Mail Your Child to Sri Lanka or Hire Indian Pimps: Extreme Personal Outsourcing. Report: Many U.S. Parents Outsourcing Child Care Overseas How far can you push personal outsourcing? Can you outsource your dating? I did. Can you outsource your worrying? AJ Jacobs did. Reading to your children or bickering with your spouse? One friend of mine insisted last April that there were serious limitations to what could be effectively “outsourced.” Bets were placed over a few glasses of wine, and so it began: I would outsource all of my dating for four weeks. Even if you would never consider doing something this outrageous, the results were beyond belief, and the process used to pull it off can be used for almost all personal outsourcing. Here are a few snippets of a recent interview about this experiment, which I labeled “From India with Love” on my desktop (Thanks, Donovan Glass!)
Donovan: I hear you outsourced your online dating. Did you just “cold turkeyâ€? I worked out a one-page “rules and regulationsâ€? Match.com has the most profiles but also the most competition. 1. How to E-mail Virtual Assistants (or Any Assistants): Proven Templates. (Photo: Alan Clark Design) [Tim’s note: This is a guest post by Ramit Sethi on two of my favorite topics: one-shot-one-kill e-mail, and creating policies so you never repeat things. Also important to note: great VAs will use templates for answering *your* email; my assistant Amy uses more than a dozen specific templates to handle my inbox overload.] Enter Ramit Why is communicating with virtual assistants so hard? When I first started using virtual assistants (VAs), I tested assistants from India, Bulgaria, and Israel.
Right? Other times, you email your assistant, saying, “Please book me a roundtrip flight from SFO to NYC from 3/19 – 3/22” and you have to endure five back-and-forth emails before it’s done… leading you to wonder why you didn’t simply do it yourself. No one wants more email. Fortunately, because I’m a huge weirdo about time management, I’ve spent over 65 hours optimizing my emails to VAs. But first, let’s start with a typical email that frustrates us all. What is midtown NYC? The Psychology of Automation: Building a Bulletproof Personal-Finance System. Too many choices. Using automation to reduce choices and dominate your money. I have known Ramit Sethi for several years now, first through PBWiki, which he co-founded, and later as someone I turned to with questions about the world and workings of finance.
In a world of gurus who promote one method of investing and then follow another, it was refreshing to talk with someone who was willing to share real numbers and case studies from their experiments. Ramit and I have also able to share a bottle (OK, many bottles) of wine and laugh about the downstream effects of titles we’ve tested and chosen, as both of our book titles sound like scams to most people: The 4-Hour Workweek and I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
Despite this self-imposed handicap, Ramit’s blog and advice have been featured in media such as NPR, The New York Times, and Fortune magazine. I specifically asked him if I could excerpt a few of the diagrams and call scripts from his new book. Enter Ramit. It’s not about willpower. Trading Places with Indian Outsourcers. Have you seen the new book? #1 Bestseller, 1,000+ Reviews: The 4-Hour Chef The HelloBar - a little bar that gets noticed! Close Open The Blog of Tim Ferriss - Experiments in Lifestyle Design 7 Reasons to Subscribe Subscribe via: ( Email / RSS ) Trading Places with Indian Outsourcers 98 Comments Written by Tim Ferriss Topics: Outsourcing Life , Uncategorized What happens when a successful US-based computer programmer, who lost his lucrative job to outsourcing, travels to India to try to get it back?
Will he discover the secret of India’s success, or that sending jobs overseas is an unstable gamble? The videos below share his incredible experience. This inside look shows how ridiculous it is to throw around terms like “slave labor” and “stealing jobs” without understanding the realities of this unusual world where best jobs start at 6pm and end at 3am… Three suggestions: 1.
This is hard-to-find coverage that will change how you think about “your” job. Share this: Posted on June 7th, 2008 98 Comments. LitLiberation: How to Travel the World–and Get a Personal Assistant–for Free. How to Do The Impossible: Create a Paperless Life, Never Check Voicemail Again, Never Return Another Phone Call… “I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.” -William Blake Forget the paperless office — it’s aiming too low. Let’s take a look at the bigger picture: a paperless life. While we’re at it, let’s also eliminate three other nuisances: answering the phone, checking voicemail, and returning phone calls. Is this possible? Consider these questions as real questions. 1. 2. 3. Paper cuts fingers and kills forests, but what of the damn 9-to-5 headaches? 1. 2. 3. We’ve all been there-you make a call and think to yourself, “please don’t pick up”, or you call and think “I hope I’m not interrupting…” With Pinger you leave the message at your convenience, and they get it at their convenience.
None of these strategies are perfect, but they do demonstrate that none of our impossible questions are impossible to answer. Did you like this? Robert Scoble Interviews Tim Ferriss: Productivity, E-mail Fasts, GTD, and More… Outsourcing Life and How to Eliminate E-mail Overload. The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done. Tao Te Ching Chapter 38 Is it possible to outsource your life to other countries? By now, you know that I believe it is. These were some of the topics I covered in “Die 4-Stunden Arbeitswoche” (The 4-Hour Workweek) with Patrick Price for his Swiss-German podcast, NetzNews.
In other news, my first “manifesto” on Seth Godin’s ChangeThis was published this week. Download it here, and pass it on to those who need it!