I’m officially deeming this week Tim Ferriss week. Tim Ferriss is my new hero and the author of The 4 Hour Work Week. The current chapters that I’m slowly devouring are about outsourcing with Virtual Assistants.

If you’re thinking boring, hold on to your hats

I’ve read about outsourcing¦ but never in the way that Tim Ferriss and his guest writer AJ Jacobs, editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, talk about how they use them.

It was during the part ‘My Outsourced Life’ by AJ Jacobs that begins on page 113 that I got up from my comfy reading position, grabbed a pen and started underlining. This part actually had me laughing out loud and was too important to be forgotten. I thought about including some of my favorite quotes from this part, but I think you need to read the whole 5 page story for it to really have an impact.  You can read the entire excerpt on Ferriss’s website under Outsourcing Life.

The Mastermind Behind Your Life

In this Automation portion of the book, Ferriss is talks about leveraging the power of Virtual Assistants to handle tasks that you don’t really NEED to do. Surprisingly, this could be just about everything. Think about it… with the right Virtual Assistants, you could literally be a master puppeteer in the play of your own life as you spend your time doing only what is truly most profitable and most valuable to you.

At first I thought there wasn’t much I could outsource. But the more I read and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could outsource a heck of a lot of tasks that would make my life a LOT more enjoyable and give me the time to put more ideas into action – the ideas I always think that I don’t have time to breathe life into.

I realized that I could outsource the tasks to a Virtual Assistant like:

• Finding people to interview
• Scheduling interviews
• Research for articles and press releases
• Finding supporting images for web content and articles
• The writing of the book I’ve been saying I was going to write for the last 10 years
• Background research on a new business idea
• Dealing with things that stress me out beyond belief like the traffic ticket I have to pay and taxes
• Generating sales leads
• Sending out samples and info to prospects
• Much more that I haven’t yet realized yet

What Could You Outsource?

Suppose that you could ONLY spend 2 hours per week actually touching your work. What things that you do are so critical that only you can do them? What did you do all day yesterday that someone else could have done for you if you absolutely could not work that day but had to finish everything you had committed to?

Replacing yourself is a strange thought. I think we resist the idea because it is a blow to our pride. But is it really? What if you could spend more time doing what you are brilliant at and letting other people handle the details? What could you accomplish?

Share Your Experience!

Do you outsource some of your tasks that you once handled yourself? What could you outsource if push came to shove and you could only spend 2 hours per week actually touching your work? What’s holding you back from outsourcing?