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 The
$2,000 executive assistant Timothy
Ferriss runs a thriving nutritional-supplement business, competes at
kickboxing championships and holds down the Guinness record for most tango
spins in one minute.
He could be excused for being one of those CrackBerry-addled multitaskers
who talks, eats and e-mails while revving a BMW through rush-hour traffic.
And yet his e-mail auto- response informs one that "Timothy Ferriss
Checks E-Mail Once Daily." He only logs two to four hours in his office
a week and he speaks in the soothing measures of a Zen monk.
Mr. Ferriss has a secret weapon in his fight for leisure time: He offshores
himself.
Corporations have been exploiting cheap foreign labour pools for decades.
But outsourcing abroad is no longer just for Phil Knight or Bill Gates.
While a few language and culture barriers remain, North American workers in
growing numbers are farming out their peskiest tasks to India, Argentina and
the Philippines, giving rise to a new sector of the offshoring industry.
"It's a great way to delegate to other people parts of your job that
you really don't enjoy doing," says Rob Hyndman, a one-man Toronto law
firm. "I can simply parcel out individual tasks to individual
providers. It makes me faster. It makes me more nimble."
Last year, Mr. Hyndman paid nearly $2,000 for a "virtual administrative
assistant" to schedule his meetings, organize his contacts and do all
the other office work that once kept him behind his desk until late. As the
personal offshoring business evolves, he's finding more and more tasks he
can farm out to India.
"Indian lawyers are often very well versed in my legal
jurisdictions," he says.
Mr. Ferriss recently paid a group of offshore assistants in India, the
Philippines and Jamaica to troll online dating sites and find him a few
potential girlfriends. The experiment netted 30 to 50 dates and cost around
$200.
"It's like having a 24-hour concierge," Mr. Ferriss says of his
offshore helpers. "I don't have to check my e-mail on Saturday and
Sunday any more. It's given me a tool for avoiding my own
procrastination."
Mr. Ferriss found his experiment in personal outsourcing to be so successful
that he wrote a book about it. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live
Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, released two weeks ago, outlines how he
slashed his 100-hour work week using a network of 20 to 40 offshore
assistants.
Corporate rank-and-file also are taking advantage of the profusion of
overseas labourers. Kelley Rowe works for Opera Solutions, a multinational
management-consultant firm. Last year, he paid Azist, a Buenos Aires company
that does mostly PowerPoint presentations, for 600 hours of PowerPoint work
in three months. That's 600 hours of toiling at the company's New York
offices that he avoided.
Almost every day, Mr. Rowe sketches out a few PowerPoint slides he'll need
for the following day and faxes them to Azist. The finished slides are
usually waiting in his inbox when he arrives for work the next day.
"It's very common in our industry," Mr. Rowe says, "but I
think I'm probably one of the heavier users."
Azist is so busy with clients such as Mr. Rowe that the company expects to
double its 30-person work force by year's end, says co-owner Matias Arturo.
Many offshore firms that cater to the personal-services market - anything
from booking flights to composing e-mails - say that business has exploded
in the two years since Thomas Friedman introduced the time-saving idea to
mass Western audiences in his book The World Is Flat, which has sold more
than two million copies.
Three years ago, Sunder Prakasham launched GetFriday.com, a firm that
provides Bangalore-based assistants for people around the world. Since then,
his staff has jumped from a handful of employees to 60.
"Small business owners, corporate workers - they're all busy
individuals these days," Mr. Prakasham says. "They need a jack of
all trades who can help them all hours of the day with anything and an
office secretary is not always there to do that. So, we are Jack."
GetFriday has been called on to fix a broken window in the Swiss mansion of
an Internet executive, order new batches of Lipitor for Esquire writer A.J.
Jacobs and phone a U.K. man every morning to rouse him out of bed and remind
him to wash and do yoga. "Five years ago I would never have envisioned
us doing such strange things," Mr. Prakasham says.
Saving time is the major advantage to using offshore firms, but the cost
doesn't hurt either. GetFriday pays its Bangalore staffers, all of them
university graduates, about the same wage as the average burger flipper at
any Canadian McDonald's. They'll even finish the work overnight, since
Bangalore's time zone is ahead.
Although overseas assistants will do just about anything, offshoring won't
solve every workplace woe. The quality of work and the language ability can
vary greatly. And then there's the halfway-around-the-globe factor - monsoon
season waits for no one, even if he wears a three-piece suit in a New York
office tower.
Last year, monsoon torrents flooded the workspace where one of Mr. Rowe's
Indian assistants was working. She trudged through the downpour to a nearby
Internet café, butthat overflowed before she could finish Mr. Rowe's
PowerPoint document.
"I was totally screwed," Mr. Rowe says. "Little stuff like
that comes up all the time."
Pitfalls aside, the idea of passing off our excess work to others for a
paltry sum will only get more attractive, say those who have tried it.
"In the future, everybody who values their time will have a digital
concierge," Mr. Ferriss says. "It removes the illusion that you
have to work 24 hours."
Moments later, Mr. Ferriss hung up his phone, rode his motorcycle through
the San Jose foothills and stopped for "some coffee, maybe a glass of
wine and then a little writing."
All in a day's work.
- by Patrick White GLOBE
& MAIL 7 May 2007
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