Work-Life Balance

Oh! The 100 things to do before I die

Here is a guest post from our client Mats Goldberg, an aspiring writer and philanthropist. He lives in Sweden and his goal is to become an accomplished author someday. While going through his blog, I found an interesting video post featuring “The Buried Life – 100 things to do before you die” a reality documentary series which aired on MTV several years ago. Inspires people to get on with doing the things they really want to do and so my pick for the title of this blogpost itself. I posted the video at the end of this blog post. And we (GetFriday) would be happy, if we can help you do that in our own small ways. Here we go with Mats, thanks for spreading the word. Sunder P CEO ———— I was surprised when they contacted me from GetFriday.com (as mentioned in Timothy Ferriss book “4 Hour Work Week”) to ask me to write a guest blogpost for their blog. I have only used virtual assistants since the beginning of 2012, so mind me; the surprise and appreciation I felt when asked to write this post. After some thinking I realized I have quite a good hang of this thing called outsourcing. Sure in the beginning I wasn’t too clear with what I wanted to accomplish or what tasks I would hand over to an assistant. I was in fact rather stupefied with bad directions and wishes. Of course that sometimes happen still today, but I have learned to better structure my ideas and wishes. Whenever I mention that I do outsourcing to India people always ask what I let my assistant do. To clarify this I usually refer our relationship as me being the owner of the company, my assistant being the CEO that delegates all the tasks I want to have done to more suitable people. In short a machinery built to work as smooth and as fast as possible with every single task, since time is my major concern. I don’t just see the one assistant I see a whole team! “So what tasks do you hand them?” is the second question and to be frank my answer is simple: “Anything!” I started out by sending a scanned document with about 3700 contacts that I needed to turn into an Excel document. After two hours I got a report saying they finished 900 of these contacts. In eight hours the job was done. had I done it myself it would have taken at least 40 hours without including all the interruptions at work. “Wow!” if that could be done, what else could I hand over? I started to make my own list of things that could be done and then assessed what I wanted to be done first. The bullet points that has come on print is the following: Send physical birthday cards to near and dear people. Buy Christmas gifts online and have them sent to me. Create logos for my business ideas. Research legal issues in operating and starting online gambling companies in Aldernay, Gibraltar, Singapore and Malta. Contact and get confirmation of the right to print the high definition material of creative resumes of almost 200 people for an upcoming book that I write. Research online lotteries and calculate odds of winning them. After the above mentioned research create a website based on the information found offering my own salary up for winnings. Together with my virtual assistant build an e-commerce store from the base of Tim Ferriss book. Create iPhone apps for a new way to barter. Structure my addresses and contacts. Proofread my blog. Help me plan and execute adventurous trips. Help in marketing and SEO campaigns. Make background research on several private issues. …and so forth! The list can be made infinitely long and the areas just as wide. In working with my virtual assistant (VA) Diyva, I have set a goal for us both to gain knowledge in new areas in life. I thirst for knowledge but don’t want the hassle it gives by making me have to spend all my free time doing things others can do better and faster. I don’t need to manage everything with hiring personnel and seeing to that they do their job. My goal is to free my time from necessary work to things that I’m more passionate about. GetFriday helps me with that! In short; if you want a full and free life, make sure to understand your capabilities and hand over the tasks that you know others can do better and focus on what makes you passionate. In that way you become interesting and an inspiration to others to do the same with their life. Become a person of influence and help change the world for the better in the way that suits your heart the most. Read more about what you could outsource to a virtual assistant at: http://www.matsgoldberg.com/42-things-you-could-outsource-to-a-virtual-assistant/. If you want to follow what I do, just click on through to www.MatsGoldberg.com or follow me on Facebook (www.facebook.com/matsgoldberg) or Twitter (@MatsGoldberg).

Oh! The 100 things to do before I die Read More »

Here is a guest post from our client Mats Goldberg, an aspiring writer and philanthropist. He lives in Sweden and his goal is to become an accomplished author someday. While going through his blog, I found an interesting video post featuring “The Buried Life – 100 things to do before you die” a reality documentary series which aired on MTV several years ago. Inspires people to get on with doing the things they really want to do and so my pick for the title of this blogpost itself. I posted the video at the end of this blog post. And we (GetFriday) would be happy, if we can help you do that in our own small ways. Here we go with Mats, thanks for spreading the word. Sunder P CEO ———— I was surprised when they contacted me from GetFriday.com (as mentioned in Timothy Ferriss book “4 Hour Work Week”) to ask me to write a guest blogpost for their blog. I have only used virtual assistants since the beginning of 2012, so mind me; the surprise and appreciation I felt when asked to write this post. After some thinking I realized I have quite a good hang of this thing called outsourcing. Sure in the beginning I wasn’t too clear with what I wanted to accomplish or what tasks I would hand over to an assistant. I was in fact rather stupefied with bad directions and wishes. Of course that sometimes happen still today, but I have learned to better structure my ideas and wishes. Whenever I mention that I do outsourcing to India people always ask what I let my assistant do. To clarify this I usually refer our relationship as me being the owner of the company, my assistant being the CEO that delegates all the tasks I want to have done to more suitable people. In short a machinery built to work as smooth and as fast as possible with every single task, since time is my major concern. I don’t just see the one assistant I see a whole team! “So what tasks do you hand them?” is the second question and to be frank my answer is simple: “Anything!” I started out by sending a scanned document with about 3700 contacts that I needed to turn into an Excel document. After two hours I got a report saying they finished 900 of these contacts. In eight hours the job was done. had I done it myself it would have taken at least 40 hours without including all the interruptions at work. “Wow!” if that could be done, what else could I hand over? I started to make my own list of things that could be done and then assessed what I wanted to be done first. The bullet points that has come on print is the following: Send physical birthday cards to near and dear people. Buy Christmas gifts online and have them sent to me. Create logos for my business ideas. Research legal issues in operating and starting online gambling companies in Aldernay, Gibraltar, Singapore and Malta. Contact and get confirmation of the right to print the high definition material of creative resumes of almost 200 people for an upcoming book that I write. Research online lotteries and calculate odds of winning them. After the above mentioned research create a website based on the information found offering my own salary up for winnings. Together with my virtual assistant build an e-commerce store from the base of Tim Ferriss book. Create iPhone apps for a new way to barter. Structure my addresses and contacts. Proofread my blog. Help me plan and execute adventurous trips. Help in marketing and SEO campaigns. Make background research on several private issues. …and so forth! The list can be made infinitely long and the areas just as wide. In working with my virtual assistant (VA) Diyva, I have set a goal for us both to gain knowledge in new areas in life. I thirst for knowledge but don’t want the hassle it gives by making me have to spend all my free time doing things others can do better and faster. I don’t need to manage everything with hiring personnel and seeing to that they do their job. My goal is to free my time from necessary work to things that I’m more passionate about. GetFriday helps me with that! In short; if you want a full and free life, make sure to understand your capabilities and hand over the tasks that you know others can do better and focus on what makes you passionate. In that way you become interesting and an inspiration to others to do the same with their life. Become a person of influence and help change the world for the better in the way that suits your heart the most. Read more about what you could outsource to a virtual assistant at: http://www.matsgoldberg.com/42-things-you-could-outsource-to-a-virtual-assistant/. If you want to follow what I do, just click on through to www.MatsGoldberg.com or follow me on Facebook (www.facebook.com/matsgoldberg) or Twitter (@MatsGoldberg).

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.

Categories