The virtual personal assistant
In contrast to the Personal Digital Assistant, which was all the rage just a few years ago, the Virtual Personal Assistant will now become the subject of the next wave. Unlike the PDA, the VPA is made of flesh and blood and owes its increasing popularity to the arbitrage effect that Timothy Ferris draws attention to in his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Not only programming can be outsourced to India, but also the tasks of a personal assistant. Create a market overview? Why waste hours of precious time when a well-trained assistant in India can do the job for a few dollars less? This not only gives you free time, but also allows you to concentrate on the really important things. Ryan Carson has also already had his first experiences with the VPA after reading the book by Timothy Ferris, which he shares in his blog. VPA providers such as Get Friday now have waiting times of several weeks since the 4-hour workweek topped the American bestseller lists. Tasks are sent to India by email in the evening, the next (American) morning the results are in the mailbox. In some cases, the results are so impressively good that one becomes afraid and anxious for one’s own economy, according to a comment by a user of these services in Ferris’ book. Of course, it is nothing new that other areas are also outsourced. What is new, however, is that not only companies do this, but also private individuals in order to regain time for themselves. Because, according to Ferris, it’s not about putting everything off until you’re a pensioner; instead, efforts should be made to design mini-retirements here and now. The question is whether it can be used to benefit beyond English-speaking countries. I have a lot of tasks that I could outsource to a virtual personal assistant, but some of them require the assistant to be proficient in German. An inquiry about this at Get Friday has not yet been answered. However, it is unlikely that this system will scale for Europeans (minus the UK) as it does for the Americans and English.