We have so many things to do in a day that we can get pretty backed up. We all know that delegation is a great way to take some of life’s todos off of our platter, but sometimes we don’t really have anyone to delegate to.
Flow Concierge
Enter the pilot program, Flow Concierge. Flow is the group project/task application that is simple, effective, and just darn beautiful to look at and use. They are rolling out a new feature that you can use to delegate tasks to a “Flow Concierge”. You can basically ask your Concierge to do anything that can be done online; look something up, compare things, answer a question, etc. What they can’t do is anything physical (“go feed my dogs”), create content or writing from scratch, offer legal advice, or do anything that involves paying for something. Anything else is fair game.
The Magic
So, I had a magical experience (yes, in the Steve Jobs sense of the phrase) with Flow Concierge today. It showed me just how powerful and awesome having a mini “virtual assistant” would be. My wife SMS’d me asking when her warranty for her MacBook was up (the bottom of it is falling apart). When I got the message a thought also hit me, “oh, boy. Our 2 year (marriage) anniversary is next week, too. What to do, what to do?” I had already been accepted into the Flow Concierge pilot so I thought I’d give it a go. First task: “when is my wife’s MacBook warranty no longer valid (then gave them her serial number.” Second task: “is there anything fun to do this weekend in the Erie, PA area?” I then assigned the task to the Flow Concierge that is now built into my Flow interface. Then I went about my other work tasks that I had to get done. About two hours later when I was clearing out my personal email inbox, I saw that my Flow Concierge had updated my tasks with a comment and then made a final answer and marked them as complete. I found out that my Wife’s MacBook warranty is sadly not valid (oh, the horror!) and that there isn’t really that much to do this weekend in Erie, Pa (other than go to the Philharmonic, which will work for our anniversary). To say that it was like magic is sort of an understatement. Yes, finding these things myself would be easy enough, but I didn’t want to take the time to do it in the middle of the day. Rather than blow it off until later when I don’t have any energy, I simply delegated to someone that had the energy and time to do it. This is a seriously awesome addition to a task app that is already excellent and the geniuses at Flow should be proud of themselves for such a great idea and implementation.
The drawbacks
One of the biggest things that I can see as a drawback going forward is the potential price of the Concierge service after the Pilot program. There would be nothing worse than using this in Flow and then one day they announce that it will be very expensive. Or, even worse, Flow could just cancel it all together. The service does seem to be “too good to be true” so far, but hopefully it gets baked into the full Flow product.
Conclusion
Flow is a pretty awesome tool to manage your projects with a team or otherwise and the new Concierge pilot program makes it that much more awesome. To be able to delegate menial tasks that will take 3 – 10 minutes of your time throughout the day can add up quick in the grand scheme of things. If you have a Flow account, try to get into the Concierge pilot program by checking out this link. You will be glad you did. (Photo credit: Flow logo via Flow)
