When Personal Outsourcing Fails Miserably

Personal outsourcing is amidst a stint as the It-girl of productivity. Everywhere you look people are trumpeting the idea of having someone else do your work, often for pennies on the dollar. What’s not to love? Right?

Well, “you get what you pay for” is an immutable law of the Universe, and with personal outsourcing there’s no exception. Whether you pay in dollars or hours, you pay nevertheless. Thinking I had been enlightened to a loophole in the law, I tried and tried again to make a relationship with an assistant work. This article will outline some of the laughably bad experiences, identify what went wrong, and look at what actually works.

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Be Your Own Slave Driver

Everyone dreams of being their own boss. The problem is that bosses are supposed to be hard-driving jerks who get maximum output from their employees. When no one is breathing down your neck, you quickly find yourself prone to being a lazy ass rather than a demanding jerk. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s simply physiological; your body senses the absence of a whip-cracking overlord and starts conserving calories. However, when this natural inclination to sloth hampers the achievement of your goals, it’s time to make the transition from ass to jerk and get slave driving.

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Getting Things Done – Naked!

I love getting things done. And I love tracking all those things that have yet to be accomplished; it makes me feel so very productive. The problem is that feeling productive isn’t being productive. Like many, I spent years trying to fine tune David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) task management system to my exact specifications, eventually learning that feeling productive can be the best way to procrastinate. Nevertheless, a bit of tracking is important to remind you what needs to be accomplished. So here now is how I track my tasks without any needless prepping of supplies, tools, hacks, or other things that stand in the way of progress.

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My Paper-Less Life: Finding Liberation and Control

Why isn’t stainless steel called stain-proof steel? Because it does corrode, it just does less. When I set out to document my paperless life it felt misleading using the term “paperless”, which implies I’ve conquered the paper monster altogether. Rather this article is here to outline how I achieved a significantly paper-less existence and learnt to accept that there are situations where paper is still king.

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Two Years of Getting Things Done

It’s been two years since I read David Allen’s relentless bestseller Getting Things Done. Judging by the painfully outdated items in my Outlook task list (”research this ‘Face Book’ thing everyone’s talking about”) I haven’t stuck with everything Allen prescribes in his book, but I am definitely a changed man having read it. So here now are the things I took away from GTD, good and bad.

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Same Time, Eat More Bagels with AutoIt Automation

I once held a job with a midsized company that provided delicious bagels every morning. The only problem was that when I came into work they expected me to, you know, work. By break time the bagels were gone. Something had to be done. Thankfully, nobody ever realized how inefficient my role was. Using a brilliant and free software package called AutoIt I created a script that did the bulk of my job for me. When those bagels came I was poised and ready whilst my computer was doing my job for me on another floor. With a bit of tweaking about 60% of my ongoing daily workload was completed without any effort or attention.

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Saving Time in Outlook with Custom Move-To-Folder Shortcuts

With the popularity of email management philosophies like Getting Things Done (GTD) and Inbox Zero, more people find themselves dragging and dropping hundreds of emails into subfolders. This is a tedious process and one Outlook is not well designed to accommodate, especially when dealing with a high flow of correspondence. The perfect solution would be one where a quick, single keystroke gets the selected email(s) to their destination. No fuss, no muss, move on to the next. Fortunately there’s an easy way to do this up using Outlook’s macros and a little know-how. This article will show non-programmers how to painlessly set this up in less than five minutes.

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Make Decisions like a Navy SEAL

Many years ago I read a book called Unleash the Warrior Within by Richard J. Machowicz. The cover supports a self-empowering title and a picture of the tough-as-nails author. Despite these deterring factors I stuck it out and read the book cover to cover, and it was worth it. Mr. Macho-witz, a former Navy SEAL and practicing Zen Buddhist has provided a viewpoint seldom seen in the self-help genre; the disciplined military perspective.

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Get a Personal Research Assistant for $5

There has been a recent infatuation in productivity circles with the idea of having an assistant. It’s an easy thing to get excited about; having someone available to do all your menial and frustrating tasks while you sit around and drink margaritas. Mix in the idea of getting a Virtual Assistant (VA) from the developing world for pennies on the dollar and a lot of people buy in. It turns out that in many situation where you would pay for a VA’s helps, there is a much better way.

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