Learning

Midhya, our VA with Jerry Hobby

Where Good Ideas come from?

Borrowing from the title of the popular book by Steven Johnson, here is an example of how ideas connect and how people benefit from it. We had posted Andrew Wilson’s virtual assistance social experiment in our previous blog posts. This is a reply from another client, Ryan Leon after reading his post. Re: The Virtual Assistance project New post by Ryan Leon » Sat Apr 16, 2011 1:23 pm I would like to begin by commending Andrew Norman Wilson on the Virtual Assistance Project. I was, for lack of a better term, mind-blown after reading his posts and watching the videos on his blog. I have to admit, that I started an account at Get Friday to make my life a little easier. After seeing Andrew’s approach, I’m a bit embarrassed by my lack of effort in getting to know my assistant, Midhya. Up to this point, my tasks have been purely business related, with some “easy” personal tasks such as ordering books on Amazon.com. Ever the positive spirit, Midhya is always eager to help and delivers great results. My eyes are now open to the fact that I have been missing out on a key value that Get Friday offers: Midhya’s input. My entire outlook has changed, and I owe it all to a creative student in Chicago. I would like to close my comment with a message to Mr. Wilson: Andrew, Thank you for sharing the Virtual Assistance Project with the world. As a 25-year old, I am constantly finding out that I have MUCH more to learn about life and my place in the global environment. You really have something here. I know that you will do great things, because you already have shifted the paradigm in my own mind. I am amazed at how the internet continues to evolve and connect people with ideas that would be lost on them otherwise. Keep up the good work. Your fan, Ryan Leon Thank you, Ryan for your unreserved appreciation of Andrew’s work. And my apologies for not asking you before making this post. Am presuming you would be happy to have it go public. And I thought his assistant should know about it as well. Midhya, keep the good work going! Pic of Midhya with Jerry Hobby, the CEO of Anything Internet and a regular guest on the CNN 650 Morning Show. We constantly learn from others ideas and experiments and that is how innovation happens. And it is more likely to happen much faster in a better-connected world. Watch this engrossing talk by Steven Johnson, spiced by some exquisite illustrative video animation. Happy viewing! Sunder P CEO

Where Good Ideas come from? Read More »

Borrowing from the title of the popular book by Steven Johnson, here is an example of how ideas connect and how people benefit from it. We had posted Andrew Wilson’s virtual assistance social experiment in our previous blog posts. This is a reply from another client, Ryan Leon after reading his post. Re: The Virtual Assistance project New post by Ryan Leon » Sat Apr 16, 2011 1:23 pm I would like to begin by commending Andrew Norman Wilson on the Virtual Assistance Project. I was, for lack of a better term, mind-blown after reading his posts and watching the videos on his blog. I have to admit, that I started an account at Get Friday to make my life a little easier. After seeing Andrew’s approach, I’m a bit embarrassed by my lack of effort in getting to know my assistant, Midhya. Up to this point, my tasks have been purely business related, with some “easy” personal tasks such as ordering books on Amazon.com. Ever the positive spirit, Midhya is always eager to help and delivers great results. My eyes are now open to the fact that I have been missing out on a key value that Get Friday offers: Midhya’s input. My entire outlook has changed, and I owe it all to a creative student in Chicago. I would like to close my comment with a message to Mr. Wilson: Andrew, Thank you for sharing the Virtual Assistance Project with the world. As a 25-year old, I am constantly finding out that I have MUCH more to learn about life and my place in the global environment. You really have something here. I know that you will do great things, because you already have shifted the paradigm in my own mind. I am amazed at how the internet continues to evolve and connect people with ideas that would be lost on them otherwise. Keep up the good work. Your fan, Ryan Leon Thank you, Ryan for your unreserved appreciation of Andrew’s work. And my apologies for not asking you before making this post. Am presuming you would be happy to have it go public. And I thought his assistant should know about it as well. Midhya, keep the good work going! Pic of Midhya with Jerry Hobby, the CEO of Anything Internet and a regular guest on the CNN 650 Morning Show. We constantly learn from others ideas and experiments and that is how innovation happens. And it is more likely to happen much faster in a better-connected world. Watch this engrossing talk by Steven Johnson, spiced by some exquisite illustrative video animation. Happy viewing! Sunder P CEO

The Virtual Assistance Project – Social Experiment

On our invitation Andrew is posting his thoughts about the social experiment here on our blog. For more in-depth information on this project please read “Virtual Assistance: An Interview with Andrew Norman Wilson” in Media Fields Journal. Andrew talks about his project: I want to start this post by stating my belief that the critical dimensions of my project, which include this post, are articulated with the utmost respect for all the actors involved – Akhil, the other virtual assistants at GetFriday, and the Get Friday management. I want to be sure that this project is not understood as a way to blame or point fingers at individuals or the company as a whole. Setting the personal dimensions aside, this project is about an economy of informational labor that has inherited certain power relations from prior (though still simultaneous) forms of capitalism. In doing what I do I am not attempting to destroy or overthrow, but rather to question the relationships we take for granted or accept as inevitable every day by attempting to actually live the changes I would like to see. The people at GetFriday have been extremely open and helpful in allowing this to happen to a certain extent, and I doubt I would have found such openness at another virtual assistance service. As my artist statement for the project reads: The Virtual Assistance project began with research geared towards unpacking the relational system of GetFriday, a virtual personal assistant service based in Bangalore, India. Get Friday typically provides remote executive support, where a largely American client base is assigned a “virtual” personal assistant. I am a part of that client base, paying monthly fees for a primary assistant who works out of the Get Friday office in India. My “assistant” is a 25-year-old male Bangalore resident named Akhil. In paying for our relationship I am not trying to lighten my workload, but rather to attempt collaborative projects and even reversals of the normative outsourcing flow under a corporate contract arranged for one-way command. Using the service has been a method of engaging with, understanding, and reacting to an economy in order to learn, with the help of Akhil, how to peel back the corporate veneer, revealing limitations, histories, biographies, networks, power, desire, and more. Personal outsourcing initially came to my attention through the writings of proponents Thomas Friedman and Timothy Ferris as a method to shorten the typical American work week – to slough off excess labor onto globally integrated residents of developing countries. Global outsourcing tends to produce telematic relationships – telematic in the sense of a remote control over another’s labor. These conditions led to a number of questions about power relations that have been guiding me through the project. If power is defined as the ability to manipulate resources across space and time, to what extent can power in my relationship with Akhil and GetFriday be re-distributed amongst a service where the normative use is one-way command? How can this be reversed towards mutual assistance and collaboration? How can this relationship exceed the commodified forms intimacy and creativity privileged by service-based economies? The Get Friday service initially struck me as an opportunity for direct engagement with one of the dominant symbols of globalism—outsourced labor in India. GetFriday’s goal of “enhancing value to its clients” is consistent with the dominant use of outsourcing and its accompanying definition of value – profitability. Most people sign up for this service not to learn about their Indian assistants or to engage in a dynamic version of a pen pal relationship, but rather to outsource low-end tasks for a low price. However, profitability is not the fundamental horizon in which my project is formed. Profitability is a term of economic efficiency, and this is not an economically efficient relationship. In terms of social profitability, a much more efficient relationship would be to find the most “relevant” Indian gallery or artist willing to work with me, and try to make work about outsourcing. This project, while partially about outsourcing, more importantly uses outsourcing. The relationship-project is inherently problematic in a number of ways for me, and so the stakes are higher and the baggage is heavier. A crucial reorientation of my goals for the project came with my understandings of my contract with GetFriday. The power dynamics of the relationship are largely determined by the limitations put into play by the corporate contract and the accompanying forms of social engagement that are deemed acceptable by GetFriday management. I can’t have contact with Akhil outside of the official GetFriday communication channels, and all communication can be monitored by Akhil’s superiors. Akhil cannot organize or join a labor union. Akhil’s superiors insist that he represent himself as my “virtual assistant” in the project. In a way, these restrictions are the juice of the project. Not because I’m seeking to call Get Friday out for bad labor practices (it actually seems like a great place to work for many), but because I’m calling to question the dynamics of this whole economy, which Get Friday and I are just a small part of. Consistent with the sociological categorization of immaterial labor, Akhil performs labor in which he has to speak, communicate, and cooperate within an organization that has been normalized for economic efficiency. Though the work Akhil has done for this project (which is far less than the work I have done for it) benefits me in certain ways (I have been invited to present the work internationally), the project has become an attempt to allow for that forced speech, communication, and cooperation to become a will to speak, communicate, and cooperate. By asking Akhil to relax and write down his thoughts in front of his favorite view of Bangalore, or asking him to assign me a task, or asking him what he wants to be working on at work, we have achieved this to varying degrees. Akhil told me he wanted the opportunity to work on design and engineering projects in

The Virtual Assistance Project – Social Experiment Read More »

On our invitation Andrew is posting his thoughts about the social experiment here on our blog. For more in-depth information on this project please read “Virtual Assistance: An Interview with Andrew Norman Wilson” in Media Fields Journal. Andrew talks about his project: I want to start this post by stating my belief that the critical dimensions of my project, which include this post, are articulated with the utmost respect for all the actors involved – Akhil, the other virtual assistants at GetFriday, and the Get Friday management. I want to be sure that this project is not understood as a way to blame or point fingers at individuals or the company as a whole. Setting the personal dimensions aside, this project is about an economy of informational labor that has inherited certain power relations from prior (though still simultaneous) forms of capitalism. In doing what I do I am not attempting to destroy or overthrow, but rather to question the relationships we take for granted or accept as inevitable every day by attempting to actually live the changes I would like to see. The people at GetFriday have been extremely open and helpful in allowing this to happen to a certain extent, and I doubt I would have found such openness at another virtual assistance service. As my artist statement for the project reads: The Virtual Assistance project began with research geared towards unpacking the relational system of GetFriday, a virtual personal assistant service based in Bangalore, India. Get Friday typically provides remote executive support, where a largely American client base is assigned a “virtual” personal assistant. I am a part of that client base, paying monthly fees for a primary assistant who works out of the Get Friday office in India. My “assistant” is a 25-year-old male Bangalore resident named Akhil. In paying for our relationship I am not trying to lighten my workload, but rather to attempt collaborative projects and even reversals of the normative outsourcing flow under a corporate contract arranged for one-way command. Using the service has been a method of engaging with, understanding, and reacting to an economy in order to learn, with the help of Akhil, how to peel back the corporate veneer, revealing limitations, histories, biographies, networks, power, desire, and more. Personal outsourcing initially came to my attention through the writings of proponents Thomas Friedman and Timothy Ferris as a method to shorten the typical American work week – to slough off excess labor onto globally integrated residents of developing countries. Global outsourcing tends to produce telematic relationships – telematic in the sense of a remote control over another’s labor. These conditions led to a number of questions about power relations that have been guiding me through the project. If power is defined as the ability to manipulate resources across space and time, to what extent can power in my relationship with Akhil and GetFriday be re-distributed amongst a service where the normative use is one-way command? How can this be reversed towards mutual assistance and collaboration? How can this relationship exceed the commodified forms intimacy and creativity privileged by service-based economies? The Get Friday service initially struck me as an opportunity for direct engagement with one of the dominant symbols of globalism—outsourced labor in India. GetFriday’s goal of “enhancing value to its clients” is consistent with the dominant use of outsourcing and its accompanying definition of value – profitability. Most people sign up for this service not to learn about their Indian assistants or to engage in a dynamic version of a pen pal relationship, but rather to outsource low-end tasks for a low price. However, profitability is not the fundamental horizon in which my project is formed. Profitability is a term of economic efficiency, and this is not an economically efficient relationship. In terms of social profitability, a much more efficient relationship would be to find the most “relevant” Indian gallery or artist willing to work with me, and try to make work about outsourcing. This project, while partially about outsourcing, more importantly uses outsourcing. The relationship-project is inherently problematic in a number of ways for me, and so the stakes are higher and the baggage is heavier. A crucial reorientation of my goals for the project came with my understandings of my contract with GetFriday. The power dynamics of the relationship are largely determined by the limitations put into play by the corporate contract and the accompanying forms of social engagement that are deemed acceptable by GetFriday management. I can’t have contact with Akhil outside of the official GetFriday communication channels, and all communication can be monitored by Akhil’s superiors. Akhil cannot organize or join a labor union. Akhil’s superiors insist that he represent himself as my “virtual assistant” in the project. In a way, these restrictions are the juice of the project. Not because I’m seeking to call Get Friday out for bad labor practices (it actually seems like a great place to work for many), but because I’m calling to question the dynamics of this whole economy, which Get Friday and I are just a small part of. Consistent with the sociological categorization of immaterial labor, Akhil performs labor in which he has to speak, communicate, and cooperate within an organization that has been normalized for economic efficiency. Though the work Akhil has done for this project (which is far less than the work I have done for it) benefits me in certain ways (I have been invited to present the work internationally), the project has become an attempt to allow for that forced speech, communication, and cooperation to become a will to speak, communicate, and cooperate. By asking Akhil to relax and write down his thoughts in front of his favorite view of Bangalore, or asking him to assign me a task, or asking him what he wants to be working on at work, we have achieved this to varying degrees. Akhil told me he wanted the opportunity to work on design and engineering projects in

Pushing the frontiers of exploration

I wanted to introduce you to Andrew Norman Wilson, a 27-year-old MFA candidate at the Art Institute of Philadelphia Chicago and a client of GetFriday who has pushed the frontiers of outsourcing to attempt something unique in the context of globalization and the society, at large. And no, this is not an April Fool’s prank! His experiments have been featured on the Philadelphia Weekly and it makes an amazing read. Read more about it here: http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/arts-and-culture/art/Virtual-Assistance-Humanizes-Outsourcing.html His work is pioneering and has explored a completely new dimension in the context of relationships in the global workplace. Our assistant Akhil in the process, probably re-discovered himself and most importantly his creativity, working for a client who sometimes even resorted to role reversals as part of the experiment. Unfortunately he left us for personal reasons, just after this experiment concluded. I distinctly recall the days when Andrew had probably just signed up (early 2009) and been there for a month or so. People used to come to me seeking approval on how much info can be shared, since his requests were weird. The information he asked for was mostly related to internal company policies or perhaps was simply too personal for comfort. There were no regular tasks, no deadlines but merely experiments with oneself and his environment. The initial alarm bells were to watch out for someone who is trying to study us and maybe clone the service. Or something even worse. But once we got to know him better, we understood that this was different and that he meant no harm for us. And most importantly, we agreed to this project because we needed to explore new territory to learn and renew ourselves. Here is a pic of the toy boat built by Andrew based on Akhil’s idea. Thanks Andrew for giving us this opportunity and wish him all the best! You can see more of the project on his website http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/35581-virtual-assistance On a different note, here is a fabulous illustrative video from the RSA (Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) on the topic of Empathic Civilization. Very relevant to Andrew’s experiments. http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/05/06/rsa-animate-empathic-civilisation/ Must confess that am a big fan of RSA Animate. Sunder P CEO

Pushing the frontiers of exploration Read More »

I wanted to introduce you to Andrew Norman Wilson, a 27-year-old MFA candidate at the Art Institute of Philadelphia Chicago and a client of GetFriday who has pushed the frontiers of outsourcing to attempt something unique in the context of globalization and the society, at large. And no, this is not an April Fool’s prank! His experiments have been featured on the Philadelphia Weekly and it makes an amazing read. Read more about it here: http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/arts-and-culture/art/Virtual-Assistance-Humanizes-Outsourcing.html His work is pioneering and has explored a completely new dimension in the context of relationships in the global workplace. Our assistant Akhil in the process, probably re-discovered himself and most importantly his creativity, working for a client who sometimes even resorted to role reversals as part of the experiment. Unfortunately he left us for personal reasons, just after this experiment concluded. I distinctly recall the days when Andrew had probably just signed up (early 2009) and been there for a month or so. People used to come to me seeking approval on how much info can be shared, since his requests were weird. The information he asked for was mostly related to internal company policies or perhaps was simply too personal for comfort. There were no regular tasks, no deadlines but merely experiments with oneself and his environment. The initial alarm bells were to watch out for someone who is trying to study us and maybe clone the service. Or something even worse. But once we got to know him better, we understood that this was different and that he meant no harm for us. And most importantly, we agreed to this project because we needed to explore new territory to learn and renew ourselves. Here is a pic of the toy boat built by Andrew based on Akhil’s idea. Thanks Andrew for giving us this opportunity and wish him all the best! You can see more of the project on his website http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/35581-virtual-assistance On a different note, here is a fabulous illustrative video from the RSA (Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) on the topic of Empathic Civilization. Very relevant to Andrew’s experiments. http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/05/06/rsa-animate-empathic-civilisation/ Must confess that am a big fan of RSA Animate. Sunder P CEO

Got work, Get Friday – Hiccups and more…

Work at GetFriday can’t get any more hectic. Sign ups happening by the minute and everyone working round the clock and against it to assign assistants to clients on or before the announced deadline of 3 weeks. That has pretty much been the scenario everyday over the last month. On American Independance Day, our staffers on the US shift are taking a welcome break from work and hopefully should come back refreshed. Lot of reviews / blog posts about GetFriday have appeared on the web recently! Most of them nice and a few brickbats too, especially about our slow sign up process. We fixed a part of the problem by allowing people to download the sign up form, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of not having enough capacity. We are working on it. The other issue was that people got confused with our YourManInIndia (YMII) service and posted random tasks and even paid in advance there. Tim Ferriss for some reason continued to think of YMII for virtual assistance when he wrote the book, though GetFriday(Sister Concern of YMII) has been in existence for the last 22 months. The people in that division (YMII) handle a different set of things and aren’t equipped to handle virtual assistance and that caused a lot of confusion and delay in response to prospective client queries. We actually zeroed in on the particular task in YMII where people were ordering and put a clear sign saying ‘For virtual assistance, please go to GetFriday, kindly don’t post your requirement here’. That seemed to have worked. To put the record straight, YMII is a concierge service in India which is capable of handling any kind of tasks (that require physical presence) in India. Typically clients are NRIs (Non Resident Indians) and sometimes could be people of any nationality wanting to get something done in India. GetFriday, on the other hand is the sister service of YMII that provides virtual assistant service to global clients. Any thing that can be handled by a graduate VA and does not require our physical presence in the place where task is executed is game for GetFriday. At present we offer only a English language service, but there are many inquiries for German and French services. We may look at providing those in the future. Our web tracking team found these perspectives about Outsourcing or GetFriday, interesting or useful. 1) 50 ways to increase your productivity – Kim Roach at LifeHack.org 2) 10 Ways of overcoming Outsourcing objections – Jon Symons at ArtofMoney.org (Incidentally, Jon posted 10 reasons why he won’t outsource a few days earlier before he become a convert to outsourcing) 3) Case study on outsourcing – Ryan Norbauer at NotRocketSurgery.com 4) Hired an assistant – Tony Rush on WAHM.com 5) Hiring a virtual PA – Ryan Carson on Carsonified.com 6) The Optimized Life – ‘Sparky looking young woman’ at TheOptimizedLife.com. 7) Four Hour Workweek for Parents – Amy Tiemann at CNET Blogs. 8 ) How to more efficiently make money online – MonetizeTraffic.com 9) Outsource or die – HarryBrelsford/SMB Nation on CAworld.com. (pdf file) 10) GetFriday : The Online Assistant – Adam at OutsideTheValley.com 11) Killer Startups – KillerStartups.com With the wave of interest in this service, there are bound to be cases where we can’t or don’t possibly meet the expectation of clients despite best efforts. You can be sure that GetFriday will analyze all such occurances and work towards rectifying them, sooner than later. Happy Independance Day to all our American clients and folks. -GetFriday Team

Got work, Get Friday – Hiccups and more… Read More »

Work at GetFriday can’t get any more hectic. Sign ups happening by the minute and everyone working round the clock and against it to assign assistants to clients on or before the announced deadline of 3 weeks. That has pretty much been the scenario everyday over the last month. On American Independance Day, our staffers on the US shift are taking a welcome break from work and hopefully should come back refreshed. Lot of reviews / blog posts about GetFriday have appeared on the web recently! Most of them nice and a few brickbats too, especially about our slow sign up process. We fixed a part of the problem by allowing people to download the sign up form, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of not having enough capacity. We are working on it. The other issue was that people got confused with our YourManInIndia (YMII) service and posted random tasks and even paid in advance there. Tim Ferriss for some reason continued to think of YMII for virtual assistance when he wrote the book, though GetFriday(Sister Concern of YMII) has been in existence for the last 22 months. The people in that division (YMII) handle a different set of things and aren’t equipped to handle virtual assistance and that caused a lot of confusion and delay in response to prospective client queries. We actually zeroed in on the particular task in YMII where people were ordering and put a clear sign saying ‘For virtual assistance, please go to GetFriday, kindly don’t post your requirement here’. That seemed to have worked. To put the record straight, YMII is a concierge service in India which is capable of handling any kind of tasks (that require physical presence) in India. Typically clients are NRIs (Non Resident Indians) and sometimes could be people of any nationality wanting to get something done in India. GetFriday, on the other hand is the sister service of YMII that provides virtual assistant service to global clients. Any thing that can be handled by a graduate VA and does not require our physical presence in the place where task is executed is game for GetFriday. At present we offer only a English language service, but there are many inquiries for German and French services. We may look at providing those in the future. Our web tracking team found these perspectives about Outsourcing or GetFriday, interesting or useful. 1) 50 ways to increase your productivity – Kim Roach at LifeHack.org 2) 10 Ways of overcoming Outsourcing objections – Jon Symons at ArtofMoney.org (Incidentally, Jon posted 10 reasons why he won’t outsource a few days earlier before he become a convert to outsourcing) 3) Case study on outsourcing – Ryan Norbauer at NotRocketSurgery.com 4) Hired an assistant – Tony Rush on WAHM.com 5) Hiring a virtual PA – Ryan Carson on Carsonified.com 6) The Optimized Life – ‘Sparky looking young woman’ at TheOptimizedLife.com. 7) Four Hour Workweek for Parents – Amy Tiemann at CNET Blogs. 8 ) How to more efficiently make money online – MonetizeTraffic.com 9) Outsource or die – HarryBrelsford/SMB Nation on CAworld.com. (pdf file) 10) GetFriday : The Online Assistant – Adam at OutsideTheValley.com 11) Killer Startups – KillerStartups.com With the wave of interest in this service, there are bound to be cases where we can’t or don’t possibly meet the expectation of clients despite best efforts. You can be sure that GetFriday will analyze all such occurances and work towards rectifying them, sooner than later. Happy Independance Day to all our American clients and folks. -GetFriday Team

Work life balance

The Four Hour Work Week

It was towards mid May of 2006, that Timothy (Tim) Ferriss got in touch with GetFriday(Sister Concern of YMII) requesting for virtual assistance. He was writing this book for Random House and wanted to test out different outsourcers offering virtual assistance to experience and test the limits of outsourcing. Now that the book “The Four Hour Work Week” is out, debuting on the Amazon top 10 and going strong at #7 at the time of writing this blog, we quite know what he set out to do. Here is a very young man who at age 29 has done an amazing variety of things in his life. Much more than what most people can’t imagine doing in a whole lifetime. There are a lot more young millionaires who probably have earned more than him at his age. But doing what he set out to do, why? Was it to write a book about it and make tons of money. Apparently no, the money is incidental. According to Tim, he was succumbing to the more you work, the better you are – culture that is all prevalent in today’s workaholic world. He wanted to make a change in the pursuit of happiness ;) and set out to really pursue what he wanted out of life without having to be a monk. Making more money doesn’t necessarily mean you get to do what you want in life. He calls his 4 steps to achieving his goal as D-E-A-L. Definition Define the kind of lifestyle you want to pursue. Most of the time, that can be achieved without having to make huge sacrifices and waiting till you actually retire. His book takes a very practical approach and tells you how to do that through his life experiences. Elimination Once the definition is made, then you come up with the biggest obstacle to this pursuit, which is TIME. Making time and time management have been oft-repeated topics with many authors and books offering cliched advice, Tim actually gets around to showing numerous practical examples that can really work for anyone. Eliminate all unproductive (that which does not make your life better) usage of time. Automation A large part of what you do can actually be outsourced (locally or across the globe) without the world coming to an end. In fact, the whole concept of GetFriday revolves around being able to handle anything that can be outsourced either to save you time, or for more efficiency or to give you the advantage of pooled expertise. Outsourcing ensures that you spend your precious time on the things that are really important. If you don’t have the time today, to take your son to the football game or to read bedtime stories to your little daughter, remember the day is not far when you would have all the time in the world after giving up on the rat race, while your children won’t have any. It is a different story that AJ Jacobs, Esquire Editor most funnily tried to get us to read bedtime stories for his kid son just to push and test the limits of personal outsourcing. It obviously doesn’t make good sense to outsource fatherhood to a remote organization in the long run. Liberation Don’t tie yourself up to a routine or an office setup. Embrace a mobile lifestyle without getting hooked onto gadgets that turn you into slaves. And it is about adding life to fill the void created by subtracting work (unproductive). It’s rather funny that 99% of people in this world would not know what to do to pursue their ideal lifestyle if they were suddenly thrown into a situation where time is not the constraint. As an aftermath to most such books and articles, a question being raised very frequently is whether outsourcing is all about cheap labor. We would say ‘no’ to that. Yes, cost arbitrage is the basic factor on which world commerce happened (from the days of the spice trade) and still happens across the globe but to be able to sustain it, one (companies, nations, cities) needs to develop what you would call as competitive advantage in a global world. The competitive advantage apart from cost in services like GetFriday being: 1) Ability to provide flexible work plans according to your need. 2) Ability to be available during your business hours and outside it. 3) Ability to provide a pool of expertise and knowledge that you may not get with a single assistant in your office or even by doing it yourself. 4) Ability to work on a faster learning curve as against an assistant hired locally by virtue of specialized training and being exposed to multiple work cultures and clients. The obvious dis-advantages with services like these being: 1) Not being able to be physically present to fix you a coffee. 2) Not being able to help in the absence of clear directions and rules from the client. The assistant while being trained to handle things independently will still be rendered rudderless if the client does not spend some quality time sharing expectations and guidelines for work in the beginning. If you want to make more time in your life for the more important things, then get yourself a copy of the “Four Hour Work Week“. To get updates on some great ongoing thoughts from Tim, check out his personal blog.

The Four Hour Work Week Read More »

It was towards mid May of 2006, that Timothy (Tim) Ferriss got in touch with GetFriday(Sister Concern of YMII) requesting for virtual assistance. He was writing this book for Random House and wanted to test out different outsourcers offering virtual assistance to experience and test the limits of outsourcing. Now that the book “The Four Hour Work Week” is out, debuting on the Amazon top 10 and going strong at #7 at the time of writing this blog, we quite know what he set out to do. Here is a very young man who at age 29 has done an amazing variety of things in his life. Much more than what most people can’t imagine doing in a whole lifetime. There are a lot more young millionaires who probably have earned more than him at his age. But doing what he set out to do, why? Was it to write a book about it and make tons of money. Apparently no, the money is incidental. According to Tim, he was succumbing to the more you work, the better you are – culture that is all prevalent in today’s workaholic world. He wanted to make a change in the pursuit of happiness ;) and set out to really pursue what he wanted out of life without having to be a monk. Making more money doesn’t necessarily mean you get to do what you want in life. He calls his 4 steps to achieving his goal as D-E-A-L. Definition Define the kind of lifestyle you want to pursue. Most of the time, that can be achieved without having to make huge sacrifices and waiting till you actually retire. His book takes a very practical approach and tells you how to do that through his life experiences. Elimination Once the definition is made, then you come up with the biggest obstacle to this pursuit, which is TIME. Making time and time management have been oft-repeated topics with many authors and books offering cliched advice, Tim actually gets around to showing numerous practical examples that can really work for anyone. Eliminate all unproductive (that which does not make your life better) usage of time. Automation A large part of what you do can actually be outsourced (locally or across the globe) without the world coming to an end. In fact, the whole concept of GetFriday revolves around being able to handle anything that can be outsourced either to save you time, or for more efficiency or to give you the advantage of pooled expertise. Outsourcing ensures that you spend your precious time on the things that are really important. If you don’t have the time today, to take your son to the football game or to read bedtime stories to your little daughter, remember the day is not far when you would have all the time in the world after giving up on the rat race, while your children won’t have any. It is a different story that AJ Jacobs, Esquire Editor most funnily tried to get us to read bedtime stories for his kid son just to push and test the limits of personal outsourcing. It obviously doesn’t make good sense to outsource fatherhood to a remote organization in the long run. Liberation Don’t tie yourself up to a routine or an office setup. Embrace a mobile lifestyle without getting hooked onto gadgets that turn you into slaves. And it is about adding life to fill the void created by subtracting work (unproductive). It’s rather funny that 99% of people in this world would not know what to do to pursue their ideal lifestyle if they were suddenly thrown into a situation where time is not the constraint. As an aftermath to most such books and articles, a question being raised very frequently is whether outsourcing is all about cheap labor. We would say ‘no’ to that. Yes, cost arbitrage is the basic factor on which world commerce happened (from the days of the spice trade) and still happens across the globe but to be able to sustain it, one (companies, nations, cities) needs to develop what you would call as competitive advantage in a global world. The competitive advantage apart from cost in services like GetFriday being: 1) Ability to provide flexible work plans according to your need. 2) Ability to be available during your business hours and outside it. 3) Ability to provide a pool of expertise and knowledge that you may not get with a single assistant in your office or even by doing it yourself. 4) Ability to work on a faster learning curve as against an assistant hired locally by virtue of specialized training and being exposed to multiple work cultures and clients. The obvious dis-advantages with services like these being: 1) Not being able to be physically present to fix you a coffee. 2) Not being able to help in the absence of clear directions and rules from the client. The assistant while being trained to handle things independently will still be rendered rudderless if the client does not spend some quality time sharing expectations and guidelines for work in the beginning. If you want to make more time in your life for the more important things, then get yourself a copy of the “Four Hour Work Week“. To get updates on some great ongoing thoughts from Tim, check out his personal blog.

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