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Vox Pop: Have you tried outsourcing your life?
Merlin Mann | Jun 25 2007
A lot of my friends have been reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and, to varying degrees, several of them have started trying on some of his more audacious ideas, such as checking email once a week, finding an "income muse," going on an extreme information diet -- a few people I know are considering outsourcing pieces of their personal and professional lives. For reasons I can't fully explain -- and will, for now, just write down to Tim's engaging style -- I also found this outsourcing idea weirdly fascinating. You identify the tedious tasks in your life that don't represent the best use of your time, and assign them to an overseas worker who can complete them for a few bucks an hour. This apparently can be virtually any kind of mundane task, from booking a dinner reservation to doing research on a company to -- heck, why not? -- answering your email. So, while I know lots of people share my theoretical interest in this, I wonder how many of you have tried it, and how many of you are using outsourced help on a regular basis. What's your experience been? Does this work? What sorts of task are most amenable to long-distance assignment? By the way, if you haven't read the book yet, here's an excerpt from Tim's chapter on outsourcing. Comments are open for your stories. I'd be grateful if you can try to limit your comments to firsthand experiences hiring and utilizing outsourced employees or in regard to evaluating the quality of their work. Thanks. 61 Comments
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 i have had very mixed...Submitted by paul (not verified) on June 25, 2007 - 12:12pm.
i have had very mixed results with outsourcing. i used to own/run a web-based store and we tried outsourcing our fulfillment twice. the first time was pretty much a disaster. the second time was not only better, it was the single best business-decision we made; radically changing everything about how we ran the business -- and how we felt about running the business -- for the better. i have also had various personal assistants at different times over the past few years and some of those experiences have been bad, some ok, and some great. i think that the primary difference that makes the batsonian difference is the quality of who/what you are outsourcing to. in the case of the personal assistants especially, it comes down to whether and how well they consciously or unconsciously practice what a wise friend of mine calls "the yoga of anticipation". in addition to that fundamental outsourcee quality, i think another important determiner of how well it is going to work is how repetitive the task is. with a very repetitive task, you may spend some "config" time up front, but once that is done, you often end up with a machine of accomplishment that, from your point of view, ends up being liberating beyond what you might have imagined. otoh, with tasks that are not so repetitive and require more creative intelligence to interpret and effect, it puts more and more of the pressure on having an unusually great resource to outsource to -- which statistically lowers the odds of a lovely outcome. » POSTED IN:
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