I have just finished the 4 hour work week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferris and I thoroughly enjoyed it! There were some really useful ideas in the book which I have applied and they work great.

To briefly go back in time, when I was a student, I had ideas all the time bouncing around in my head… as a student, brain activity (for most!) is important in getting your degree… in addition, all the thinking I was doing and with all the various people bouncing off ideas with each other, I frequently thought “what if I could design a bit of software which could do this?” The problem is that you should be exerting most of your energy thinking about your coursework and degree… I did do that but I also thought about how I could use technology to do things… however, with the studying and managing a student club, I just didn’t get the time.

In Tim Ferris’ book, he talks about outsourcing his life. What he has done is to outsource all the boring administrative time consuming work of the company he set up to virtual assistants! Now he swans around the globe travelling with his team of virtual assistants running the mundane day to day administrative duties. It’s a really clever concept and in our time constrained lives, it is a fantastic way to achieve more in less time.

Virtual assistants, and I’ll show you where you can find them, are people who are happy to do this work for you (for a fee of course). The vast majority of virtual assistants are based in India/Phillipines and they are happy to do what you are requiring for a fraction of the cost of hiring someone in the UK or US. Even as a student, you should be able to afford the help of a virtual assistant if you’ve got a fab idea… recently, I hired a virtual assistant for $3 for an hour to do some admin work on Excel spreadsheets. As a student, I wrote a lot of stuff down (as I didn’t have any money for a computer)… I could have scanned in all the notes I made and sent them off to a virtual assistant to type up!

Tim used Get Friday for his virtual assistant. However, reading reviews on the web have not been too great simply because Tim’s book was a roaring success and he has brought a lot of business to these guys and they are unable to cope. I have looked on the web and done my research, the company I recommend is Odesk.

Odesk allows you to list your projects and then you can either offer a fixed amount for a job or pay them an hourly rate. You can also filter prospective candidates for various skills. Odesk have proficiency tests which candidates can sit and you can filter on them to ensure that they have the proven skills you require. It could be basic administrative tasks, typing, database entry but you can also get people to design websites, build software applications etc. It certainly has made me change the way I view things and has saved me considerable time… perhaps I should outsource this blog typing to them also!!

Links:
Odesk
4 Hour Work Week

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