Personal Outsourcing

Can personal outsourcing work for a SWO? Would you trust a faceless virtual assistant (VA) in Bangladesh or India handle some of your more mundane tasks in return for a few dollars an hour? I say, why the heck not?

Personal outsourcing, also often referred to as 'Outsourcing Your Life' is the hottest trend in increasing productivity, freeing time or both for busy American professionals. Based on the internet, phone and email, agencies provide VA's with the requisite skill sets and then facilitate a purchase of their time to do your work.



One of the most popular agencies is GetFriday.com. Their rates range from $15/hour for a 'pay-as-you-go' plan to $8/hour if you are willing to commit to purchasing a large block of time per month. Their smallest subscription block is ten hours for $120. And the hourly rate decreases as the amount of time you purchase increases.

Don't want to go outside the U.S.? Havingthingsdone.com uses American college students and charges a flat rate of $15/hour.

What type of tasks could possibly be outsourced? And what about the large amount of things that we deal with that are classified? The issue of outsourcing classified items can obviously not be overcome, but what about the unclass stuff. How about reformatting an INSURV POAM? Researching the SURFORTRAMAN and developing a plan for submitting awards? Or putting together your travel claim? And certainly don't forget all the 'work' that we do after we come home from work. Balancing your checkbook, searching for hotels for your next vacation. The list could go on and on and each item is keeping you away from your family and the things that you would prefer to be doing.

Whether that is worth it, is, of course, a personal decision as to how much you value your free time. Essentially though, one pays $100-150 a month for an extra day of free time by outsourcing ten hours of work that you would have otherwise been compelled to do personally. (Considering I have seen people pay $50-100 for a shipmate to take their duty day, this price does not seem unreasonable.)

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