Work-Life Innovation |

This is the latest update of my Adventures in Personal Outsourcing series. The conclusion of my interactions with my Virtual Assistant that I found at Guru.com actually took place not long after my last post on this subject, but I have only gotten round to posting the update now. My Bad! Anyway, I can say that my experiment with Personal Outsourcing has been very good indeed. Apart from my initial difficulties in finding a VA that would do the work at other, more well know VA companies (notably YourManInIndia.com, and GetFriday.com), once I found Guru.com the offers from VA’s to do the work were plentiful. I chose a lady from India who agreed to post all of my books onto Amazon.co.uk for $25 or about £12.

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Way back in April, I posted about how I was going to find a personal assistant to list on Amazon all the old books I wanted to get rid of. The basic idea was to test out this whole personal outsourcing idea with a task that was easy to do, but time consuming for me. I hoped it would at least pay for itself and perhaps make a little bit of cash. I supplied the ISBN’s of a set of old books I wanted to get rid of, and asked for whoever was to do the job to find the books on Amazon and list my books 5% cheaper than the going rate for a used copy already listed.

Since then I have put up the details of the task on several websites, such as Your Man in India, Get Friday and DoMyStuff, all to no avail The sites either never got back to me, or the task is still listed with no takers for the job. Undeterred, I found another site called Guru.com where I posted the task again. The very next day I had close to 50 people bidding to do the work! The bids ranged from $20 to $200(!?), coming from places like the US, India, the Philippines, and Canada. Read the rest of this entry »

I sense a shifting in the force! Something is rotten is the state of productivity, and efficiency don’t live here…anymore.

Yep, the game is up. We no longer want (or need) to work 70 hour weeks, spend 15 years negotiating a complex corporate hierarchy and wait 40 years to experience the joys(?) of retirement. We want our lives back, and we want them back now.

There’s an old story about a corporate executive on holiday on a stunning island off Mexico who meets a fisherman. The exec says to the fisherman, “You have a good little business here, you should expand”. “Why should I do that?” says the fisherman. “So, you can earn more money and buy more boats. That, way you would be able to catch more fish.”. “Why would I want to do that?” replies the fisherman. “Well, so you could sell them and earn more money, expand your business even further, maybe even buy up some of the other fishing businesses here and earn even more money. Then, eventually you could sell it all, retire and go live on some beautiful island somewhere!”. “Hmm” says the fisherman, scratching his chin. “you mean like this one?”. “Oh…” says the exec.

Is the fisherman a slacker? Or has he got it right. What are we really working for anyway? Is it really worth the candle to defer your life to some uncertain future in which your too old to do the things you’d love to do now? Read the rest of this entry »

Answer: Have a lot of ideas.

end of post.

Only kidding. It is true though that most of the people who have had great ideas have had hundreds if not thousands of terrible ones. As Thomas J. Watson of IBM once said: “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”

The common approach to getting good ideas is to brainstorm. To get together with others and throw ideas out there while holding back on the inner critic. It’s often advertised as an almost magical, zen like leap into creativity, where all our problems can be solved. Trouble is it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because people can’t keep there mouth shut. Read the rest of this entry »

Time, like money, is a resource that we can either fritter away bit-by-bit on activities that give us no real return on our investment, or use wisely now in order to reap the benefits in the future. Pushing the economic metaphor further what if, like money, you could invest time so that it grew with interest and displayed compounding-like effects?

A post over at Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week describes the possibilities of such a lifestyle economics. And while I think the post brings up some interesting possibilities, it appears to me to be based on the false premise that time can be compounded. It cannot. For each of us time is fixed (we just don’t know how much of it we’ve got). But what is possible is to telescope the amount of time we spend on work-related tasks to free up the (fixed) amount of time we have for other things. Such task-time telescoping allows us to engage in more important/worthy activities thereby increasing the value of that time, however we cannot say that time itself increases or grows as a consequence.

The question then becomes this: Read the rest of this entry »

In some cases less really is more. As you all no doubt are very much aware, there is a glut of data out there and the question is no longer how do I get the right information, but rather when do I stop looking at the data so that I can act? In my days as a grad student I remember spending months reading around my subject looking for an angle that would give me my thesis topic. The trouble was there was just too much to cover, and every article led to five more. I felt I never had enough information to make a decision about where to put my stake in the ground and formulate my thesis topic. This went on through most of the first year until my supervisor took me aside and told me to stop reading and start thinking! It was the right advice. Read the rest of this entry »

A tale of one man’s heroic attempts to open a spreadsheet

“Joe is heading into work on a grey and rainy Monday morning. He’s had a great weekend; but now it’s Monday, and there’s a mountain of stuff to get through at work. Joe thinks about the tasks he has today and by the time he reaches the office he’s ready to hit the ground running. Joe’s to-do list is longer than Gisele’s over-insured legs, so he really has to get moving and start ticking off the tasks one-by-one. Joe logs in on his office workstation and is ready to go… But wait! Someone has just IM’d him. That little orange rectangle at the bottom of Joe’s screen is flashing furiously, demanding Joe’s attention. So he clicks on it…It’s Bill, with a question about some work they did last week. Joe answers Bill and waits a few seconds to see if Bill is going to reply….It appears not, so Joe closes the chat screen and goes to open Excel. But wait! The little orange rectangle is back again. Joe’s peripheral vision has been hijacked and all he can do is click it open again. Read the rest of this entry »