Cheap labour abroad is reshaping the North American economy. Why not let it reshape your life? For a few bucks, you can outsource your most boring, time-sucking chores and focus on the stuff that really matters. Like spending time with your family. And watching football.
Get Friday
Get Friday’s India-based virtual assistants can’t bring you coffee or give you a back rub. They can, however, manage your daybook, balance your chequebook and do just about anything else that doesn’t require a physical presence.
Case Study: Mike Nelson, a personal trainer, had his virtual assistant make dinner reservations and purchase concert tickets. Then he threw a curveball: “I had my VA send jokes to my fiancée. The jokes were horrible, but we both got a laugh out of it.”
Cost: $14/hour; $120/10-hour block
Brickwork India
India’s leading remote executive assistant agency means you can outsource parts of your job; they’ll do anything from basic web research to creating blogs and e-newsletters.
Case Study: Brian Shillair, who owns a small data storage company, outsourced mind-numbing – but crucial – tasks, like managing his database and customer relation system. Now, he says, “I can focus on playing golf and watching football.”
Cost: From $15/hour
Do My Stuff
Post any task to this eBay-equivalent, and watch as folks from around the world bid to do your dirty work.
Case Study: Rob Watson, a home owner in Toronto, got someone to clean up the dog poop in his backyard. “Best twenty bucks I ever spent,” he says.
Cost: Varies
Image courtesy of Photo Denbow.
As a person with a disability who can’t work because I injured my back I can’t sit or stand for long periods of time. I live in Cornwall Ontario. I can work on my laptop in my bed. But the hard part is finding a job. I barely get enough money to live on from Ontario Disability Support Program(ODSP). I would like to do some type of data entry job. So if there is anyone who can help me finding a legitimate job not a scam would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Lonny,
Nice shot article, but it looks like it came directly from I book I read last year called “The 4 Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris.
Did you recently read this book and just wanted to share this idea with us?
Hi Jeff,
I completely understand where you are coming from with your disability. I was disabled in December due to a pinched nerve that caused sciatica. The pain was so bad that I was confined to my bed, and couldn’t even stand or sit. I would piss in bottles and only crawl to the toilet to take a dump, it was fucking disgusting. I then drank alcohol to relieve the pain and depression, but then my freaking GOUT started kicking in. So finally I manned up and saw a doctor who gave me some great narcotics, and now I can finally walk again but stopped drinking or face the same fate as Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger. All this time I had to somehow continue making money. I was fortunate because I am a managmenet consultant that can make money by co-ordinating via e-mail and telephone conversations. If you have never been on your feet, it will be harder because you may not have made all the relationships to sustain a career as a bed confined consultant. So what I would offer is you somehow develop a niche expertice online, then offer services for this expertise. You NEED to start a LinkedIN account right away if you don’t have one already. You need to start blogging and proving your expertice in something. You need to build your online reputation, then eventually a contract or opportunity might fall in your lap that you can start invoicing for.
You mentioned data entry. That is not enough. If someone wanted data entry staff, they would pay a student minimum wage who would show up at work everyday.
You need to either start writing an dpublishing books, or find online methods of earning cash.
You need to become an expert at something to do anything online. Find what niche subject matter you are interested in that has a market. Good luck!
What a joke, this author simply plagarized some text from The 4 hour work week. Are they running out of material so bad that they have to steal ideas from books published 2 years ago?