Get a Personal Research Assistant for $5

December 6th, 2008

There has been a recent infatuation in productivity circles with the idea of having an assistant. It’s an easy thing to get excited about; having someone available to do all your menial and frustrating tasks while you sit around and drink margaritas. Mix in the idea of getting a Virtual Assistant (VA) from the developing world for pennies on the dollar and a lot of people buy in.

It turns out that much of what you end up having an assistant do is simply research: You struggled with a question, you couldn’t find an answer, you get the assistant to look into it for you.

It turns out this is a tremendous waste of time and money. If your question could be answered with a simple Google search, you could have done it just as well as anyone else. Google doesn’t create webpages, it just catalogues them. If the answer isn’t sitting tidily on some site, packed full of your chosen keywords, searching won’t help. When the appropriate answer is nowhere to be found you need someone to generate the solution from scratch, preferably someone who knows about your topic.

Handing off the question to an assistant provides a fleeting sense of completion and hope. Yes, sometimes it helps to get a fresh set of eyes on the question, but more often they come back with an unsatisfactory answer. To add to the problem, you have to adequately explain your needs to someone else and hope they look for the right thing. This can be especially difficult if you’re using a foreign VA.

So by this point you’ve spent a large amount of your own time, and you’re paying someone else to waste even more time. There is a much better way.

Ask MetaFilter.

For those unfamiliar with Ask MetaFilter, the basic premise is that you publicly ask a question and people respond with their advice or insight. In any public forum, especially online, there are always some participants who are eager to make a sassy comment. However, in the case of genuine, legitimate, sometimes heart-felt AskMeFi questions (not just provocative threads) the share of useful comments is unusually high. Other “question and answer” sites exist but the quality of responses are often abysmal, making these sites only capable of answering the most basic and generic of questions and forcing you to endure much useless smart-mouth commentary. AskMeFi in contrast is low on the commentary, high on the content.

You may very well have heard of AskMeFi, but chances are you haven’t actually used it. The entire MetaFilter parent site (www.metafilter.com, identifiable by its blue background) has only around 38,000 registered users and only a portion of those use the “Ask MetaFilter” subsection of the site (ask.metafilter.com, with its green-grey background). This implies that the majority of the internet world is passing by on this extremely useful tool.

Law & Order

There’s a good reason more people don’t use AskMeFi more often: The site administrators don’t want you to.

Letting just anyone freely post to a site is asking for low-quality comments. Look under any YouTube video for an overwhelming example. Ask MetaFilter is selective about who they let comment. As a result you need to play by a few simple rules in order to benefit from their site. You can dig through their site for the details, but the basics are:

• You pay $5 one time only to sign up.
• You must wait a week before posting your first question.
• You have to wait at least one week between questions.
• You can respond to a question as soon as you’ve signed up (having paid the $5)
• If you post spam, promotional links or generally unacceptable remarks and you will be banned.

These rules, while somewhat restrictive, are designed to encourage quality questions and responses. And they serve their purpose well.

WIIFM

So for a mere $5 anyone can join a barter community, helping others with their problems in exchange for help in return. AskMeFi currently doesn’t require you to post responses to questions before asking one of your own, but this may change as the parent MetaFilter site does require participation between posts. Helping someone is good Karma nevertheless and doing so takes no longer than writing up a short email, especially when it’s on a topic you’re familiar with.

Oddly, questions that have been asked and are archived on the site don’t show up in most Google searches, despite being blatantly relevant. Even if you can’t find your answer on a Google search it’s possible using Ask MetaFilter’s in-site search box will bring it the answer to your exact question. You may be surprised how many people have already wondered about the same things as you.

You can’t Google everything

As we strive to solve more problems in shorter periods of time, we often achieve the opposite effect. The “information age” has conditioned us to think every answer is out there somewhere so we’re astounded when we can’t find it easily. When this situation arises it’s important to get a grasp on the value of your time. When you’re frustrated trying to find a solution to some (any) problem, wasting too much time then passing it off to someone else isn’t the right choice; getting customized advice from people who know better is. Ask MetaFilter is a terrific modern tool to help do just that.