Private outsourcing to India
Too much work? In the New York Times supplement of the Süddeutsche Zeitung there are several articles about Tim Ferris’s model of the 4-hour week and outsourcing to virtual personal assistants, which I had already written about. The posts reminded me of my promise to write more about Ferris’s book, which I haven’t kept yet. Ferri’s approach is mainly to block out everything that is not immediately important. E-mails are only read once a week, messages are not read at all, and people don’t surf the Internet anyway unless you have to for a task. Furthermore, Ferriss recommends that you first have to make sure that you no longer drive to the office every day, but can work from home; as soon as this is possible, you should get a VPA (Virtual Personal Assistant), which can then take over many tasks for you. In addition, Ferris has founded a company himself, through which he can earn a five-figure sum every month, but for which he has to do next to nothing. Everything is outsourced, from production to delivery to customer support. Checking emails once a week is enough to collect $40,000 cash every month and travel the world with it. Basically, we already know everything that’s in Ferriss The 4-Hour Workweek. Hide the unimportant, focus. It is the radicalism that has helped Ferris’s approach to popularity. And the idea of the arbitrage business, in which the cheap labor of others is used to do one’s own high-paying job. And don’t we all know a Ferriss in our area, someone who never responds to e-mails and who makes you wonder how he or she gets away with it, but at the same time admire how he or she gets his or her projects organized? More about Ferriss in his blog (which you shouldn’t actually read according to his specifications). My own experiences with my VPA are mediocre. Since mid-September, I have been outsourcing 10 hours every month, but I don’t give anything from my main job to India. So far, my VPA has mainly helped with book research, although the quality of the results varies. You have to be very precise in describing what you want, which is no surprise when it comes to outsourcing (I’ve dealt with offshore development before), but sometimes the requirements aren’t read carefully enough. My tip: Don’t hand in a large task and then only accept it after completion, but let intermediate results be shown. At the same time, however, there is also a feedback system that decides, for example, on the bonus of a VPA. By the way, as expected, there are no VPAs at getfriday.com that speak German. This will significantly limit the ability of most Germans to use VPAs for an arbitrage transaction; I also think it is unlikely that a similar business model will work here due to the high wage costs. Those who are proficient in English and have a job in which German hardly plays a role will have an advantage here. For the Americans and English, we are talking about a real language advantage here (not a locational advantage), and I would not be surprised if this were to grow into a serious factor for an economic advantage.