DoneThat vs Hire assistant

The short answer

An assistant does your work. A desktop AI watches how your work is going and prompts you. Those are different purchases, and the honest version of this page says so up front.

If your problem is that there is too much to do, hire someone — no software in this category removes a task from your plate. If your problem is that you cannot see where your week goes and you keep working on the wrong things, an assistant will not help, because they only see what you already decided to hand over.

What an assistant actually removes

This is the part worth being concrete about, because "AI assistant" marketing has blurred it.

A human assistant completes tasks. They make the booking, chase the invoice, sit on hold, reschedule the thing, deal with the person who is being difficult. When it is done, it is done, and it was not done by you.

They also carry judgement and responsibility. They can tell that a request does not make sense and ask before proceeding. They own the outcome, which means you can stop holding it in your head — and the mental relief of that is a large part of what you are paying for.

And they operate in the world. Phone calls, physical errands, the interpersonal work that never touches your screen.

Don, DoneThat's AI coach, does none of that. It nudges you onto your goals, can block calendar time for them, flags when you are on low-value work while you can still fix it, checks how you are doing, reminds you of upcoming meetings and suggests breaks. That is coaching, not delegation. It is a smaller claim, and it is the accurate one.

What an assistant cannot see

The blind spot runs the other way too.

An assistant knows exactly what you delegated and nothing about the rest of your week. They cannot tell you that you spent nine hours in a recurring meeting that produces nothing, or that the "quick" admin task you never delegate has quietly cost you a day a fortnight. You would have to notice that yourself first — which is the problem.

Automatic capture reconstructs the whole day, including the parts you would never report to anyone. That is a different kind of visibility, and it is the input to a decision an assistant cannot make for you: what should I be handing over?

On the ask, since an assistant involves no capture at all: screenshots are never stored. Processed in real time and immediately deleted; only derived structured activity persists. Excluded apps are redacted locally before anything is sent. Bring your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model and raw activity never reaches our servers. The desktop app is open source.

Delegating from evidence

If you have both budgets, this is where they meet.

Most people decide what to delegate by intuition — the tasks they dislike, or the ones that feel big. Captured data usually disagrees. The expensive work is often something small and frequent that never feels worth mentioning, precisely because each instance is trivial.

Capture gives you the actual list, sorted by what it costs you. Then the assistant works from that instead of from your impression of your own week.

Where hiring an assistant is the better choice

• You are out of hours. Software does not create any. A person does.
• The work is real-world: calls, bookings, chasing, errands, anything off-screen.
• You want responsibility transferred, not just visibility into it.
• The tasks need judgement and someone to flag when a request is wrong.
• You already know what to delegate. If the list is obvious, you do not need data to find it.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• You do not know where your week goes. An assistant cannot tell you; capture can.
• You want to work on the right things, not just get more things done.
• You need prompting during the work, not a person to hand things to.
• Budget rules out a salary or retainer. Software costs a fraction — though it removes no tasks, so this is not a like-for-like saving.
• You want AI tools to have your work history. MCP and an API make it queryable as long-term memory.
• You want mood tracked alongside the work, so burnout risk surfaces before it becomes a problem.

Where the two genuinely conflict

One case: if you delegate heavily, a large share of your important work stops appearing on your own screen. Capture will under-represent it, because the work is happening on someone else's machine. Heavy delegators should expect a partial picture — the record is of your activity, not your team's output.

How we compared these

There is no vendor to cite: "hire an assistant" is a market, not a product, and rates vary too widely to state figures that would be true for the reader. Claims about DoneThat are first-hand — we build it, which is the bias to read this with.

We have not argued that software replaces an assistant, because it does not. The narrower claim is that delegation decisions are usually made from impression rather than evidence, and that is a gap capture fills.

Questions people ask about Hire assistant

Can an AI assistant replace a human assistant?

Not for the work an assistant actually does. A human assistant removes tasks from your plate — booking, chasing, calling, deciding. Don, DoneThat's AI coach, does not do your work; it watches how the work is going and prompts you: nudging you onto goals, blocking calendar time, flagging low-value work, reminding you of meetings, suggesting breaks.

What can DoneThat do that an assistant cannot?

See the work. An assistant knows what you delegated; they have no view of how your day actually went. Automatic capture reconstructs where the time went, including the parts you would never report to anyone, and turns that into coaching and goal tracking.

Do they work well together?

Yes, and it is the sensible answer if you have both budgets. Capture shows you which recurring work is eating your week — which is exactly the list worth delegating. Most people delegate by intuition rather than from evidence, and the evidence usually disagrees.

Is DoneThat cheaper than an assistant?

By a very large margin, but they are not substitutes, so the comparison is misleading. Software costs a subscription and removes no tasks. An assistant costs a salary or retainer and removes real ones. Choose on what you need removed, not on price.