tim ferriss

How do you spend money to save time?

Torley Wong — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:49:41 +0000

It's a — pardon the expression — timeless saying:

"You can always make more money, but you can't make more time."

The staunch followup to that tends to be that you can make better use of time.

Like 10,000 pebbles

I've been thinking a lot lately about tiny — even "microscopic" — shifts in my daily activities that add up big in the long run.

For example, one of my faves on the computer is setting up PhraseExpress text macros to auto-paste frequently-used snippets of text, cutting down 10 secs of typing into a 1-second keystroke on each pass. Not to mention the memory overhead of needing to recall each snippet. When each instance is viewed in isolation, that's not very much. But multiply that over weeks, and the savings are phenomenal.

Another one of my fave habits is to batch-process documents: I stack stuff I need to scan and archive into a shoebox, then every couple of weeks or so, I put on lovely music like Philip Glass and start an intense half-hour to an hour of filing them all. This removes the overhead of switching between tasks, since each time I do this, I need to arrange the scanner and documents, and go through a series of steps that are simply more efficient when done in one "swell foop" than piecemeal. Having such concentration also adds to getting the task done effectively. It's economy of scale applied domestically.

Like any healthy habit, these involve repetition. But the smart kind.

A fair exchange?

Spending money to save time is a must for resourceful people, since there are some things which just about anyone can do, like raking leaves or mowing the lawn. However, if you have creative inspiration or life dreams that only you understand (at least so far), there's no way you can transfer your innermost tasks to have them carried out, let alone communicate them to another person. More importantly, while someone you've paid is doing what you consider a boring task (and don't feel bad — it's a fair exchange of money for your focus), you're in a position to generate even more wealth, whether it's rolling in net dough or spending quality time with family. In fact, one commonplace but no less important money-for-time exchange is paying a babysitter so you can enjoy a night on the town with your sweetie. The thought that you love your kid less because of this is absurd.

On a grander scale, books and blogs on "outsourcing your life" have gotten popular, with many copycats tagging on Tim Ferriss' coattails. While you'll never want to entrust some personal tasks to others, the next time you feel time-crunched about a recurring activity that someone else could do — especially if it feels like a tiresome déjà vu — consider doing what I call a CLE, or "Cheap Lightweight Experiment" to test if more life automation may be right for you. Whether it's hiring someone to do manual labor or using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to "hive-mind" some info you need, there are plenty of options. Spend a few bucks and observe the results.

Usefun

I challenge you to: get stuff you're used to doing in an hour… done in 45 minutes or less. This could very well mean your work, due to a higher sense of structure and ordered tasks there. But it could just as easily be a household chore or other recurring activity at home. This doesn't mean you'll rush through it carelessly. It means you either become more intense about finding shortcuts or not doing/ignoring unnecessary parts (and there almost always are if you look really closely), or delegating/outsourcing it to someone else entirely.

I find practicing this every day of my existence not only makes me sharper, it helps me to have more useful fun — what I often portmanteau as "usefun" — because events are more memorable. My comprehension and self-awareness increases. I care more, and I'm far better off than, say, someone who isn't just riddled with distractions, but is merely doing an "OK" job and not looking to get more out of all those little slices of time that pass us each day. That's such a sloppy waste, especially when there are so many opportunities to invest in a tool or pay a person to help us make better use of our time.

In turn, when you're stretched out and relaxing — whether it's in our bed or on the beach — you'll feel that much better about it. You've optimized what needs to be tight, and now you can enjoy the slack.

A matter of perspective

As tough as it can be to avoid when you're in a jam, penny-pinching at the expense of feeling freer isn't really saving money at all. It's like hoarding a small treasure in a locked room when there's so much gold to discover outside the door, as scary as it may seem.

Do you regularly and consciously spend money to save time? Or is something you're still afraid of? And if you have questions about my specific processes, please ask!

Editor's note: This post was selected for The Best of the Best in Money and Personal Finance carnival!

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This article is from Torley Wong of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Outsourcing Your Life, and Creating New Businesses

Nora Dunn — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:56:24 +0000

How much is your time worth? If you get paid $25/hour for example, you work long hard hours on a salary (read: no overtime pay), and you have a family that is starting to forget what you look like, then how much is your time worth?

In order to gain an hour or two of family time, get out of the office at a decent hour, and save your health, is it worth $12/hour to hire landscapers? $15/hour to organize a terrific birthday party for your child? Or $10/hour to have somebody apply for visas for your next big vacation?

If you own a business and are doing nothing but running around putting out fires, how much more money could that business make if there were no fires to put out? Or rather, if somebody else could put them out for you and free you up to start averaging $50, $75, or $200/hour?

Welcome to the wonderful world of outsourcing.

Tim Ferriss describes this concept beautifully in The 4-Hour Workweek.

In fact, you can read a clip from the book here; a humorous and compelling case study for outsourcing your life.

I have read about this concept before. This is not news. I have hired cleaners, delegated taxes to experts (who can complete them in a fraction of the time it takes me and still manage to save me more money), and hired help whenever I could find a way to do so.

But when I read the book, and more specifically the passage above, I began to realize that it doesn't matter what you do for a living; there is always a way to outsource, make a profit in the end, and have more time to live life.

You can outsource your life to enjoy a fuller existence and more profitable career. But you can also create new businesses using outsourcing as the platform. Let's explore both.

Outsourcing Your Life

When I sold my business to travel full-time and write for a living, I figured I was in it on my own. Shy of sending my taxes to an accountant, what can I possibly outsource? And why on earth should I need to? For goodness sake, I travel full-time; how taxing can that be?!

Shortly thereafter, I learned that it doesn't matter what you do, or where you do it. There is always a way to find yourself too busy if you aren't careful. Time that was previously filled with client meetings, drafting financial plans, and driving all over the city became filled with visa applications, press work, destination research for articles, actually writing and editing, working part-time in trade for accommodation, internet research and posting… you get the point.

I am traveling, yet I seem to spend more time at WiFi hotspots than I do actually seeing the world.

So I started to look at how I could outsource my life. Here are just a few ways:

Article Research: Some articles I wish to write require a lot of research. Since it costs me (in both time and money) to do internet research on the road, I tend to shy away from these projects. If I can get a stack of research done for a small fee, and turn that research into one or many paying articles, I will have a healthy profit and somebody else to have done the grunt work which normally slows me down — or rather, stops me from starting.
Website design: I don't have the patience or time to learn how to design and maintain a website, but if I get somebody else on the task…
Blog postings: I regularly contribute to a number of blogs. And sometimes, it takes me almost as long to post the articles (especially if I'm in a place with a pitiful connection) as it does to write them. My virtual assistant can post it, take care of the html code, and attach reasonable tags. In fact, they can probably do it considerably more efficiently and effectively than I.
Travel Research: Instead of buying a travel guide and sifting through information I don't need, or searching on the internet for what I do need, I can have a tidy little report sent to me by my assistant on exactly the things I want to know about my next destination. And there's a potential cost savings in not having to purchase the guidebook too.
Travel Visas: If you have ever applied for a visa in certain countries with rigorous visa processes, you'll understand why this may be worth outsourcing. It saves both time and headaches.
Income Optimization: My virtual assistant can consolidate all my online income sources and report some of the specific activities I monitor on a regular basis through avenues like Feedburner, Analytics, and even other avenues I have a desire but no time to monitor.
Increase Traffic: Anybody who makes money online knows there is but one golden rule to making money — thou shalt increase traffic. If my assistant can spend the time required to drive traffic to certain portals, my income can increase exponentially.
Personal Tasks: It's a bit of a stretch past my comfort zone, but I could even outsource the monthly payment of my bills (online), and accounting. I do, however, draw the line at having them correspond with my family and friends for me!

There are a number of dos and don'ts to outsourcing your life and working with virtual assistants, so I will leave it to The 4-Hour Workweek to explain them, as the author does a bang-up job.

Let's start to think even bigger.

Creating New Businesses

I just managed to find ways outsource most of the things that hold me down and keep me from traveling with a clear mind and lighter pack.

But what about outsourcing as a business?

It’s pure art in the making.

Artists by nature are rarely business-minded people. Entrepreneurial talent and artistic talent utilize different parts of the brain. I wonder if it is one of the reasons you see talented artists (be they visual artists, musicians, or — ahem — writers) who aren't "making it big" like you believe they should.

What if you could pave the way for these artists? To develop a team of virtual assistants, versed in everything it takes to market that mural, or book that gig? And what if you could connect those artists with your talented virtual assistants? The artists become your clients. You then manage their marketing activity via your virtual assistants.

What's in it for the artist? A well-organized marketing plan, and possibly the big career break they could otherwise spend a life searching for.

What's in it for you? A cut of the profits for finding the artist, taking them on as a client, and outsourcing the marketing management. It's not cheating; there's still work involved in bringing a team of virtual assistants up to speed (an initial research task which you would be out of pocket for up front), and in soliciting and managing your artistic clients. But once you get even a few clients on board, what a wonderful form of relatively passive income this could be. Heck — you could even outsource the research on how to find potential clients, and get your virtual assistant to make the prospecting calls and book meetings for you. This leaves you free to work on another outsourcing business. Or drink pina coladas. Your choice.

This is just one business idea on how to maximize the power of outsourcing. If you take a look at your own profession with fresh eyes, you may find a few ways to do something similar yourself. Heck — you may even want to outsource your own job.

So… how much is your time worth?

Here are some outsourcing resources to get you started:

International Virtual Assistants Association — use them to find virtual assistants all over the world.
Your Man In India — a tool mentioned in The 4-Hour Workweek. Poking around there will lead you to Get Friday, where you can hire a virtual assistant to take care of any number of tasks.
Upwork — another portal for outsourcing and locating virtual assistants who can help you simplify your life. You can search for appropriate companies by the task you wish them to complete.

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This article is from Nora Dunn of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: