Annie Ridout is editor-in-chief of digital lifestyle and parenting magazine The Early Hour, and works as a freelance journalist for national news and women’s magazines and has written for the Guardian, Red Magazine, Stylist, Metro and more. She lives with her husband and her two children – a nearly four-year-old daughter and one-year-old son – in east London.

Among the plethora of life coaches, juicing gurus and diet plans clogging the arteries of the bestseller lists in January, it has been fascinating to see in amongst them Rob Moore's Life Leverage: How to Get More Done in Less Time, Outsource Everything & Create Your Ideal Mobile Lifestyle. Outsourcing and freelancing. Now it seems to be a lifestyle choice. How can specialists help buy you time and make you more efficient? Something the publishing industry has been wrestling with for years. Gradually, it seems, the material advantages of efficiency and flexibility are being championed by more and more converts.