Christene LeDoux | handyman | Part-time Personal Assistant | Rate

The bin full of C and D files-to-be-­created weighs on me.

I hear myself repeating Lorie's advice: Never say, "Put it here for now" - find a permanent place for it. Is this rolling pin a B object or a C object? Does Tylenol count as an A object when you're so organized it gives you a headache?

I'm so busy organizing my work, I'm not working. Wasn't outsourcing supposed to free me to be more productive? What's happening?

What's happening is I'm seriously considering buying a label maker.

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Christene LeDoux,
Part-time Personal Assistant

Rate: $12 an hour
Found: Craigslist

Christene loves my daughter. Loves my dog. Loves my cat. On the first day she works for me, she drops off dry cleaning, organizes a drawer, buys materials for a new laundry-room shelf, buys hooks for my bathroom doors, drops all my trash at the transfer station, takes four boxes of donations to the thrift store, finds a handyman to fix a broken bureau drawer, and brings me a latte. I love Christene.

On the second day, she gets stuck in traffic on the way to my house, and I spend the first hour of her time here searching for tools she can use to install the laundry-room shelf. She installs said shelf slowly and with some difficulty. Same with the hooks on my bathroom doors. I realize, at the end of the day, that we should have asked the handyman to install the shelf, so that Christene could have worked on combining my address books. But I still love Christene.

As I'm falling asleep that night, insight jolts me awake: I'm making many of the same mistakes businesses do when they outsource (see "Outsourcing Trip-Ups," at right). Having edited a half-dozen stories about those pitfalls, I should have been able to avoid them. Nope. Management 101: Knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to execution. To lull myself to sleep I open my laptop and tinker with the next day's to-do list.