Final Four

Woohoo! Just got this via email:

Dave:

Congratulations!

Your entry was one of the four (4) semi-finalists to receive the highest number of votes during the public voting in the True Value “Do-It-Yourself All Star Contest”, sponsored by True Value Company.

You are now a Finalist!

As a Finalist you are eligible for the Final Round of Judging. The Grand Prize winner will be determined by Sponsor from among the four Finalists using the judging as described in the Official Rules: (#1) helpful “Do-It-Yourself” role to others, (#2) relevance to Theme and (#3) “Do-It-Yourself” accomplishments.

The Grand Prize winner will be notified by telephone, postal mail, express mail and/or e-mail on or about October 29, 2007.

Additional information will be coming directly from True Value within the next week.

Again, on behalf of True Value Company, thank you for your participation.

Will keep you posted.

I’m a finalist “do it yourself allstar”!

I’m a finalist in the True Value “Do it Yourself Allstar” competition. My wife was nice enough to submit an entry for me. I made it to the top 20, and now it’s up to voters to get me in the top 4, and then I’ll be judged by a panel for the final decision. Winner gets $1,000 to use toward a project (I’ll use it to finish the inside of Max and Sally’s play-house), and gets a 2-hour consultation with Steve Watson, the guy from “Monster House” and who has a new show on HGTV called “Don’t Sweat It.”

Here’s the entry Jen sent in (click the link to vote!):

My husband took a couple months last summer and built the ultimate backyard playground and park for our kids! He had a treehouse as a child, and wanted to recapture the magic for our then-three year old son and newborn daughter. After collecting ideas and remembering his childhood club-house, he sat down in front of the computer with a mini CAD program, and laid out the components. The “house” sits 5 feet off the ground, and is designed with the same materials as our real house. It features a 7’ x 7’ play area with a sleeping nook above the porch. There is a 7’ tall deck (with a tube slide for getting down quickly) off the back of the house overlooking the pond in our backyard, and other “amenities” include another slide over a clatter-bridge, two swings, a tire swing, and a rock-climbing wall. Though the project took a full two months, our son helped swing the hammer a bit, and they both had a grand time building a place for the kids to retreat. His next project is to finish the inside of the house and build an “interctive” sandbox underneath so the kids can flex their imaginations in the shade. The pictures speak for themselves – and the kids love it! We now have the “neighborhood park” right in our back yard.

http://www.startrightstarthere.com/displayEntry.aspx?entrantId=82

Check it out and vote if you want!

How to do more by “farming it out”

I’ve become something of a crusader for Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek,” and have recommended the book (and blog/website) to at least a dozen friends, relatives and acquaintances. So when I saw that another of my favorite info sites, Merlin Mann’s 43 folders, had featured one of the book’s key nuggets — outsourcing your life — I knew I needed to dig further. And guest-blogger Ryan Norbauer’s post gave me a ton of great tips that I want to pass along.

Enlightened outsourcing, Part 1: The psychology | 43 Folders
I recently encountered a weirdly tantalizing idea in Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which would ultimately disrupt my addiction to the extraneous. The book advocates farming out the more mundane tasks of your existence to outside firms and consultants, which Ferriss calls “outsourcing your life.” Probably because it would give me an excuse not to do something else more pressing, I decided to give this a go a few months ago. While I did learn quite a lot about outsourcing in the process, my experiments led me to a far grander epiphany about the way I approach life and work generally and helped me form a new set of habits that have utterly rocked my workaday world.

Part 1 of this 2-part series gets into the “why consider outsourcing” question. Best reasons from his post for me include the chance to “do business like the big guys”:

Outsourcing has become something of a fad in the past few months, thanks to Mr. Ferris. I think this is in part because many people hadn’t realized that they could do just what American and British corporations have been doing for years: hire workers in the developing world at rates that would make any domestic contractor laugh.

And the necessities of taking the plunge that force you to get it together in such a way as to be able to hand some things off:

Making good use of outsourced help requires being able truly to open yourself to the possibility of asking for help, getting over your delusions of importance, surmounting any weird hang-ups you might have about entitlement or your worthiness to get assistance, and having the creativity necessary to identify the ways in which you can open your workflow up to external aid.

Then, Ryan makes the leap all the way into GTD to explain the big nugget in part 1:

David Allen, when defining productivity “tricks” puts it this way: “the smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part of us responds to almost automatically.” And philosopher John Perry suggests something very similar in his structured procrastination, which involves taking on ever more grandiose projects so that you’ll work on the projects you’re actually supposed to do as a way of avoiding those bigger projects. I’ve merely taken this one step further (or flipped it on its head, depending on how you look at it.) By outsourcing the means of avoidance, I’ve committed myself to working on the grandiose.

So there you go. Taking care of the small junk that you’d be tempted to do instead of your big projects actually frees you up (or removes all your excuses) so you can get down to the business of the big things you’re taking on.

Now, things get really interesting in Part 2.
Ryan sets up a detailed explanation of the kind of work that’s best to outsource and how to figure it out (watch your habits over a couple days, continually asking “can someone else do this?”), plus a GTD trick to help you on the way:

Ethan Schoonover recently wrote a fabulous piece here at 43folders about the value of formulating your GTD next-action lists as if they were written for someone else to do. If one of your projects isn’t moving forward, as the theory goes, you probably haven’t sufficiently clarified precisely what physical, visible actions need to be done in order to complete it. When approached with an eye toward outsourcing, it becomes clear how important and powerful this strategy can be. Not only have you figured out precisely how the thing needs to be done, you’ve already packaged it up to outsource to someone else with no (or little) additional work.

Some examples of work Ryan offers as good for the outsourcing model: Virtual assistants, design, fulfillment, A/V editing, scanning, transcription, “artificial” artificial intelligence (doing work that needs automation but that’s hard to automate, like picking photos), software development and domestic work. He gives fantastic examples for each, and gave me a ton of great ideas for ways to make the leap to outsourcing a reality.

He also offers a ton of places to look for outsourcing providers, anything from eLance to Amazon, India to Boston. Plus links to top choices and things to look (and look out) for when choosing and matching a provider with your needs.

Fantastic write-up — if you’ve been thinking you’re too busy and need some help, do yourself a favor and check out both parts.