Your apartment is a mess, and your cat doesn’t even recognize you anymore.

You are receiving hate mail from the cable company because your account is “seriously past due.”

Your to-do list includes such pithy tasks as “get reimbursed $5,000 by insurance company.”

You could (a) go screaming to your mother. Or (b) skip the inevitable guilt trip and call Nancy Freedman, a/k/a The Taskmistress, a self-styled — personal facilitator. Here’s just a short list of some of the things she’ll do: grunt-work shopping (asking your neighbor for toilet paper is not appropriate behavior), meeting with brokers, cutting through red tape at insurance companies, making dinner reservations, hiring contractors and overseeing their work, gift-buying, party planning. You name it, she’ll do it. Even if it means being on hold for 45 minutes.

Says Freedman, “I am definitely a luxury item.” Luxury is right. At $75 an hour ($85 on the weekend), is she worth it? If you can swing it, sure. You might be able to stop pulling out your hair. Which, by the way, she’ll take care of, if that’s become a problem for you, too.