Timothy Ferriss runs a thriving nutritional-supplement business, competes at kickboxing championships and holds down the Guinness record for most tango spins in one minute.
He could be excused for being one of those CrackBerry-addled multitaskers who talks, eats and e-mails while revving a BMW through rush-hour traffic. And yet his e-mail auto-response informs one that "Timothy Ferriss Checks E-Mail Once Daily." He only logs two to four hours in his office a week and he speaks in the soothing measures of a Zen monk.
Mr. Ferriss has a secret weapon in his fight for leisure time: He offshores himself.
Corporations have been exploiting cheap foreign labour pools for decades. But outsourcing abroad is no longer just for Phil Knight or Bill Gates. While a few language and culture barriers remain, North American workers in growing numbers are farming out their peskiest tasks to India, Argentina and the Philippines, giving rise to a new sector of the offshoring industry.
"It's a great way to delegate to other people parts of your job that you really don't enjoy doing," says Rob Hyndman, a one-man Toronto law firm. "I can simply parcel out individual tasks to individual providers. It makes me faster. It makes me more nimble."
Last year, Mr. Hyndman paid nearly $2,000 for a "virtual administrative assistant" to schedule his meetings, organize his contacts and do all the other office work that once kept him behind his desk until late. As the personal offshoring business evolves, he's finding more and more tasks he can farm out to India.
"Indian lawyers are often very well versed in my legal jurisdictions," he says.
Mr. Ferriss recently paid a group of offshore assistants in India, the Philippines and Jamaica to troll online dating sites and find him a few potential girlfriends. The experiment netted 30 to 50 dates and cost around $200.
"It's like having a 24-hour concierge," Mr. Ferriss says of his offshore helpers. "I don't have to check my e-mail on Saturday and Sunday any more. It's given me a tool for avoiding my own procrastination."
Mr. Ferriss found his experiment in personal outsourcing to be so successful that he wrote a book about it. T he 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, released two weeks ago, outlines how he slashed his 100-hour work week using a network of 20 to 40 offshore assistants.
Corporate rank-and-file also are taking advantage of the profusion of overseas labourers. Kelley Rowe works for Opera Solutions, a multinational management-consultant firm. Last year, he paid Azist, a Buenos Aires company that does mostly PowerPoint presentations, for 600 hours of PowerPoint work in three months. That's 600 hours of toiling at the company's New York offices that he avoided.
Almost every day, Mr. Rowe sketches out a few PowerPoint slides he'll need for the following day and faxes them to Azist. The finished slides are usually waiting in his inbox when he arrives for work the next day.
"It's very common in our industry," Mr. Rowe says, "but I think I'm probably one of the heavier users."
Azist is so busy with clients such as Mr. Rowe that the company expects to double its 30-person work force by year's end, says co-owner Matias Arturo.
Many offshore firms that cater to the personal-services market - anything from booking flights to composing e-mails - say that business has exploded in the two years since Thomas Friedman introduced the time-saving idea to mass Western audiences in his book The World Is Flat, which has sold more than two million copies.
Three years ago, Sunder Prakasham launched GetFriday.com, a firm that provides Bangalore-based assistants for people around the world. Since then, his staff has jumped from a handful of employees to 60.
