As a full-time working mother, I’m constantly bombarding myself with working mom’s guilt: guilt for not spending enough time with my children, for having a less-than-perfectly organized house / refrigerator / closet / kitchen cupboard / etcetera. While I long to bake cupcakes with my kids or whip up a delicious family dinner at least one night a week, work commitments and basic errand-running often sabotage my well-intentioned plans to get more things done for family and home. First things to drop off my ‘taking care of me’ list?: my workout, personal errands, girlfriend time, and oh yes, enough sleep. 

I recently found a secret weapon against all that working mom’s guilt and errand chaos: TaskRabbit. If you haven’t heard about it, TaskRabbit gives everyday people access to on-demand errand runners for things like grocery shopping, dry cleaning pickup, mailing postal packages, assembling IKEA furniture, handyman tasks and yes, even meal preparation and pet care.

I’ve used TaskRabbit on three separate occasions, and have been blessed with super helpful ‘errand angels’ as I like to call them! One TaskRabbit brought me chicken soup while I was down with a bad flu and my husband was out of town. Another TaskRabbit unpacked what remained of our moving boxes and organized my closet top to bottom, moving one season into storage boxes and a new season of freshly pressed clothes in its place. I found out she was a big cat lover during her first assignment at our house, so I hired her for a repeat assignment to house sit our three cats while we were away for an extended family holiday. 

TaskRabbit was founded by Leah Busque in 2008, an engineer-turned-entrepreneur who was inspired to create the company one cold Boston night. Leah wished she could hire an errand runner to fetch her Labrador Retriever a bag of much-needed dog food so she could instead make dinner with her husband. TaskRabbit recently raised an impressive $17.8 million in venture funding to expand its workforce of ‘rabbits’ to multiple cities nationwide. That’s good news for working parents who need extra help from willing and helpful people, and also for the local economies that TaskRabbit touches. There are a multitude of underemployed people and workers seeking flexible employment (such as part-time and stay-at-home parents) around the country, who may be just one or two errands away from being fully employed. Go TaskRabbit, go! I’m rooting for you and for the odd jobs you’re bringing to Americans everywhere.

Please note that I am in no way paid to endorse TaskRabbit, or have any official commercial relationship with the company or its affiliates. I am merely a big fan, since the service helps me get more things done and focus on the things I love to do vs. the things I need to do to run my home life while working and juggling kids.