Software Sweatshop

Tim Ferriss, author of the wildly popular book The 4-Hour Workweek says that one of the secrets to living the life of your dreams is to outsource personal tasks. Successful business people and entrepreneurs have known that delegating tasks to competent parties allows you to actually focus on what's important. In his book, Ferriss helps the common person utilize this ultra-powerful concept. He advocates using virtual assistants to help you with checking email, online dating, paying bills, research, and even helping you complete projects for work.

This concept is behind the push into outsourcing 15 years ago. The idea was to find competent, reliable people to do low level tech work. Fast forward to 2008 and outsourcing is now part of the repetoire of normal people like you and me. The key is to find someone reliable. Most companies that have outsourced software development will tell you that their experience has been pretty bad. Missed deadlines, mis-communication, unrealistic expectations, lack of oversight, and just plain incompetence are some of the things we hear people complain about. Here are a few lessons to make outsourcing work for your personal life:

Find Someone Reliable: This almost goes without saying, but it's worth mentioning anyway. Businesses know that you can work around technical limitations and lack of knowledge, but you can't work around incompetence and lack of committment. Companies that have outsourced software development projects will tell you that reliability and committment is the key. Someone who's willing to learn and stick with you for the long haul is worth their weight in gold.

Isolate tasks: Outsourcing works very well if you farm out finite, well-defined tasks to competent parties. For example, in businesses that outsource software QA work are usually pretty happy with the results. There is a finite task with measurable results. Outsourcing personal tasks should be the same. Perhaps you can find someone to pay your bills or search for cheap travel online. Companies that have successfully outsourced more complex tasks understand the importance of constant communication with their offshore partners. This type of long-term outsourcing is much more difficult and requires more effort from both sides. It's not that it can't be done, it just takes more effort.

Share Your Culture: When you build a company, one of the more important things is to build a company culture. A solid corporate culture makes the business less reliant on you. For example, if you build a corporate culture and instill it in your employees, they will be empowered to make quick decisions when unforseen circumstances arise. If they understand the culture, they won't have keep coming back to you everytime there's a problem. Whether you outsource software development, legal work, business processes, or personal tasks, as the relationship grows you need to make sure that your outsourced team makes decisions the same way you'd make decisions. The true value in outsourcing is not saving a few bucks... it's about nurturing a team that becomes an extension of you. That's the only real way to leverage an outsourcing relationship.