Our blog has moved

If you've head the great news, our website http://www.taskrunners.com.au is up and running. You can now access all our blog posts here. 

Happy Tasking

Cheryl

Santa’s lil Task Runner - 5 ways to keep sane this festive season

http://eclectiquebutterfly.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/some-christmas-funnies.html

Is it any wonder that Australians greet Christmas with a mix of quiet delight and a sinking sense of misery?

Any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• Mum is in the kitchen slaving over chooks, hams, seafood, salads, roast veggies, trifle and plum pudding.
• Uncle is on guard duty to stop the kids from squeezing and shaking the presents too much before the big reveal.
• Aunty is almost to the point of stapling the baby into her Christmas gown to avoid any more nudie nappy runs.
• Every 3 minutes one of the kids insists on putting the antlers back on the less than impressed family dog.
• Grandpa is in the corner making more and more unwanted advances towards the sherry.
• Nana can’t get over the heat...oh the heat...and what it’s doing to her ankles, knees, hips and ears.  
• Whoever gave the toddler a noise-maker is inches away from being strangled by Dad. 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It's not even Christmas day!

So we've put together 5 ways to use TaskRunners to keep some sense of sanity working up to the 25th. 

1) Help with cleaning and fix-it projects

The house has to be super clean in order to pass the fingered glove test the mother-out-law (oops, typo) loves so much. So if scrubbing the house like a crazy person was one less day of hard work you didn’t have to do, post a spring cleaning task. 

Those DIY and fix-it projects from last year better not be hanging around lest Dad gets a lecture from his father and father-in-law. You can get help tackling those as well.

2) Pick up the grocery shopping 

Feeding an army at your party and don't want to break the bank? How about asking a Runner with a Costco membership to pick up your shopping and even have it delivered. It's worth the savings in time and money. 

Trips to the farmers markets. Picking up the 10 cartons of alcohol. Picking up the Christmas ham! Don't lose hairs over it, if it's one less thing on your to-do list, have someone help out. 

3) Put up (or taking down) the decorations 

If you love the idea of entering the best Christmas lights on the street competition you could possibly do with a spare hand. Or even if it's just dragging the tree from the garage and putting up the 500 decorations. That's at least a few hours of your weekend you could be doing something else. 

4) Be your personal shopper

How nice would it be to simply write lists and send off to your personal shopper? Well, you can. Managing your time and priorities is one of the best ways to help handle periods which can become overwhelming. Delegating tasks is not about losing responsibility but about prioritising your time and using it wisely. 

5) Help at the party

Treat yourself to actually enjoying your own party and relax with the help of Runners waiting on your guests and helping set up and clean up. A little box of choccies to say thank you for their help would be a special touch. 

It’s funny. Christmas is such a special occasion but the thrill of actually being able to have Christmas your way somehow diminishes as the workload piles on. Even before you can say “yes, we get to do it our way this year!” you’re surrounded with chores and complaints.

Lighten the load with TaskRunners. Large or small, we can put some of the jolly back into your Christmas this year!

Are you planning to have a stress-free Christmas this year?

Can you help us launch TaskRunners?

At the crux of it, TaskRunners is all about help. Helping people who need things done and connecting them with people who are looking to earn some extra income by providing that help. My English teacher would be appalled to see the word ‘help’ used four times in a paragraph. Sorry Mrs Brown, but I’m trying to get a message through here.

As we inch closer to our website going live in a mere week or so I’m buzzing with excitement that it’s come this far. I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished as a team (thank you Michael, Grant, Bek and Corn) and thrilled to have had such positive support from our growing community to keep the dream going. The best is yet to come.

I’ll be honest – starting a marketplace of any sort is not easy. Think eBay as a prime example. Critical mass, ie getting enough people to use the site as either Task Posters or Task Runners is the key, otherwise it simply doesn’t work. The great news is that it IS going to work and you know why? Not because I’m financial and emotionally vested in it but because YOU, our friends, our fans, our family want it also see it succeed. And damn it, it’s going to happen. Here’s where you come in.

The 'Go Live' button. 

On the day we go live, the last thing you and I want to see is a measly handful of tasks posted by my dear mother.  We want to get everyone hitting the ‘Post it’ button from the get go. Flood the pages with things you need done for the house, in preparation for Christmas, for that party you’re having with 50 friends, with getting your small business in order – tasks that have been sitting around for way too long waiting for the tooth fairy to take away and leave her gold coin for. It’s time to get it done!

So what can you do to help? In any of the following ways:

• Post your tasks of course!
• Share our page www.taskrunners.com.au with your friends on email, Facebook, Twitter and any other social media and let them know what amazing things we’re looking to do here at TaskRunners,
• Give out flyers to your local coffee shop, businesses, schools and clubs,
• Leaflet drops in your building and around your suburb. We can post these out to you, just email me at Cheryl@taskrunners.com.au and let me know how many you’d like and your mailing address and I’ll get that out to you quick smart.
• Spread the word whichever way you like.

I can’t say thank you enough for your support. There truly are amazing people in the world. I’m looking forward to hearing stories about your experiences and how TaskRunners has really made a difference.

Yours in tasks

Cheryl

"I am surrounded by good energy, great opportunities, and amazing people." - Sylvia Borges

Why we're launching FREE

When you kick off a start-up, a lot of people (we’re talking pretty much ALL the people you talk to) will rave on about the power of Early Adopters. For ease, let's refer to them 'EAs'. We’re not talking Angelina and Brad adopting mind you. These are the people who uncover the ‘cool and new’ things, and who are such apparent trend setters the rest will follow their lead if they think your new business idea is fantastic.

So compelling is the theory that this is the group a lot of businesses (especially ones online) aim for when they first kick off because even if the EAs don’t necessarily have a need for your product, they will tell someone who will. And you see it in a lot of Australian start-ups.

But does it make it right?

We’re stepping out on a limb and going against the grain.

TaskRunners won’t be launching in the heart of EA territory. It’ll be launching in the heartlands of where people need the help the most – right in the heart of suburbia.

We can’t ignore the need to ‘monetise the product’ but we will be skinning this cat in a way that is different to most through offering both cash and in-kind as a payment option (so swapping or bartering basically) and taking a little more of a creative route to the road of a sustainable business (stay tuned for more on this).

We want to roll up our sleeves, get in there and help people get things done as quickly and as stress free as possible.

<Drum roll please>

We’re making TaskRunners completely FREE until the end of 2012. We’re testing our theories related to sharing tasks to create a better way of using time without our community of members paying for it.  

If you can hear a gasping, screaming sound right now, it’s probably the collective groans of the start-up community because we’re not trying to romance trend setters or looking at this from a plainly cash perspective.

We’re in this for the right reasons and for the long haul so we have to reinvent things a little to make sure it works the way it should.

That’s why we’re diving right in at the deep end to save your sanity. Because we wouldn’t have it any other way.

What do you think? Crazy stupid or crazy smart?

Taking on our Biggest Task

If you've read our post about how our TaskRunners journey started you'll realise we we're pretty much stuck in the busy-ness of life like millions of Australians. Simply overwhelmed.  

When I first thought of TaskRunners, I wasn’t looking for a specific “collaborative consumption” business to start. I didn’t even know the term or movement existed. I sure wasn’t looking for an online start-up that could make use of the latest in technology because I’m almost a complete technology dud. Start-up culture and practices weren’t even on my mind.

No. It sounds a little cliché but I just wanted to help and connect people which brought some joy into their lives. I’m not talking around help in a charitable way (that’s another one of my passions that I’ll save for another post) but in a sense that made people’s lives easier, more enjoyable and just so they have the freedom to choose what they wanted to do with their time. I know it was what I also wanted for myself and my family.

What I was seeing around me was (and have since found out):

• Parents, especially mothers, drowning under the weight of the domestic burden, sleepless nights and a lack of ‘me’ time.

• Overworked and stressed out individuals who were working ridiculous hours without time to even enjoy their families let alone look after their own health.

• The growing Grey Army (of which my parents are a part of) who have all this skill, experience and knowledge to share but don’t get a lot of opportunities to make the most out of that without a lot of digging.

• A huge underutilised workforce in the form of stay-at-home mums, university students, carers, the disabled, underemployed and the unemployed.

• Freelancers who were stressed by the growing number of eBidding sites denting their livelihoods as more and more work went overseas.

• Small business owners who saw less and less of their families because of impossible ‘To Do Lists’ attached to their workload.

Mission Impossible

With all these people leaping around in my head, I began to wonder what I could do.  How could I do something to cater to all these different markets or it just impossible? It literally bugged me for months before I began to realise it was TIME that was everybody’s problem. It took me that long to come to that realisation because I was just so caught up with life myself. 

So what if I could find a way where people who had spare time on their hands could help others who didn’t and redistribute what everyone needed to do and re-balance time? Sounds a little far fetched but I did my research and I knew I could introduce a localised solution to cater to the Australian family. The task was on! On now, just mere weeks away from going live, we're ready to get things happening for people.

Sign up here to be the one of the firsts to know when we launch. 

What do you think of TaskRunners? Love it? Hate it? Not quite sure?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

x Cheryl

Results of the TaskRunners Survey! (Infographic)