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.