It's her dime and my time. It is also my first experience in a weeklong headlong dive into what is rather grandiosely known as "collaborative consumption in the sharing economy". Journalist Konrad Marshall, who tried out the sharing economy. Websites are popping up everywhere to maximise our skills and possessions. Own a car? Become a driver on uber.com. Got a spare wardrobe? Rent your storage room to strangers on spaceout.com.au. If you listen to the breathless TED talks about this topic - or to the proselytising CEOs of these websites - we are all slowly shifting towards a new economic model. Our future is a virtual marketplace of peer-to-peer exchange, using the web to tap into idle capacity and unused abilities. From the grey army to unemployed youth, we are all potential "micro entrepreneurs" unshackled from industrial-age structures and freed from greedy corporate middlemen. My working week begins like any other, in front of a laptop at 9am on Monday. Only now I'm sitting at home, unshaven and unshowered, wearing my favourite stained tracksuit pants. I slurp coffee from a big novelty mug and think I like this new utopian paradigm. I log in to airtasker.com and begin looking for work.

Airtasker is almost like the Trading Post for labour. People post jobs - deliver a couch, assemble a book shelf - and other people bid to complete those jobs. (The company takes a 15 per cent cut of every deal from the person who does the work.) The site has been active for two years now and might sound revolutionary, but the good people who run, and use, websites such as taskrabbit.com, sidekicker.com and occasionalbutler.com might disagree. The playing field is crowded. I fill in an enthusiastic profile that lists my few real-world abilities - deliveries, gardening, cleaning, handyman. I've been given a pep talk by Airtasker's co-founder and CEO, Tim Fung, on how to get work. Be diligent, enthusiastic, and don't be disheartened if you miss out on jobs. "You need a good profile picture," he says. "Clear, smiling at the camera, free of sunglasses. Not a photo of you with your dog at the beach." Now to find work. Jananthan R needs some rubbish fished out from under his house in Clayton South, for $80. Alex B wants a few garage weatherboards painted in Belgrave Heights, for $50. Both sound promising, but it seems as though everyone else on the site has the same idea. Damien H and Lizzy B swoop, each with a far more convincing sales pitch. While I flail and gush - "Hi, I'm new to Airtasker and I'd LOVE to do this job for you" - they stick to a polite and polished script.

They open with "Hello Jananthan" (smart) and don't bother explaining why they want the job - instead explaining how they will do it: "I have a truck with ropes, dollies and tarps, to safely move your stuff." Matching the immediacy and eagerness of this workforce is exhausting. I try to land a simple $25 gig transcribing an interview, but I cannot compete with Blaise T's real-time enthusiasm ("I can do this for you right now, Maya"). Not all of the tasks are in my skill set, either. I can't perform the duties of a "Dressmaker in Fitzroy". Nor am I "someone to weld tables". No matter how badly a "Daiquiri machine service is needed", I cannot provide one. But my bids are improving and within an hour and a half, at 10.37am, I land my first gig - hauling bricks for Kt.L so she can build her chicken mansion. I find her digging a hole in the backyard. Kt.L runs a "second-hand baby gear" Facebook page and is clearly a "sharing economy" type, but I do wonder how she feels about having a stranger in her home. It turns out she has texted my profile to her husband, letting him know when I would be coming over. Yet she also has faith in the "community" and gives the example of a time a man put up a sad, sad task. He needed someone to talk to: $10. "A whole bunch of people started messaging, asking if he was okay or if he needed to get together," Kt.L says.

Although Airtasker will be my main port of call, there are a wide number of online alternatives to choose from. Apart from those already mentioned, there's freelancer.com, which has been lauded as a boon for flexi-workers everywhere, and simultaneously lambasted as the tip of a damaging "offshoring iceberg". I set up a Freelancer profile as a writer and editor, and list my working price as $20 per hour (although I soon realise my price can't compete with people in Pakistan and Bangladesh). I also learn that my profile is basically invisible until I get my first job. A short message appears in my Freelancer inbox from someone called Ustyler: "Hi konradmarshall, I noticed you have experience writing in both Australia and the US. I would like a bio created for my band Rick Dodd and the Dickrods and a version adapted for Australia." Within minutes we have an accord - $80 for four hours of my time. As a bonus, I also win a small Airtasker job - $10 for picking up and delivering a few bags of sand. I take the opportunity to drive through town playing the Dickrods' album of "outlaw country" music, with blaring tunes about shotgun shells and crucifixes. The music has a very persistent and peculiar take on unrequited love. My favourite lyric is "Her breath was sweet as a fart". I dash off 400 words of tricked-up redneck prose, and then another 400 for the Australian market (by removing references to US brands like Elmer T. Lee bourbon or Pabst Blue Ribbon beer). It takes me four hours to finish. By midweek I think I have the right attitude to make a living this way. Humility and deference are key. I notice some other Airtaskers making demands of their taskmasters. The nerve! Hermiese C is quick to point out that she can clean that house in Chadstone, but the garden will cost extra. Many others, like Neda B, ignore the posted prices for jobs and instead offer their own hourly rate. Meanwhile, I'll do any silly task for whatever the asking price, just to build up a few good reviews and get more jobs.

My next employer, in Yarraville, is moving house and for $60 wants me to unpack a dozen boxes and arrange the entire contents of his old kitchen in his new home. He doesn't care where things go, and the organisational stickler in me is alarmed by this attitude. I would want to have a say in where my corn-cob holders are stored, but Craig C doesn't seem to mind. His wife and kids are away, he explains, so he wants to finish fast. He has another Airtasker outside helping shift household goods, and one more upstairs reassembling furniture. I like my task best. I like trying to imagine where he wants me to put the family stash of birthday candles. I enjoy pondering the best place to store a spare SodaStream gas bottle. Where would Craig C - car-yard manager and two-minute noodle eater - want the ceremonial champagne flutes from his wedding? And where would his wife want her breast pump? It takes me 90 minutes to find a new home for everything, and then I take my new boss on a guided tour of his new kitchen. "That looks great," he says. "I'll tell the wife I did it." When I get home, the available jobs seem to be getting weirder. Fiona B needs a side drummer to join the Watsonia RSL pipes and drums group for one night, for $45. Bubba C is willing to pay $120 to anyone who can help hack an online poll and generate a few thousand votes.

Ethan L is blunt about what he wants: "I need someone sexy to take a selfie of themselves holding a broken phone for marketing purposes." Sebastian W offers to help, adding a smiley face emoticon. Ethan L responds: "ideally female bro". Sebastian W is unfazed: "no problem my girlfriend would love to do it. She's very sexy." Ethan L is interested: "Can you please attach photo?" And Sebastian does, and that is when I depart that thread and head to bed. But not before realising how much time all of this is eating up - scanning jobs, monitoring comments, making bids, arranging cutlery drawers. I'm not leaving much time for my own work, or my own chores around the house. It's time to put my earnings to use. I open my laptop and begin to type: Mow and prune my nature strip - $20. Posted by Konrad M. Jason C's profile photo shows him dressed like a punk with a mohawk, but he turns out to be a rather ordinary-looking, polite 40-something. He has two daughters and is a professional town planner who wants a little extra cash and some exercise. My lawn is more than a foot high, so the whipper snipper comes out first. On hands and knees, Jason C yanks weeds from between the agapanthus. The mower follows. I had fantasised about reclining in a hammock sipping iced tea, keeping a close eye on my worker through tinted sunglasses. But I feel guilty even being here. Soon I have my gardening gloves on and I'm helping. When the job is done I hand Jason C an extra $5. I'm quite annoyed with myself.

I sense my wife is getting annoyed with this conceit, too, and I don't blame her. Bringing strangers over to do my chores was brazen. I promise the missus a piping-hot home-cooked dinner - a fresh recipe with a little spice. I just neglect to mention that it isn't my recipe, and won't be cooked with our spices, nor in our home. Instead I log on to meal-sharing website byfork.com and order two $5.50 servings of chicken tikka masala from Alexander of Elwood. Much later - too late - I find out that the site is dormant. The promised piping-hot dinner turns into last-minute eggs on toast, and I sense I could be sleeping on the couch tonight. My couch isn't very comfortable, though, so I log on to couchsurfing.org to see if there is a better one in Melbourne. The site connects like-minded strangers who have a spare futon to share. I send out a handful of last-minute requests and have no luck, but I do receive a request of my own. Amelie, a beautiful 23-year-old brunette from the south of France, would like to sleep on my couch for two weeks in June. I am fairly certain my wife will not warm to this idea. Fortunately I've earned enough cash that I can splurge on a night away from home using airbnb.com, the wildly successful website that allows people to rent a room or an entire house. "Beautiful artists' home in Fitzroy" appeals. $60 per night is promising. And their profile picture is lovely. There's Gustavo, an Argentinian with a pointy moustache, his Australian wife, Sandy, and their toddler, Angelo. Gustavo and Sandy are painters who run a puppet shop.

I make a booking and head out into the night, stopping at a Korean grocery to buy a bottle of wine for my hosts. (I choose one with an art nouveau label, hoping it will prove a talking point.) Sandy kisses me on the cheek when I arrive. The carnivalesque shop front is beautiful, and the string of rooms behind it is an endless menagerie of paintings and puppets, masks and marionettes. Gustavo comes home from painting a mural all day at the Werribee Zoo, and we sit up late at the dinner table sipping wine. (He identifies the label as the work of Alphonse Mucha.) He strokes his moustache and talks about living with Sandy in Barcelona, and the home they once bought on a river in the Amazon. We discuss the puppet business, which is when I accidentally call him Geppetto, but he doesn't seem to notice. He tells me that collaboration increases in moments of great need, as it did when the Argentinian economy faltered in 2001, resulting in plumbers and dentists trading their skills in the streets. "It started with swapping, favours, no money - people exchanging face to face," he says. "Then somebody had the idea to make money from this market. Technology has given, but it takes, too."

Gustavo is a wise man, I think. I'm transfixed by his stainless-steel spectacles and the paint on his fingernails, until he starts talking about a UFO stargate in the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Yemen. The next morning I wake up and sit in the kitchen eating crusty artisan bread with butter, while Sandy and Angelo laugh and eat homemade pancakes with jam. The family rabbit, Nicholas, hops at our feet. My final gig for the week is scheduled for Friday afternoon - housework and gardening for Ben A in Richmond North. Ben A is a young dentist, and his parents are flying into town for the weekend from Tasmania. I will be making him appear like a capable son. That starts with a solid hour of ironing his shirts (42 regular) and pants (34 waist). Next, I wash his wooden venetian blinds with a Chux and a bucket of warm soapy water. This really is a frustrating job, and I can easily see why someone would outsource it. I head out into the garden, which is actually just a patch of dirt with some weeds and a palm tree - and a foot-deep layer of rotting orange fruit of some kind that's fallen from the branches above. Ben just wants things to look nice, but I want to do more than a cosmetic job, so I throw my back into this last task. After three hours of work, he gives me $85 instead of the pre-agreed price of $55. I take the money and run.

In my week, I worked for a total of 20 hours, completing $335-worth of tasks. After the various digital middlemen took their share, my earnings came to $285 - a little more than $14 per hour. Take out petrol costs and income tax, and my take-home pay was less than $10 an hour. In fairness, I had little time to build momentum and thus develop a base of regular clients. Still, you have to work hard at getting what amounts to a series of piecemeal jobs, and the patchy nature of the income from week to week would no doubt be soul-destroying after a while. The cloud-computing, new-millennial, digital natives out there will have you believe that these sites are allowing us all to maximise our time, while tech-fearing traditionalists think that the new paradigm takes advantage of our desperation for work in the new economy. My multifaceted week of work now over, I'm not sure either way.