Archive for January, 2008

After quickly reading The 4-Hour Workweek over the holidays, I started to read the book again on the weekend. My plan is to do a more careful second reading, hopefully picking up on things I may have missed and also to follow the specific challenges and actions Ferriss suggests at the end of each chapter. One passage that particularly resonated with me is actually in the introduction when Ferris specifies the "problem" the book will address:

I'm going to assume you are suffering from time famine, creeping dread, or - worse case - a tolerable and comfortable existence doing something unfulfilling. The last is the most common and  most insidious.

Source: The 4-Hour Workweek.

The web defines insidious as:

Alluring but harmful; intended to entrap; working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way.

Source: Google.

Insidious indeed. Deep down I have always felt this way about employment in general. When performing unfulfilling work, your employers pay you off just enough to make you comfortable. Just enough to make you feel you would miss that compensation if you decided to forgo what is ultimately unrewarding work. By the way, I have never felt any ill will towards an employer because of this. They are intelligent enough to get other people to do the work for them and pay them just enough to do it. That's just smart. And truthfully, sometimes the work is fulfilling. Therefore, the ultimate goal is simple: to become the employer and do only the work that one finds fulfilling.

Odds & Ends

Rex over at the Diary of a Four-Hour-a-Weeker wrote a post about Beginning the Outsourcing Journey. He references an article on 43 Folders which I think should be required reading by all 4-Hour Workweek initiates:

• Part 1: Enlightened Outsourcing - The Psychology
• Part 2: Enlightened Outsourcing - The Practice

This is a great two part series. The first part steps back and discusses one's feelings about your work, getting help with your work and having people work for you. These sorts of things are not really discussed in The 4-Hour Workweek or are somewhat glossed over. The second part is more tactical, but examples are always helpful! Thanks for sharing the link Rex!

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One exercise I am working on right now is listing all of the things I do, both professionally and personally, and looking for activities that take up a lot of my time and only add incremental value. Perhaps some of these things are simply not worth doing or can easily be done by someone else. I work in the software industry, and one item I know I can outsource is the more mundane programming tasks I do as part of my job. There are components of the software I develop that would be difficult to outsource because it requires specialized expertise, the use of proprietary technology and/or sensitive client data. However, besides these exceptional cases, there is a lot of code I currently write that could easily be written by someone else.

At this point, a reasonable person might start by clearly defining the programming tasks to be performed and post the project on Elance, Rent A Coder, or a similar service. Of course, I had to try something different. I decided to contact a programmer overseas directly. How did I do this? A couple of years ago I had communicated with a developer (let's call him "Ajay") who had posted sample code on Planet Source Code, and we had since gone on to work on some open source stuff together. From these experiences I know he is a first rate programmer. To think, I had a potential VC (virtual coder) in front of my eyes the whole time!

My theory is that, in general, this may be an alternative way to find freelancers to do software development work. There are a lot of developers posting on Planet Source Code, Code Source, Code Guru and the like. By searching for programmers directly via these sites you can validate a candidate's expertise and focus your search on a particular subject matter area before you even start the proposal process. Better yet, get a VA (virtual assistant) and have them do this for you! It's just a theory and maybe Elance is a much more efficient approach, but it seems like fun to experiment a little!

Anyway, here is the email I sent Ajay:

Happy new year Ajay! I have a proposal for you to consider: I have some development work that I need to do, and I am wondering if you would be interested in helping me out. Compensation would be coming out of my personal funds, so I cannot afford a "corporate" rate if you could keep that in mind! Would you be interested in doing some work for me? If so, what kind of hourly compensation would you consider? If you are too busy, or not interested, or too expensive would you know other good programmers that might be interested?

He responded positively to this proposal. He suggested an hourly rate that is a little high in my opinion, but he indicated a willingness to negotiate on that. It looks like I am ready to move forward on farming out some work, and I am eager to at least give this a try.

I will start with a single, but meaningful programming task to see how it goes. I need to figure out a few things though. Since I did this kind of backwards, I need to go back now and very clearly and specifically describe the task to be done. Not only is this a best practice according to Ferriss and others, lack of clarity can create problems even before you have someone in mind to do the work. Some other issues to figure out:

• How do I budget for this? I would rather know ahead of time the cost for the completed project and not simply pay by the hour. I assume that once the task I have is clearly defined, I should have Ajay quote me on completing that task, not on his hourly rate.
• How do I mitigate potential risks?  For example, I would hate to find out a week later that nothing was accomplished. My guess is that I should define a deadline and perhaps have some kind of checkpoint between the starting and completing of the work.
• How do I deal with a finished product that is unacceptable or of poor quality? I suppose I can state some expectations up front, but I may not be able to judge the end product until I integrate and run the code. Should there be a financial penalty for bugs? Or perhaps part of the agreement should be for Ajay to fix any bugs that I identify?

If anyone has some experience in outsourcing programming work, I would love to hear you thoughts on these issues!

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I have a new VA (virtual assistant) and her name is Sandy. I have her tasked with starting my day with a daily digest of the day's appointments and activities. I have her set up and manage appointments, and remind me of them and other scheduled tasks just when I need to know. I have her keep track of all kinds of things I need to remember like contacts, books I want to read, birthdays, bookmarks, people to call and things to do.  I have her keep track of any notes I want to make, and in general she will help keep me organized. I didn't even go through Elance...in fact, Sandy works for free! Do you want Sandy?

Ok, Sandy isn't a real person. She is your free virtual personal assistant, and by virtual I really mean virtual! In Sandy's own words:

Hi! I’m Sandy, your new assistant. I'll remember the details so you can focus on what's important.

From managing appointments and to-do lists to taking, filing and looking up notes, Sandy does handle a lot of the details for you. I found Sandy when I was looking around the web for a software tool to help me capture all of my thoughts digitally (if you don't write things down or capture it somewhere else, your thoughts tend to float around in your head, where they often surface at the wrong times, stress you out and are usually forgotten when they are actually needed). In a way, handling such details is exactly one of the reasons we want and need a VA.

Sandy is web based, so she is accessible from almost anywhere.  You communicate with Sandy via email, sms and IM via twitter (hmmm, sounds a lot like how you would communicate with a real VA...). I have access to Sandy 24/7 from my inbox, Blackberry and cell phone. You also use natural language to communicate with Sandy, and honestly, after a while, it almost seems like you are emailing a real person. It is actually very cool.

All that being said, Sandy is not going to find you the best deal on an apartment in Buenos Aires or research the Ice Cream industry and establish contact with diary product experts (well not yet anyway - it is amazing what these techno whizzes are capable of these days...). So you will still need a real VA in your quest to cut out 80% of your day to day work, however, Sandy might help you outsource the management of some of the small stuff. So far, Sandy has fit very nicely into the workflow of my current organization system. Check her out!

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After virtually challenging the Four Hour Trial man to hire a VA (virtual assistant), I thought I would jump into the 4-Hour Workweek world head first and change my voicemail recording (let's face it, outsourcing is the easy part). Here is the script I used:

Hi, you have reached the desk of Brick Andrews. I am currently checking and responding to voicemail at noon and 4:00 pm. If you require assistance with a truly urgent matter, please contact me on my cell phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Otherwise, please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can. You can also leave your email address as I am often able to respond faster that way.  Thanks and have a great day.

Source: Inspired by the 4-Hour Workweek.

You will notice that it is a slightly more compact version than the sample given in the book - it turns out the amount of recording time on my voicemail service is quite limited. By the way, having a script seems to be a best practice when recording messages, otherwise you are forever pausing in the wrong spots, saying "um" a lot, or just generally screwing up the message you are trying to record. I had a script and it still took me three takes to get it right!

Seriously, changing the voicemail recording was rather simple. The hard part is not automatically answering the phone when it rings. For some reason, most humans are hard wired to drop everything and pick up the phone when it rings, often with the urgency of an emergency response team. It is an unconscious reaction and quite Pavlovian. It was actually quite refreshing today to not pick up the phone when it was ringing and batch the handling of calls into a single period at noon.  Since it was my first day on this, I have been quite militant in not answering the phone. I suppose if you were really doing nothing you might enjoy taking a call - all things in moderation.

In general, we should take and make telephone calls when it is convenient for us, not necessarily the caller. The same holds true for home as well as the office. I have a voicemail service on my home line, and I recommend you get one too. Why should I answer the phone if I am in the middle of watching a movie, or playing a game with my kids???

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As an addendum to my previous post on how to wake up early every morning, I would like to be clear on one item: the ability or desire to wake up early every morning has really nothing to do with the concept of the 4-Hour Workweek. In fact, the danger is that one's desire to wake up earlier is driven by a need to find more hours in the day with which to fill with work and other crap. This would only be a symptom of work for work's (W4W) sake, and I would think should be avoided.

Personally, I just think getting up earlier on a regular basis leads to a more productive day and helps one to ultimately become more successful. I don't want to wake up early just so I can do more work! It's like a race - if you get a head start, not only do you often win the contest, you also finish earlier.

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