I paid someone to take over my family's to-do list for a month. It got me hours of my life back.

Contrary to what FindFaye.com suggests, I did not find Faye — Faye found me.

She found me in the way most goods and services discover you these days: ads the algorithm giddily serves up to a woman whose search history is mostly "How do I not lose it on the phone with our stupid health insurance?" and "Why do after-school clubs sell out at 9:02 a.m.?"

Faye is a service that pairs you with a dedicated family advisor (a real person, not the chatbot you occasionally go to for advice about your marriage or this month's unusually strong menstrual cramps), who takes over the life admin you don't want to do yourself.

From paying bills to checking on insurance claims, I hoped this advisor would free up time for more enjoyable parts of my life.

To be clear, there are many websites that can help you hire a virtual personal assistant — Athena, Magic, and Wing, to name a few. However, I liked that Faye is specifically designed for families, and treats domestic life admin as the real work it is.

My husband and I both work full time. He is an involved parent, but I still carry the majority of the anticipatory mental load — the noticing that something needs to happen, then completing or delegating every step until it does, whether it's the glamorous work of making sure we have enough toilet paper or organizing playdates.

So in addition to alleviating my own stress, hiring a Faye advisor was partly an experiment: What happens when the invisible work of parenting becomes visible, documented in a real-time database, and monetized? Would it change my husband's perception of housework?

Faye is a monthly subscription with three tiers of support: Four hours is "Peace of Mind" ($169 a month), eight is the "Free Time Finder" ($299 a month), and for one month, I paid for the holy grail of 16 hours ($569 a month), promising to be a "Game Changer."

I was very ready to get 16+ hours of my life back.

Offloading the invisible labor

As soon as you sign up for Faye, you get access to its online database, and you're encouraged to start adding items to "Tasks" for your advisor.

I experienced something magical the first time I typed every "to-do" in my head and on my phone into my Faye task list. I added not only the ones flagged "GIRL, DO IT TODAY OR ELSE", but the evergreen lists labeled "Personal", "Health", "Kids," and even ideas for "Fun!" that would still require some administrative planning.

Every task in the database had a section where I could clearly define the task, expected outcome, and deadline, and label it as low, medium, or high priority.

It was delightful to watch these tasks land in someone else's database, in a pleasing font, as if they were now someone else's problem entirely. Of course, I understood that more would need to be said and done before any of these tasks got executed. However, for a moment, I believed my advisor would take it all off my plate, not unlike the delusions of a new romantic relationship.

Within 30 minutes of signing up, I got a text from my Faye advisor, Julia. We scheduled an onboarding call for the next morning.

Julia was also a mom, lived 45 minutes away, and, based on her photo, looked eerily similar to me. She had a professional track record that instilled confidence, but my honest first concern was whether my husband could keep "Julie" and "Julia" straight in his mind. (My second thought was that dear Nora Ephron is bored out of her mind up in heaven and playing a fun joke on me.)

During onboarding, we ran through a quick slide deck showing how to get the most out of Faye, including granting full calendar access, completing a brief questionnaire about your family, and loading key logins and at least one credit card into Faye's encrypted "Secrets" tab.

Julia and I agreed to use the Faye task manager as command central, but she encouraged me to always text or email her if something came to mind and I didn't want to formally enter it as a task. She would capture the fleeting thought and then take care of it for me.

For example, I forwarded a birthday party e-vite so she can RSVP on our behalf, add the party to my calendar, and then have a wrapped, age-appropriate gift delivered to my house. This is the closest thing to parenting witchcraft I have encountered as an adult, and the only thing left for me to do was beg my children to write their names on a card.

Faye runs occasional free workshops for members, and I got a lot out of "The Art of Elite Delegation" led by Jennifer Mickel, founder of The Third Shift, which brings management consulting frameworks to the invisible labor of family life.

Mickel reiterated that the most exhausting part of most family labor takes place before you delegate a single step — it's the noticing, tracking, and reminding that modern parents, usually moms, deal with.

She clarified the fix isn't delegating a next step, but delegating the outcome. (Delegating a next step sounds like: "Call the pediatrician and ask for the school health form." Delegating the outcome sounds like: "My son will be cleared for school by August 15"— and then every follow-up call and task to reach that outcome is no longer my responsibility.)

The workshop also offered ways to figure out what to hand off, like the tasks you've been procrastinating and ones that irritate you the most.

It also brought up the "Interchangeability Test," where you ask two questions about any task: Do I like it, and does it matter that I specifically do it? If the answer to both is no, delegate it.

What Faye actually did for me

Over the next month, my advisor handled:

• Health insurance: Thankfully, our family does not have any chronic health issues and did not have any emergencies during this time, but as everyone knows, no matter what plan you have in America, health insurance is still difficult to navigate. My Faye advisor helped with denied claims, eligibility questions, and recurring billing issues. This assistance alone saved me an estimated 200 gray hairs.
• Email inbox management: In both my personal and work inboxes, Julia mostly unsubscribed, categorized, and then flagged what I actually needed to review.
• All things kid admin: My advisor handled school-supply orders, found new shoes for my 5-year-old daughter that met her exacting standards ("pink enough, sparkly enough, and they better light up"), the end-of-year class picnic signup, etc. When it came time to create my son's elementary yearbook spread, my husband and I sent Julia two dozen of our favorite photos. She (with some AI tools) arranged them into a polished layout, created the yearbook portal account, and submitted it.
• Some work tasks: My Faye advisor compiled interview questions and organized research into a spreadsheet, though, to be honest, these required so much specific direction to get them to the level I wanted that I was essentially delegating the typing, not the task.

The Verdict

With any assistant, there is a training-wheels period, which Faye is upfront about. Its own onboarding materials tell you great delegation isn't one-and-done. It requires answering clarifying questions and closing feedback loops — scheduling a recurring call twice a month with your advisor to stay in sync is also recommended.

I asked to check in briefly (five to 15 minutes) with Julia every week on a video call. The calls were included as part of my monthly hours, and I agree that if you skip that investment of your time, especially at the start, it can start feeling like chasing or managing an employee.

For the most part, the platform itself felt intuitive and easy to navigate. You can label a task low, medium, or high priority, but there's no field in the task bar for a concrete deadline — so at times, I found myself chasing items where "high priority" meant tomorrow to me. Eventually, I began communicating my own deadline expectations in my meetings and messages to my advisor.

It also helps to remember that your advisor is working with multiple families, not just yours, and there were moments I wanted more speed than I was getting — especially on the 16-hour plan.

There is an "Urgent" tab that flags a task for any available advisor to handle ASAP, but I never tried it. For me, the whole point was building trust with one person, and handing my life over to another stranger felt like starting over.

Here's the honest math: I used all 16 hours and could probably have purchased a few more. However, after the first month, it didn't feel affordable or worth more than $500, so I switched to the smallest, four-hour plan.

Now I choose which fires I delegate to myself or my advisor. I have to be more selective, but at least I still feel supported, organized, and able to hand off any task I truly don't want. At $169 a month, that feels well worth the investment.

A friend asked: "How is this different from me asking Claude to do it?" Faye advisors openly leverage AI, and some responses were clearly prompts I could have generated myself.

The difference is who owns the outcome. An AI assistant can tell me what to do, but until we have widely available, reliable agentic AI, it can't yet see the task through to completion. With Faye, I can delegate the follow-through.

Still behind, still subscribed

I have now used Faye for almost five months. Of course, there are days I still feel behind, the four hours evaporate, and I'm back to being the person who has to notice everything.

As for my original experiment regarding what happens when this invisible work becomes documented and billed monthly, the results were mixed.

In the beginning, I added my husband to the database to receive all Faye notifications, and after a couple of weeks, he offered his findings: "I get a lot of emails and notifications. Am I supposed to do something?"

I appreciated that he could finally see "sign the kids up for camp" is not one task but 11, but within a couple of months, we drifted back to our natural equilibrium, where he's only looped in when something requires his immediate, direct action.

Technically, I'd still consider him an employee of the household who needs a well-scoped assignment and a deadline. However, he's also an employee with newfound respect for management, and I'll call that a step in the right direction.

For now, I'm keeping Faye, in part because it's genuinely nice to have another adult in the trenches of modern parenting who understands, and who is unambiguously on my side. The administrative limerence has faded into something less shiny, but gradually, the familiarity and trust are compounding, which, I'm told, is what a real relationship looks like.

My husband still messages the wrong Juli(e/a) about once a week.

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