Outsourcing Life
You’ll enjoy this fun article in Esquire Magazine by A. J. Jacobs. Briefly, he hired two people in India to help him, one for his work, one for personal stuff. It’s an experiment to test out the ideas in Friedman’s “The World is Flat” book about why outsourcing is inevitable so get over it,
[tease]
I’ve become addicted to outsourcing. I am desperate to delegate everything in my life but have to face the depressing reality that there are limits. I can’t outsource those horrible twenty-five-minute StairMaster sessions. I can’t outsource taking a piss. I can’t outsource sex with Julie. Not that I dislike it, but we’re trying to have another kid, which means a whole bunch of sex, and enough is enough, you know? It gets tiring. I can’t outsource watering the ficus.
[tease]
SPEAKING OF the Indian domestic economy, it’s looking pretty rosy. My team is good, cheap, and absurdly eager. They will do anything short of violating the Geneva Conventions. And with most of the tasks — online shopping, thank-you notes, research — my crew saves minutes or even hours of my day. Admittedly, the outsourcing of my life is sometimes counterproductive — an ill-fated order of an eggplant dish from a nearby restaurant comes to mind. But overall, it’s working.