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This post is Part 2 of a series describing my experiences in implementing some of the ideas in The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. You can follow along starting with Part 1, Do You Want to Work a Four Hour Workweek?

In my last post, I briefly summarized The 4-Hour Workweek and described my first, largely unsuccessful experiment with outsourcing my life. When I realized that maybe I’m not ready to manage a team of low cost assistants, I decided to refocus my efforts and tackle some issues that are a little closer to home.

Elimination – The Key Step
In the early parts of the book, Tim explains that living the 4-hour lifestyle involves lots of DEALs, an acronym which stand for Definition, Elimination, Automation, and the coveted goal of Liberation (also known as napping on the beach while being fanned by my cabana boy). When I started dissecting my first experiment with outsourcing I realized that I jumped prematurely into the Automation phase and skipped over a lot of the Definition and Elimination parts.

Definition became fairly simple once I put my mind to it. For right now, I want to streamline some of my personal tasks so that I have more time to work on this blog and to be social. That’s not my ultimate goal, but it’s what I am choosing to concentrate on in the here and now.

Elimination turns out to be the step that is the most difficult, and of course, the most important. As Tim points out in the book, there is no point in outsourcing crap work. If you do that, you’re just paying someone else to do things that don’t need doing anyway. He recommends doing 80/20 analysis (as an aside, that whole meme is WAY overused right now!) to figure out what tasks are the biggest time sucks with the least amount of results.

In my analysis, I discovered that housework was causing me the most grief as far as personal tasks go. A few years ago I didn’t mind cleaning, and sometimes found it therapeutic (perhaps someday I’ll tell the story of how I scrubbed the whole house when my uncle died suddenly), but over time I have come to dislike and even resent having to do much of it.

The good news is that there were just a few causes of the majority of the mess in my home. The biggest clutter offender is definitely mail. For some reason, mail seems to dominate my living room. I live in a small house, so any amount of messiness can cause livability issues. A pile of bills and newspapers on the coffee table is a huge irritant for me. Going all electronic with bills isn’t feasible for me at this time, so I needed a system for controlling the paper.

The other issue is the bathroom. I am completely neurotic about having the bathroom clean all the time, but I really hate cleaning it.

Eliminating these time and energy vacuums turned out to require very little effort and investment on my part. I simply visited my local Big Box store and purchased a few items that would help me easily deal with the mail issue and the bathroom cleaning issue. Now, when I grab the mail, I sort it into:

• Junk to be Recycled – this goes straight into the new miniature trash can, which is emptied into the recycling bin.
• Junk to be Shredded – is immediately run through the new table-top shredder.
• Stuff I Need to Keep – lives in the bill sorter that hangs on the wall by the front door. The sorter also has hooks for keys.

The result is a clear coffee table and a clear mind.

In the bathroom, I decided to take advantage of some of the newer convenience products. I went ahead and purchased a new Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaner. I also bought some cleaning wipes for quick sink and toilet basin pick-ups. The verdict is still out on the effectiveness of the shower cleaner, but the wipes are definitely more convenient than breaking out a sponge and some cleaner.

With those two major issues handled, I felt like I was ready to explore the Automation step a little more, but I wanted to stick to a local provider this time.

Outsourcing the Old Fashioned Way
Yes, Mom, I hired a cleaning lady.

Even with the improvements in my house cleaning processes, I realized that elimination isn’t enough. No matter how convenient you make it, cleaning is still time consuming and, for me at least, unpleasant. It was time to hire some help.

I knew that the big franchise companies can be quite expensive and have some deal-breaking limitations on what they’ll do, so I did a little networking and got the name of a woman in my town that runs her own business. She came over, took a look at my little house, and said she’d clean the bathroom, kitchen and living room for $30.

I immediately hired her to come in twice a month.

This past Tuesday was her first day. I came home to a sparkling kitchen (she even washed my coffee pot – I NEVER wash my coffee pot!), a clean and sanitary bathroom, and a neatly dusted and vacuumed living room. Totally worth every penny.

Continuing the Journey
This is just my first step on the road to the 4-hour lifestyle. So far my household outsourcing seems to be a success, but it’s really just a drop in the large pond of stuff I have to do. I’m currently making a list of research and marketing tasks related to this blog that I can outsource overseas. I’ve also begun a relationship with a local tech-savvy person I know to do some design and administration on the site.

In the coming months, I hope to have new experiences to share and concrete examples of ways to successfully implement the principles of the 4-Hour Workweek. In the meantime, if anyone else has experiences to share please tell everyone about it in the comments.

So do I!

Unless you’ve been living on a beach in Costa Rica and only checking your email once a decade, by now you’ve heard all kinds of crazy things about The 4-Hour Workweek. Author Tim Ferris claims to learn languages in 3 months, employ 25 Virtual Assistants all over the world, and to have doubled his company’s profits while cutting his working hours from 70 to 4.

I have to admit that I fell victim to the hype and bought the book a couple of months ago. While I expected it to be full of wild exaggerations (it probably is) and tons of crazy ideas that aren’t even appealing to me (having an Indian Virtual Assistant apologize to my significant other for me), I was also completely blown away by the possibilities the book presents.

The 10-Second Book Summary
In a nutshell, Tim advocates developing ways of earning money that aren’t directly dependent on time input. In the world of normal people, this is called passive income. Once you’ve created passive income and have time freedom, you can apply what Tim calls geoarbitrage (taking advantage of currency differences in lower cost of living nations) and spend time moving around the globe enjoying “mini-retirements.”

This all sounds pretty good to me.

It has always been my dream to live on a little island somewhere where it never gets cold. A place where I can write short stories in the morning and nap on the beach in the afternoon – while being fanned by my cabana boy, of course. The 4-Hour Workweek is selling that dream, which probably explains why it’s a runaway best seller.

My Experiences
I don’t realistically expect to be making 100 bazillion dollars by selling information products on the internet (the main business that Tim suggests for a “muse”) and I don’t necessarily want to spend 4 months a year in Cambodia. However, I am interested in getting a little more time freedom with little or no impact on my income. I’ve started to take some baby steps using some of the methods of the book, and I want to share my experiences here.

My Indian VA
Perhaps the most spectacularly over-hyped section of the book talks about using low cost Virtual Assistants from places like Indiana, Romania and the Philippines to handle everything from market research to breaking in a new pair of jeans. Since this is the part of the book that really caught everyone’s attention (and because Elance was offering a $25 off coupon), I thought this would be a good place to start. Because I am an employee and not (yet) a self-employed entrepreneur, I decided to outsource something from my personal life.

I wanted to start with something low key that didn’t require me giving up my bank account or Social Security numbers, yet is time consuming and fairly routine. I decided to outsource the planning of my social life.

I’m the type of person that is usually calling around on Saturday afternoon to find something to do Saturday night, so it would be a nice change of pace to plan ahead a little. What I envisioned is that a VA would search the web for activities in my area and send me a nice spreadsheet with 25-50 choices of live music, art exhibits, festivals, and other fun things that I described. Then, just for kicks, I would have the VA send an email to my friends asking them to vote for their choice of activity. After all, why not have a little fun with the process?

I submitted a project and got about 10 bids in a variety of price ranges from $4 to $15 per hour. Since this experiment was all about outsourcing as cheaply as possible while still getting acceptable results, I selected an Indian firm that was offering $4 per hour and had gotten quite a bit of good feedback. I sent what I thought a detailed but straightforward explanation of what I was looking for including dates, towns, keywords, types of activities, and even a couple of websites to check. After I hit “Send” I sat back and waited for one of those beautiful Excel spreadsheets everyone talks about.

The next morning I logged into Elance and downloaded what I thought would be my completed research document.

That’s when I realized this isn’t going to be as easy as Tim Ferris made it sound.

I don’t know what went wrong, but I got back a cut-and-pasted Word document for things I didn’t want to do on days that I hadn’t listed in my instructions. Ugh.

Time to re-evaluate how I was communicating. I did some searching around on the 4-Hour Workweek message boards (note: you need a password from the book to access this board) and found a template for communicating with a VA. In my next attempt, I tried to stick to very simple, unambiguous words. I re-stated that I was only interested in a certain date. I suggested that the VA start with Google Local for a certain list of towns and search for restaurants, niteclubs, and bars, and look at the websites for each of those businesses to check their calendar for events. I even asked the VA to re-state my instructions to make sure she understood before beginning work. I thought I was doing so well!

The next morning I got back a list of restaurants, bars, clubs, and even a few strip clubs. No events, no dates, no bands, nothing. I still have 8 hours of work on this damn contract and I’m fed up already!

To Be Continued…
This post is already longer than I intended, so tomorrow I’ll share my experiences of outsourcing closer to home. I would love to hear from anyone that has had success using overseas VAs. As you can probably tell, I need all the help I can get on building my VA communication skills!

Update: Check out part 2 here!