sacha chua living an awesome life

When people ask me about virtual assistance, I usually start off with a few stories about things my assistants do, like:

• Renew my library books and e-mail me a list of the books they couldn’t renew
• Look up information in my e-mail and call me with it while I’m out and about
• Call stores to find out if something I’m looking for is in stock
• Double-check the dates and times of appointments and talks, because I sometimes mess that up and it’s embarrassing

My reasons for experimenting with virtual assistance are to:

• Learn how to delegate
• Understand and improve my processes
• Learn how to scale
• Help other people grow

I use Timesvr for 15-minute tasks and well-specified processes, and I work with virtual assistants I hired through oDesk for more specialized skills or more extended projects. Definitely worth the experiment, and quite affordable considering what you can learn and how you can help yourself and other people grow. =)

To get started:

1. Make a list of things you do and things that you’ve been meaning to do.
2. Identify things you frequently forget to do, don’t like doing, or can delegate to someone else easily.
3. Set aside some money in your budget for outsourcing. Timesvr costs USD 69 + tax a month, and oDesk virtual assistants can go from USD 3 – USD 20 or more per hour. The virtual assistants I work with generally charge about USD 5 per hour, with specialized skills like illustration costing more.
4. Try to estimate how much time it would take to complete each of those tasks. If your list has a large number of 15-30 minute tasks on it, consider signing up for Timesvr. If you have extended projects or projects that need specialized skills, consider posting on oDesk. You might even try both.
5. Try a few small tasks. Timesvr has a free 3-day trial, and you can hire people on oDesk on an as-needed basis (< 10 hours a week, with no charges if you don’t assign them work).
6. Think about your processes and your outsourcing experiences, and look for ways to improve. You can ask experienced assistants to help you learn, too. For example, I have Timesvr e-mail me a list of sample tasks every day.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat. =)

Resources for people getting started:

• Tips for getting started with virtual assistance
• Tips for managing virtual assistants (with links to other blogs)
  
• Five reasons why I’m experimenting with outsourcing to virtual assistants

My experiences

• Imagining more possibilities
• Finding finishers, building a team
• The surprising benefits of transcription
• Ethics and egos in virtual assistance and relationships
• From reactive to proactive, from inboxes to goals; thinking about the big picture
• Wake up calls
• Five favorite Firefox add-ons for virtual assistants
• Tasks I’ve tried delegating to TimeSvr so far
• Virtual assistance and a review of TimeSvr, ODesk
• VA Days: Rethinking web search and virtual assistance

Processes

• My process for managing talk deadlines and information
• Calendar management with Timebridge
• Manage Toronto Public Library books
• Wake-up call
• Tungle for the win: kaizen and calendar management
• Refining web research process for virtual assistance
• Calendar Management

Check out my blog category about managing virtual assistants, and feel free to ask questions or share your experiences through comments or e-mail!

People often ask me about my experiments with outsourcing to virtual assistants and my reasons for this experiment, and I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned.

So here are some getting-started tips I’ve figured out over the last two months:

• Ask them to teach you. Ask your assistant what he or she is good at, passionate about, and interested in learning. Adapt your tasks to take advantage of those strengths and interests, and grow your team so that you can take advantage of a diversity of skills. If your assistant handles other clients, ask your assistant to give you examples of other tasks he or she does, how long those tasks take, and what the request and the output look like. This will give you a better idea of what you can delegate, how you can delegate it, and how much it will cost.

• Experiment. You’re learning how to delegate and your assistant is learning how to do things the way you want them done. Some tasks will work out. Some tasks won’t–not right away, or even not at all. It’s a learning process for both you and the assistant. Start with small experiments, provide lots of feedback, and expect to invest some time in training your assistant. Think of it as an iterative process. The first thing you get back might be incorrect, but as you give more feedback, your results get better and better.
• Don’t just do it yourself. You might think that you’d be faster doing something than delegating it, and you’d probably be right. But if it’s not something that you enjoy and you can find other, more productive uses for that time, it may pay off to delegate it and train someone to learn how to do the task. Similarly, you might be tempted to just correct things yourself. If you’d like to delegate tasks like that effectively, though, you’ll probably do better by training your assistant on how to do it properly.

Good luck and have fun!

When it comes to finding people for my outsourcing team, I’m like a 5-year-old in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. There are so many people with so many great talents, and I want to tap all of them.

I find it amazing that I can trade my money (which really represents my time and energy) for someone else’s time and energy. For example, the image below took one of my illustrators 4 hours to make based on a photo, for a total cost of around USD 45. This is not an amount to sneeze at, for sure, but considering how long it would’ve taken me and how badly I would’ve drawn it myself, it’s not a bad trade-off either.

That’s so much better than my stick figures. =) Now my personal outsourcing team includes someone who types faster than I do (she’s an excellent transcriptionist) and several illustrators who can beat me in a drawing competition even with their eyes closed.

I delegate many clerical tasks, taking it as an opportunity to think about and document my processes. But the times I really enjoy delegating something to someone is when I can tap their strengths at things that I find it difficult to do, and they do things that surprise and delight me. My team doesn’t just save me time, they teach me so many things along the way, and they help me imagine even more possibilities.

There’s something powerful in here, and I’m looking forward to learning how to make the most of it. =)

1. Log on to docs.sachachua.com and open my Talk planning spreadsheet.
2. Click on the last tab near the bottom of the page. (Talk planning)
3. Select the F and G columns, right-click on the column header, and choose Insert 2 Left.
4. Select the D and E columns, copy them, and paste them into F and G columns. Delete the TEMPLATE header.
5. Replace the date and title from the text.
6. Fill in the other information about the talk.
7. Log on to Toodledo.com in a separate window, and arrange your windows so that you can see the spreadsheet and create tasks at the same time.
8. Scroll down to see the tasks on the spreadsheet. The dates should be automatically calculated based on the due date of the talk. Manually set the dates if any were specified.
9. In Toodledo, click on Folders, and then add a folder with the title of the talk. Then go to the To-Do List and add the tasks (shortcut key: n). Specify the folder, due date, and length based on the spreadsheet and/or talk information. Set the context to “home” (unless I indicate otherwise) and the tag as “presentation”. For the tasks before “Call or e-mail organizer to confirm details”, set the start date to be one week before the due date.
10. Create a Timesvr reminder for two hours before the presentation with the following text:
    Please call me on my cellphone to remind me about the upcoming talk on (talk title). Remind me of the title, the time, the organizer’s name, and other information.
11. Create a calendar entry for the presentation on my Sacha – Main calendar, including the talk title and organizer contact information. Add location, transit instructions, and driving instructions if specified. E-mail me when you’re finished.

For reference, this is what the left side of my spreadsheet looks like:

		DATE OF TALK
		Title of talk
		Organizer contact info
		Duration
Length	Task	Days
30	Send organizer title, abstract, bio, and picture	-21
15	Get talk details	-21
30	Outline talk	-18
120	Do background research	-14
60	Assemble detailed outline	-7
150	Write pre-talk blog post	-5
60	Storyboard presentation	-4
120	Make presentation and send it to organizer	-3
10	Call or e-mail organizer to confirm details	-2
60	Give presentation	0
60	Post recordings	1
30	Update ROI spreadsheet	2
		Talk information
		Abstract
		Bio

“So, what did you tell Steve to convince him to take time out for lunch with me?” I asked Ian Garmaise as we settled into our chairs at the Village Idiot Pub. “You probably told him that I’m always on the look-out for interesting mentors,” I said. The Steve in question was Steve Mann, whose work on wearable computing had inspired my fledgling experiments with it in fourth year university, and who is unquestionably a remarkable inventor. I mentally reviewed my list of questions to see if they were up to par.

Ian reassured me that it was because he thought I might be able to help. That is, I think he meant to reassure me. I scrambled to think of what I could’ve learned that Ian would’ve thought useful.
                       
As it turned out, I did. Both Steve and Ian were particularly interested in my recent experiments with outsourcing work to virtual assistants. I told them how I asked a transcriptionist to process one of my talks, and how happy I was with the results. Steve’s got way more lectures and way more recordings than I have, and he’ll certainly have plenty of material to go through.

I also told them how I enjoy starting work and turning them over to other people to finish. This can be a liability (I’m a little scatter-brained!), but if I can team up with, hire or partner with people who are good at finishing, it’s something that can be handled. At this, Steve lit up. He was also very much a starter, and if he can get better at assembling and coordinating teams (or work with someone who is), he can get more of his inventions further along. I referred him to the transcriptionist I hired, and I also gave him a few tips on starting working relationships with contractors (small jobs at first!).

And then I had fun playing music on Steve’s hydraulophone. =D And yes, the brochure is right – it really is play. You can’t play music with water splashing everywhere and not smile. =)

Some of the things that came out of that experience were:

• As it turns out, I do have something to share with others. More experiments mean more interesting experiences and more thoughts to share. I can help people connect the dots. =)
• It’s a lot of fun talking to other ideas people who also practice relentless improvement.
• … and it’s so cool talking to someone who has been playing and wondering and making things happen for decades! =)
• … and random-ish connections like that can be tons of fun!

Thanks, Ian, for the introduction. Keep me posted – I think it would be cool to learn how to tap other people’s skills!

I frequently give speeches. During some months, practically every week involves a presentation or two. I usually post presentation, recording, and notes for these presentations, but it would be handy to have a transcript. Timestamped transcripts also make it easy to search within presentations, synchronize audio with slides, and even remove ums and ahs.

I’m not an auditory learner. I find it difficult to sit still for an audio-only session, even if it’s my own. ;) I’ve transcribed some things–my research interviews, a few of my talks–using the handy Transcriber program, which made it easy for me to associate text with specific audio segments.

And maybe transcripts can help me learn how to be a better speaker, too! I speak at about 200 words per minute when I’m excited. While that’s below the 300 words per minute I often joke about, it’s still well above the recommended 140-160 words per minute for persuasive speeches. Transcripts make my rambling sentence structure and my verbal crutches painfully obvious, too. ;)

If I can get word counts and review what I’m saying without the large initial effort of transcribing things myself, I think it’ll be well worth it. It gives me metrics, and metrics are useful. Like the way that people work on getting into a target heart beat zone when exercising, these numbers can help me get into a target speaking rate zone, providing me feedback about going too quickly or too slowly. And like the way that listening to music and practicing on the piano will eventually give me a feel for how long a quarter note is in different tempos, listening to good speeches and practicing myself (either through actual presentations or through podcasts I make on my own) can help me adjust my speaking rate.

On to the actual process of transcription:

I posted a job notice on oDesk looking for people who can edit and transcribe audio files. While waiting for candidates to respond, I asked one of my virtual assistants to download Express Scribe and give it at try – it might help her develop new skills. I like having plenty of timestamps in the transcribed text because it makes it really easy for me to recheck the transcript, so I also sent her a link to this shortcut for timestamping files.

A few good candidates responded to my oDesk ad. One of them had an excellent sample transcript, so I’ve also added her to my growing team. I sent her the audio recording for the talk I did yesterday, and I’m looking forward to getting it back.

Here are some notes on my preliminary experiences with transcription, and I’ll add more as I explore this:

• More effort is required to transcribe ums, ahs, repeated words, sounds, and other things accurately. If you don’t need them in the final transcript, tell your transcriptionist to skip them. If you want to make it easier to edit the file, you can ask people to add timestamps and a marker like “!!!” during the ums and ahs. Work backwards from the end of the file in order to remove the ums and ahs, so that you can keep the timestamps useful for as long as possible.

  There’s probably a better way to handle this audio editing. Maybe a transcriptionist could remove ums and ahs along the way? Maybe I can ask an audio person to clean up the audio before handing it over?

• I need to pause more when giving presentations. ;) Pausing more helps transcriptionists figure out sentence punctuation and paragraph separation.
• If there are unclear words, ask the transcriptionist to indicate that with a timestamp and a marker like ???. That way, you can easily review and fix it.

I wonder how I can take advantage of Dragon NaturallySpeaking here, as I already have it. Even better if I could get someone else to train and correct my user model, but I think Dragon NaturallySpeaking wants me to upgrade to the super-expensive version in order to do that. =|

Hmm… How can I tweak this process…

Do you outsource transcription, or do any of your friends outsource transcription? I’d love to hear about experiences and tips!

Leesa Barnes is very firm about this: outsourcing social media content and relationships is not okay.

I mostly agree. oDesk and Elance job posts recruiting people to write reviews and post comments praising products or places give me the heebie-jeebies, and there’s something Really Weird about asking someone to write fan letters to people you don’t even choose. I don’t invite random strangers to connect on LinkedIn or Facebook, and I don’t leave random blog comments in an effort to build links.

On the other hand, I think that a little bit of delegation–yes, even in your personal life–can be surprisingly helpful. I really appreciate the list of upcoming birthdays and contact information that an assistant prepares for me each week, because I’m otherwise horrible at remembering birthdays, and it turns out that acknowledging people’s birthdays makes people smile. I’m glad that I have someone doublechecking the dates and times of meetings, because I’ve been burned by that before. I like being able to respond to Facebook and LinkedIn messages without having to use the Web interface.

So there’s more to this than than just outsourcing, and I wonder how much of it is related to ego. ;) I don’t get frazzled by a lot, but I do know I tend to get mildly peeved when people impolitely make me feel bad because I didn’t make them feel important enough. For example:

• When I confess that I’ve forgotten someone’s name, and that person doesn’t just gloss over it but instead further embarrasses me by dropping “obvious” hints, I’m less likely to introduce that person to anyone I know because I wouldn’t want him or her to inflict the same treatment on my friends.
• When I’ve taken a little time and effort to reach out to people, and they zing me because they don’t feel that things are personal enough, I wonder if that defeats the purpose…
• When someone gives me grief because I unfollowed them on Twitter, I can’t help but think they need to spend less time worrying about their numbers. ;)

Hmm. When I get a half-joking prod about whether or not I had a virtual assistant handle a social gesture, I may send that person a link to this blog post.

What’s important in a social gesture, anyway? Is it that someone holds all of the information about you in his or her head, or that someone cares enough to look it up or have it available? Is it that someone thinks about you all the time, or sets up ways to be reminded of you every so often? Is it that someone reads your blog and follows your tweets almost obssessively, or that someone’s willing to ask you questions about what you’re excited about and to listen to your update, and perhaps even drop by once in a while? (You can tell what I think. )

If I had someone whisper in my ear the likes, dislikes, and conversational topics related to whoever’s walking up to me, I’d love that. I can’t remember everything on my own. Knowing more allows me to be of more help. Also, it makes me less stressed about interacting with people.

If it offends someone that I don’t remember everything about them right away, or that I don’t know about the latest posts on their blog or the latest tweets they’ve shared, well–that’s probably more related to their ego. I’d be happy to let them take the initiative in the conversation. Most people forget, which is an interesting thing.

And if you find yourself having that kind of a reaction… stop and think about it for a sec, mmkay? =) Maybe you don’t need to react that way. There’s a space between stimulus and response, and you can decide how you perceive things. If you find yourself focusing too much on a perceived slight, try to move past it and focus on the good stuff instead.

Of course, other people get the same deal. If you meet me and you have no idea what I’ve recently been writing about or working on, that’s totally okay. If you say you can’t remember my name, I’ll happily reintroduce myself, no hard feelings. (In fact, if you hesitated even a little bit, I’d probably already have reintroduced myself by that point.) If you say, “Nice to meet you!” when we’ve already met, I’m never going to give you a hard time about it.

So yes, I’m fine with delegating relationship-related tasks to virtual assistants (not all, but more than most people do). I think that people can help me both be more thoughtful and learn to be more thoughtful, and I think that there’s more to building relationships than just the mechanics of social gestures.

And yes, W- knows I’m learning more about delegation, and why I’m learning about delegation, and he thinks it’s a good thing. He’s so awesome. =)

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This post was inspired by danielpatricio‘s tweet, which led me to leesabarnes’ tweet, which led me to her blog post, which tapped into something else I’d been meaning to write about because people occasionally do that “of course you should be able to remember my name” thing. =)