Hello.....

I'm at a crossroad right now

About the end of my mini retirement

My week long break is finally ending and i will be heading back to my workplace tomorrow.

During this week, I am glad to have conducted some lifestyle experiments, particularly on outsourcing work. I have also tried to design a lifestyle system which I hope to put in place in a few weeks. Everything is great. But like everything else, once there are some positive results, I get ahead of myself and want to try more experiments.

To conclude the experiments I have done:

3 hour weekly virtual assistant:

1) I have set up a system for my virtual assistant to keep track of deadlines and send reminders to me via google mail and ical. So far, it has got me more organized.

2) Since 60% of my work is done via email, I have ask my assistant to draft some emails, leaving aside those with sensitive information. If this is done properly, I am expected to cut the time I spend on emails by half. Right now, the assistant is in the training stage to get into "automatic" mode. I am hoping that he will draft responses automatically after a few weeks of practice.

3) I have got the same assistant to leave an "open hour" every week. He will either use this hour to convert my name cards into CSV files or do some web research for me. He claims he can do up to 100 name cards an hour. I have not verified that.

Online resources to increase productivity

1) www.elance.com - have outsourced a number of jobs on this site and have got the best people to do it at a good price. Professionals include graphic designers, programmers, virtual assistants and copywriters. I have got a feel on how to finish up an entire project using this site.

2) www.zoho.com - online project management tool I use to communicate with one of the offshore programmers. Definitely usable but I do not like complex interface. I prefer things in simplicity.

3) igoogle and all google tools - an amazing amount of resources on igoogle. This is not new to me but I finally have time to examine its capabilities in greater detail. igoogle and and the tools are definitely the way to move into "cloud"

Here's some of the other lifestyle challenges I'm going to complete in a few weeks

1) Get income autopilot project in action

2) Aim to rely less on desktops and try to divert more work to my hand phone. This way, the work that reaches me will be minimized to decision making and I can do it anywhere I want. Something from my experiments tells me that this is very possible

3) Start some thought experiments. I would be interested to experiment on the way we get motivated.

Project Mini Retirement

A lot of people have been talking to me about retirement planning and I have figured that it means living the ideal state of life, which in fact suggests that the current lifestyle that most people are living is not ideal.

I share the sentiment. What I do on a daily basis and what I like to do on a daily basis have become more and more distant. The difference is that the things I like to do cannot wait 50 years later when I can finally "retire" from the current lifestyle.

Like for example, I like to go for a morning jog at the beach every morning when the sun is nice and warm. And I think if I have to wait 50 years for that, it will never happen.

So I took a week's leave and tried to sample retirement. It is a wonderful feeling because apart from doing the things I like, I am also working remotely to get the work done. It got me thinking because if I am stuck in the corporate world, I will be forever expected to work at least 9-5 (but nobody really works 9-5). So it feels really good to be in charge of my own working hours for once.

Did the morning jogs do me good? It did! I was able to enjoy the sun and I think the burning of calories is finally faster than the intake. If only I can maintain this lifestyle!

I also joined in the gatherings of some friends, network with a few people, meet up old friends of whom I have not managed to meet for a long time.

Now for the rest of the week, i'm going to think how it's possible to "retire" now

Project Outsourcing

I have probably touched on this topic before but haven't really done anything until recently. I started doing homework on outsourcing life and was pleasantly surprised with the things I found.

I started with a trial on this website: www.asksunday.com. This is highly recommended by many users and they have a special way of working. You can either purchase the service of a dedicated Virtual Assistant or you can purchase requests. Requests are typical tasks that will not exceed 20minutes of work on either the internet or the phone.

Every request is charged at about USD$3. I wasn't sure if I was going to require this type of service so I asked for a free trial of 4 requests for a week. I found it wasn't really that easy to think of tasks to outsource. So as a start, I asked for a 20 minute research to compare prices of web hosting services.

Of course the task was not going to be executed immediately unless I gave it to a dedicated assistant, which helped me realize that any urgent tasks should not be outsourced. 4 hours later, I received the compiled list on my iPhone. The quality of work was astounding. In that 20 minutes, the assistant checked out the different web hosting services, checked out reviews of these services and gave his opinion on the top 5 providers. This was more than What I asked for.

I would think purchasing these requests would help for tasks with the following nature:

(1) To pass an information to someone and make sure he/she receives the message. A phone call made by a virtual assistant will save time if the phone call has to be made multiple times before the person picks up.

(2) Web researches. If you are compiling a report or trying to make a decision, you may have several topics to research on. Engaging the Virtual assistants to perform these researches will save a lot of time

(3) To do data entry. Scan the things you want to convert into data and email to the assistants.

However, I found that these tasks were too trivial and started to look for a dedicated assistant. Asksunday was offering a dedicated assistant at US$12 per hour. A little too high for my budget. Thus, I started experimenting on www.elance.com.

Elance is an online platform that help match employers with free lance professionals. I started with a US$5/hr project with one offshore company, which helped me with internet research, time sheet management and compilation of reports. Apart from administrative work, I was also able to outsource part of my iPhone programming to free lance programmers.

This has got me more all excited. Within a week, I found I was performing more project management than doing the actual ground work myself. It got me focused on the important tasks that cannot be outsourced (Or can they?) and also spent more time on decision making.

However, managing the Virtual assistants and the free lance programmers wasn't always a breeze. Communication has to be clear and instructions have to be passed down properly. It would be nice if a system can be established to mange this. And this led me to design a template for this system. The next phase of the experiment is to test if this system works.

More updates!

Credit Card Optimization

One of the woes in recent times is the handling of credit cards. Recently, I lost track of the amount I have to pay for each card and what they are being used for. It used to be much simpler when I was using only 1 card.

To make things worse, the expenses used for work related stuffs are often mixed up with my personal expenditures. The time spent on tracking the transactions each month is so much that most of the time, I simply ignore the bill and pay whatever I feel like paying.

This has got me to decide on the following

1) Use only one card for personal expenditure, probably the Manhattan card. This is the card with the greatest cash back reward. Forget all the other cards with different vendors discount as they are just not worth the time to save on that 50cents to 5 dollars for each transaction.

2) Use only one card for work related expenditure, preferably one with good overseas coverage and benefits. This should not be mixed with my personal expenditure.

3) Sign up for the RBS card that offers money withdrawal overseas at no extra charge. This is only for emergency situations.

I’m just going to leave the rest of the cards to collect dust

About life’s little woes and their solutions

Behind every complicated problem, there is usually a simple solution.

I started this as part of an experiment. Like most of my other counterparts in the rest of the world, I managed to get into a “decent” job. I do not know if this is good news or bad news. What I do know is that the problems I faced are exactly the same as what the majority is facing. This led me to wonder why the solutions have not surfaced since many people must have spent time thinking about it.

With this in mind, I started a series of experiments on Lifestyle optimization. This blog will be used to document my findings from now onwards.