sending me research, reviews and pricing options? 

We’ve been cooking as a family for a while and we’re tired of all of our recipes, but too busy to research new ones. Can you send me healthy parent websites with new food ideas, and can you recommend good cookbooks that we could order from Amazon? They should be highly rated and focused on organic, healthy living. 

My nephew is about to turn one year old. His parents are both vegan hipster types. Can you send me ideas for birthday presents under $80 and find a place in Seattle where the items are in stock so I can go purchase them? The gift should be eco-conscious and super cool.

Can you have my daughter’s pediatrician fill out the attached permission form confirming that she’s healthy to go on her school field trip, and then send it to her school? 

Can you please send me some research about cord blood banking? I'd like to get some actual stories of families who have benefitted from banking their baby's cord blood and how it helped them, as well as hear from negative objectors who feel this is unecessary and/or not advisable. 

Can you send me a list of programs that are available to stream on Netflix that are well-reviewed educational shows for my children? 

Keep up the good work, parents...we're here to help you when you need it! 

We're a US-based company but we work for clients all over the world, and we have many in the UK. 

Sometimes our assistants have to look up the words that are used in a request to be sure they understand what our British friends are referring to! 

Here's a cheat sheet highlighting some of our common differences (click to expand).

The temperature at Fancy Hands HQ varies widely. Our methods of heating and cooling are tempermental and inefficient. Add that to a handful of people toying with the thermostat everyday, adjusting it to the temperature that they feel is perfect for them, and you get a lot of ups and downs. 

Nick, one of our developers, brought an electric imp in so that he could chart the scale of our thermodifferentiation (I think I just made that word up).

It seems that we haven't perfected the art of temperature control ourselves, but Men's Health says that in order to maintain our utmost productivity levels, we should. 

A Cornell University study that found low office temps (68 degrees or below) increase employee error by 44 percent.

How can temperature hurt your performance? Blame what the Cornell researchers call the “post-lunch dip.” Unlike the early morning and early evening hours when body temp and hormone levels are elevated, you experience a drop in both between 1 and 4 in the afternoon thanks to your body’s natural circadian rhythms, the researchers write. And, just as your body temperature drops at night when you’re asleep, the afternoon dip causes drowsiness that’s heightened by a cool office, the research shows.

If you work from home or hold the reigns to your office’s thermostat, set it for 71 degrees—the optimal temp for afternoon productivity, according to similar research from Finland’s Helsinki University of Technology. If your workplace’s temperature is beyond your control, pulling on a sweater, moving away from AC vents, or switching on a space heater could help you stay sharper after lunch, a Northumbria study suggests.

Productivity remains high even up to a balmy 77 degrees, according to the Cornell research.

Looks like we're on the highest temperature cliff here at Fancy Hands. I think I'll go open a window before we all start to drift off.

Have trouble thinking of gift ideas for friends and family? Throughout the year, whenever you hear them mention something they want or like in conversation, add it to the "notes" section of their contact in your phone. As their birthday or a holiday approaches, you'll have a cheat sheet ready to go.

Your Fancy Hands assistants can help you buy the gift, and you'll be a hero! 

Meet the star of our accidental office meme - Sad Jon. 

He and Sad Keanu are besties. 

And now, the questions: 

What are your interests? 

The typical nerdy suspects: scifi, gadgets, beer, etc.

What are you good at? 

Drinking for free via bar trivia.

What is your worst quality? 

I'm one of those people that never stops talking about how they adopted a dog from a shelter.

What's the biggest risk you've ever taken? 

I'm sure it wasn't actually risky, but taking a trapeze class sure as hell felt like it.

What's the most memorable request you've ever seen from a client?

A customer once had us call a whole bunch of places asking about her lost dog, and they were reunited.

What's your favorite request to outsource to your Fancy Hands assistants?

Scheduling appointments. I haven't personally arranged a meeting in months now.

What food do you hate? 

Most condiments. Specifically, mayo and sour cream.

What food do you love? 

Beer. If we're not counting liquids, pretty much anything breakfast related.

Favorite movies, books, TV shows? 

Scifi wins here again. Zombies, robots, various other apocalyptic scenarios.

Do you blog or Tweet or have any social media links you want to share? 

I know not of this "social media".

Who is your spirit animal? 

Does Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles count?

What are you normally doing on a Saturday night? 

Keeping 3rd Rock and Futurama fresh in my mind. You never know when you might need to know something from there.

What advice would you give to the 16 year old version of yourself? 

I'd stay far, far away from my 16 year old self, since anything I did would most likely result in a time paradox resulting in my death, global thermonuclear war, or some other such catastrophe.

In all seriousness, I (currently) have no regrets. I embrace my mistakes and try to learn from them. Not making a mistake early just means you won't be prepared for it when it inevitably happens. Anything I did at 16 almost certainly shaped my current self, and I'd much accept myself for what I am and focus on the future than dwell on the past and how my life could be different today.

(Click to enlarge) 

(Via Daily Infographic)

How many cows are there in Texas?

That's just one of the questions that Fancy Hands client Kate, of Prepwise.com, has asked her assistants to research for her. And then she sent us this email:

I logged in to place another request, but realized you may not hear often enough how appreciated you are.

The service is great and admittedly so is the price point. Thanks.

Also, big kudos to your user interface team. I recently had to build another site (which is NOT my bag), and was reminded how unsung cohesive design is. Your design aesthetic works for me. This dashboard is perfect. Nice contrast with the tasks remaining and reboot date. All above the fold. Clean. Simple. Pleasant design really does make it nice to return. Thanks for all you do.

-High five from The West Village, NYC

I reached out to Kate further and she added: 

The question I had when I signed up was, "Will I really need 25 requests? What can I possibly need every month that they can do?" You'll see I've used most of my requests most months.

Your team has helped me clarify some direction by doing some of the high level research so I could free up my mental resources for other activities.

I've been surprised by how many tasks you guys can actually help with once I started thinking about chunking the way I need/use information.

There have been a couple of phone calls to Time Warner and Con Edison, but really, the biggest draw is having a smart assistant do a quick search - another thinking person contributing to my efforts.

It often saves me from doing the same search and lets me start deeper. In the case of filing out paperwork, your team has helped me find the document I needed so I could get work of the work done without needing to do the pre-work of the work. 

Here are some requests that Kate sent to her Fancy Hands assistants recently: 

• Can you send me 4-5 options for tech-oriented, flexible office space in NYC?
• Please call this admissions office and ask them if they would sponsor or extend an existing F-1 visa for one of my students if she enrolls with them for a year while she continues her English studies to get into an American university.
• Please help me identify 3 anti-virus software options using Mac Lion or Snow Leopard that will protect my machine and create logs that can be downloaded and shared as needed.
• How much gas do Americans use to drive their cars annually?
• What's the number of Apple products in use?
• How many dogs are there in the US?
• Can you please get me in ASAP for an allergy patch test with my doctor? 
• Please help me identify the best 4-5 places to bring my iMac and external hard drive for repair. Places that specialize in Mac repairs and or recovering lost data due to corrupted mac hard drives get priority. Previous happy customer ratings that highlight expert technicians are a big plus.
• Where can I find the best roast beef sandwich in New York? 

Well…now we’re hungry. 

Thank you, Kate, for being a member of Fancy Hands, and for letting us know how we're doing! 

Today's random facts, culled from our assistants while completing requests for our clients: 

There are 736 licensed marijuana dispensaries in Colorado! Denver tops #1 with 400, follwed by Colorado Springs with 208. -Debra W. 

American Airlines has hold music. If you don't get hold music - just quiet, and you're sitting there, thinking you're on hold; you have actually been disconnected. 

This is totally different than calling correctional facilities, where you sit on hold in complete silence thinking that you've been disconnected. Nope, their hold system is one of complete silence. -Michele K. 

There are phthalates (chemicals) in pretty much everything - including spices! In searching to source phthalate-free spices for a client, I came across this article. Gah! Commence the urban homesteading and growing of my own food. -Mary B.

In comparing the two, Southeast Asia is a better region to begin a startup than China. It's an easier market for entrepreneurs to find their footing because of the opportunity gaps and the option to leverage social media. Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. -Mandie S.

You can pay for a claim to parcels of land that are reserved for prospecting for gold and other precious metals. You can get them as small as an acre up to hundreds of acres and you get it for the whole year to dig as you please. And people actually are do well doing this type of thing! -Kelley P.

Orchids are considered to be the masters of the flowering plant kingdom because they deploy some pretty cunning and sneaky methods to trick hapless bees and birds alike into pollinating their blooms. I had no idea! I thought they were just beautiful and difficult to grow. -Hope S. 

One of our clients' favorite requests to ask of their Fancy Hands assistants? 

"Make this phone call that I've been dreading." 

Frequently, the calls will have something to do with a service account of some kind, like a cable or phone company. 

We can handle those calls in two ways. 

Example #1 - Patching You In: 

Dear Fancy Hands,

Can you call Time Warner Cable and tell them that I've been without my HD channels for two weeks now?

Please schedule an appointment for a technician to come fix it - anytime next week on a weekday morning is fine.

And please negotiate a credit for my lost service as well.

I'm around all day and I'll look out for your call - please patch me in on my cell phone and I'll verify my permission for you to speak on my behalf. 

The important things to remember when requesting a patch-in are: 

• Please give your assistant a window of time that you'll be available for the call. 
• Remember to answer an incoming call from a number that you don't recognize. 
• Specify which phone number on your account (if you have more than one entered) you'd like them to call. 
• Specify, if you'd like your assistant to make a service appointment, a few times that work for you. If you have your Google calendar linked to your account, they'll drop the appointment in for you once it's confirmed. 

Your assistant will call the company, hold until they get a real person on the line, then patch you in so that you can give the customer service representative your account information, and let them know that you authorize your assistant to speak on your behalf. 

Then you can hang up and be on your way while your assistant handles the call for you. 

Example #2 - Including Your Information:

Dear Fancy Hands,

Can you call Time Warner Cable and tell them that I've been without my HD channels for two weeks now?

Please schedule an appointment for a technician to come fix it - anytime next week on a weekday morning is fine.

And please negotiate a credit for my lost service as well.

My account number is 876-50843 and my security password is 4531. The address and phone and name on the account are all mine that you already have in your system but I am around on my cell phone today; you can patch me in if there are any further qeustions. 

We may still try to patch you in if there's a hiccup (Did you forget that the account is actually in your wife's name? They don't have any appointments next week, is the week after acceptable for you? etc.), so if you let us know in your request that you're available for a patch-in, that will help us expedite your job. Otherwise, you'll receive an email detailing the outcome of the assistant's call and they can call the company back once they've received an email answer from you. 

Whichever way you prefer to have your assistants place these kinds of calls for you, we can eliminate that nagging "man, I still haven't called the cable company" thought that comes to you in the middle of the night.