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.