As part of my work on Week Plan, I constantly try to find ways to help people be more effective.

Being more effective comes from identifying what matter most and working on it. But what should you do with the things that are not that important and yet still need to get done?

Before working on Week Plan, I created the outsourcing marketplace TaskArmy (http://taskarmy.com) to help people leverage the world of outsourcing.

I have always been passionate about finding ways to use my time meaningfully and I think that outsourcing can help tremendously.

But I understand that starting outsourcing from scratch can seem daunting.

  • What can a personal assistant do?
  • How to find the right person?
  • How much should you pay?
  • How can you collaborate with that person effectively?

I am going to answer these questions.

What a personal assistant can do for you

First of all, please understand that you can outsource almost anything (web development, cooking, cleaning, shopping, delivery, etc…). Today I am going to focus on helping you find an online personal assistant: someone who can do general admin tasks and support you everyday.

If you are a busy individual, you will need to work out why you are so busy. Usually busy individuals tend to overcommit, even to things that aren’t that important to them. To avoid being busy, the first step is to be picky with what you commit to.

Second, you need to identify which tasks you find taxing. The tasks that you have a hard time doing and procrastinate the most. These tasks will drain your energy and are great candidates for elimination, automation or delegation.

Third, once you have a list of wasteful activities, you can try to solve these problems with three actions: elimination (just stop doing them, remove yourself from the commitment of doing them), automation (automate the payment of your bills, ask for home delivery of your groceries, etc…), and delegation.

Delegation is where your personal assistant can help. Anything that cannot be automated may be outsourced. For example, finding the cheapest flight ticket is hard to automate but if you can express your needs clearly, someone can spend the time finding the right flights for you.

You need to see your personal assistant as an building block in your productivity system. Look at the tasks you do, which one should be eliminated / automated / delegated?

How to find the right person

In today’s world, finding a personal assistant is very easy. Dozens of websites will help you find one.

Some of my favourites are http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-outsourcing (of course) and http://odesk.com Why I recommend you to check TaskArmy out is because the personal assistants there are manually screened before being listed on the website. Some have actually been screened by me directly! So the quality of the work you will receive should be higher than on oDesk but oDesk has the largest numbers of assistants listed (= more choices).

When I was looking for a personal assistant, I would look favorably for people from the Philippines. Most can speak English, they are generally trustworthy, and have very competitive rates (starting at $2 per hour!).

How much does it cost?

A general admin virtual assistant from the Philippines or India costs around $5 an hour.

If you need to outsource software development, it starts at around $12 per hour (look for freelancers in Eastern Europe).

I like paying per hour because I only pay for what I need. A month, you might only need 10 hours worth of work ($50), and some other months, you might need more. It is great to know that you have a personal assistant available to take some work off your list.

How can you collaborate with your assistant effectively?

This is where people fail when outsourcing for the first time. Outsourcing is learned skill.

People get outsourcing wrong for many reasons: they give tasks as if their assistants could read their mind (not clear enough). They lack cultural sensitivity (certain cultures will resist telling you that something is wrong. Or they expect their personal assistant to be excellent at everything for $5 per hour.

Outsourcing is a learned skill, and you need to start small to reduce the risks involved in outsourcing (time wasted, money spent, etc…).

Start with tasks that have no deadline or quality requirements grow from there.

I would like to give you a few tips that have worked wonders for me.

My #1 tip comes from the IT industry: ask your assistant to send you a daily update of what was worked on and what is coming next.

I found these emails were a great opportunity for me to ask questions, clarify certains requirements and identify issues.

My second tip is to build the relationship with your assistant. Some people see their assistant as nothing more than just an email address you send stuff to. A good way to not fall in the trap is by having weekly Skype video calls.

Last tip: train your assistant by recording videos. Videos are a great way to show something and they often take less time to record than the equivalent text page with images. On Windows, I use Open Broadcaster Software (https://obsproject.com/) and I hear that Screenflow is great for Mac users (not free though).

I hope this article gave you enough information and motivation to start outsourcing. If you have any question regarding this topic, just leave a comment.

Thanks!

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