DFHW: Living the 4-Hour Work Week

Sorry, Tim. eLance sucks. And here’s why.

• Enforcing exclusivity – The big mistake is that the folks at eLance assume that I won’t be simultaneously posting the job req. on other outsourcing sites. Why wouldn’t I? I’ll be increasing the number of respondents and selecting (I presume) from different resource pools. But eLance wants you to be with them entirely or not with them at all. How do I know? Because…
• The 20% rule – If you don’t award 20% of your issued projects to eLance respondents, they’ll shut off your account. That simple. They want to force you to use them for 1 out of every 5 bids. Now, that might not seem like exclusivity to you (after all, you can award 4 of them to other sites), but it really is because….
  
• eLance penalizes canceled projects – Let’s say you don’t want to continue forward on the project at all, or more likely, you found a better resource on another site or on your own. So, you have the chance to cancel the project. All good, right? No, because eLance counts all projects towards the 20% rule. So if you start 5 projects and then find a better place to find those 5 resources, guess what… you can no longer post on eLance because your account will be frozen. This is complete bunk. So, why am I not finding resources on eLance in the first place? Because…
  
• Poor Quality of responses – I find that I get few qualified responses on eLance, at least in comparison to the other sites I’ve been bidding on. The respondents tend to respond to everything on the site, which means that you have to really filter to find the person appropriate for you. It’s like the problem with Monster.com… too many people vying for too few jobs yields very poor results. But, if that weren’t all…
• High Average Bids — The bids I get on eLance are easily twice as high if not as much as ten times as high as the ones I get on GetaFreelancer.com. Why is that? I’m not sure, perhaps because eLance respondents are mostly in the US while in GAF they are overseas, perhaps? Or maybe because of the sort of resource pool on eLance? You’d think it would be the opposite given that there’s oversupply on eLance.

In any case, I’ve now been banished from eLance because I couldn’t find any resource on that site to meet my needs. I gave them a really good shot - I posted 10 projects there. But I simply was able to find better respondents somewhere else. Sure, if I was exclusive to eLance, I would have awarded them to someone on eLance, but that premise is false. I do what any responsible buyer would do and look to multiple sources for my resources. If eLance wants to take themselves out of the running by not allowing me to include them in my sourcing pool, that just makes things worse for them. I really can’t understand their business justification for that. At least give the benefit of the doubt to the person who is responsible for building their value in the first place — the buyer.

I have had my best luck with GetaFreelancer.com, and maybe Guru.com. Anyone else have any thoughts to share? Disagree with me? Have any better luck with some other sites I haven’t mentioned? Let me know and share! I need some outsourcers for website development, product prototyping, etc,and have not been fully happy with my experiences so far.

Filed under: outsourcing | 6 Comments »

I got a good comment yesterday from Jennifer @ LifeMuncher in response to yesterday’s post on more effective time management. Rather than reply as a comment (and leave it buried for everyone to find), I though it would make a good follow up post.

The question simply was: “What were some concrete examples of things that you’ve eliminated to get from 60+ hours to 20?”. The answer, in my case, pretty basic, but perhaps has to do with my specific work style, activities and business. But, here’s the details.

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Filed under: time management | 2 Comments »

In a few past posts, I mentioned that my primary task towards achieving the goals of the Four Hour Work Week is to reduce my 60+ hour work week down to 20. As evidenced by my recent trip to Denmark and Sweden, I was able to successfully do so. Of course, the big question is “how”?

First, in order to reduce your total work week, you have to find out where the time is going. Using a combination of my Time Audit Spreadsheet and the Personal Task Manager (PTM) application, I realized that much of my time was going towards tasks that could easily be eliminated, trimmed, or outsourced. I resolved that I would at that point force myself to focus on my “day job” from 9AM to 1PM only, freeing up the rest of the time for my new muse and new-business tasks.

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Hi DHFW readers! Missed me? Haven’t heard from me in a while? Want to know why? I was on a 10 day vacation to Scandinavia! And, without any stress. Yes, I have managed to reduce my work week down to 50% of what it used to be. I’m going to reveal a bit more about the results of my time audit and how to utilize the PTM tool in my next post (as well as some gripes as to how it can be improved, or maybe how I need to be educated on how to use it better).

Yes… you CAN live a 4-hour work week. Or at least, not have to live a 40-hour work week. That said, I have not mastered many of the concepts of the book around Passive Income and Muses and outsourcing, but at the very least through more focused time management you can recover the inherent waste in your day and Eliminate it. Next step: Automate and Outsource better to reduce my time another 50%.

Stay tuned!

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Editors Note: This is a guest post from Brick Andrews of Life Sutra: The 4-Hour Workweek Journal. Brick Andrews is the founder of Life Sutra: The 4-Hour Workweek Journal. The Life Sutra questions old assumptions and socially reinforced illusions about how to live a fulfilling life while exploring new ways to live and work smarter.

Inspired by both the principles of time management and The 4-Hour Workweek, I had developed the Life Management Matrix. This matrix classifies the activities we perform into four categories which I will summarize here:

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The 4HWW community is getting more rich and vibrant by the day! As such, I’ve launched the DHFW Forums at: http://www.fourhourworkweekdiary.com/dhfw-forums/. Check them out! I’d love to know what you think… but more important — keep posting and keeping this community vibrant!

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Editor’s Note: This post is a guest post from Hilary Catherall. Hilary Catherall is a co-founder and the president of technology startup DOMITECH, L.L.C., a revolutionary web development company. DOMITECH’s projects so far include www.city-dweller.com and www.saneliving.org. Hilary still holds down her day job for now, and just started seriously applying the principles from the 4HWW late last year in hopes of attaining a little Liberation. You can contact her at hilary.catherall@dom-itech.com and read more of her writing at hilarycat.blogspot.com.

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As I recently posted in my hilarycat blog , I think I’ve wrapped my mind around what Tim Ferriss calls a “muse” in the 4-Hour Work Week. As Tim says, muses are automated vehicles for producing cash without requiring much time… but to put the complete explanation into a (densely packed) nutshell, they are automated & outsourced businesses that drop-ship quickly manufactured, moderately priced, substantially marked up, easily-understood specialty products with staying power to niche audiences we already understand.Whew. If you haven’t thoroughly read 4HWW, you may not grok that definition very quickly, but for those of us who are starting to internalize the system, I believe it’s a neat and tidy summary for easy reference. Read more »

Filed under: muse, revenue | 1 Comment »

Editor’s Note: First, let me note that this is a very long blog post. I probably should have chopped it up into a few blog posts, but I didn’t want to lose the stream of thought.

Getting a bit more practical, one of the themes in the Four Hour Work Week is the idea that you can have a nice source of passive income from a short investment in time called a Muse. Hilarycat posted recently on what constitutes a Muse (or in her words, a Passive Income Generator [PIG]). But the gist is that it’s not necessarily your main “day job”, but rather something that allows you to earn the income needed so that your main job doesn’t consume you. You can be free to pursue the things you want because the lights can stay on and the kids can stay fed.

As a way to get things started, blogs themselves can be nice sources of revenue and could potentially be muses if they turned into something bigger. That does not mean that it has to consume lots of time, but you should definitely thing about all the ways to generate revenue from a blog and related media. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. If you know of other ways to turn blogging and writing activity into muse-worthy income, let everyone know by posting some feedback in the comments.

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Filed under: muse, revenue | 3 Comments »

On a somewhat random note, I have a habit of taping interesting fortunes that I get from fortune cookies to a printer on my desk. Why? Because the printer is right in my field of vision and whenever I glance in that direction I can see all these little bits of wisdom reminding me to stop and think about what I’m doing. Or at least give me something to think about (or chuckle).

I’ll let you in on my little bit of printer-wisdom. Here’s the “fortunes” I currently have attached to my printer:

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Well, it’s been a week since I decided to audit where my time was going and work to optimize my use of resources. Did I get the results I was expecting? Yes and no. First, I have a better idea of how I’m spending my time and which things I need to specifically focus on while other things I can either Trim, Eliminate, Automate, or Outsource. I also figured out how to effectively audit time without the auditing process itself taking much time.

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