But the other 30 things I outsourced this month could not have been solved by bash/grep/awk/sed.

Claiming that knowing command line tool can save you more time than outsourcing (unless all you do is download photos all day) is just plain missing the boat.

Work has been done from all over the world for my projects… everything from graphics design, to software installations in my websites, legal documents, presentation ‘pretty-up’ by a graphics designer team, etc.

I am browsing with interest the Elance.com website.
It is new to me! Thanks!
The two websites I always worked with was GetAFreelancer.com and RentACoder.com
Elance.com looks very slick!

Have a great day everyone!

You may be able to solve the problem faster. But you can’t do it cheaper. If you think you can, you have very much underestimated the value of your time.

If it were critical, sure. You’d have to do it. But almost nothing is that critical. And you’ll never learn the difference, or how to delegate, if you do everything yourself.

you can cookup a script to fetch source code, regex find image links, loop fetch the images — maybe a one liner wget downloading 1-level-deep jpg file is easier

@rob: the whole deal can be done in at most 5 mins. if this step is critical to an important project, you eliminate the delay of 90sec+20min+waiting_hours, not mentioning the dollar wasted

your va probably did the same (view source, copy url, get image) that s/he spent 20 mins. a better va maybe spends only 10 mins. however, the 90sec+waiting_hours delay won’t go anywhere — that’s it, you only save 10 mins switching to better va assuming waiting_hours is the same

for $i in $(cat links.txt) ; do wget $i ; done

Save yourself $2 and 24 hours of waiting.

I’ll make a note to write something up on the subject.

I’d like to hear more about your experience interviewing, hiring, and tasking VAs and other outsourcers. I’ve read Tim Ferris’ book and I’m convinced getting some of my work in other people’s hands is the way to go…but I haven’t figured out how yet. I need smaller steps and a better visualization of what happens. (That or I just need to jump in the pool )

Actually, I’m not doing that, but I have used a VA for research-heavy content and I would do it for a research-heavy blog post.

But having someone write blog posts for me? Nah…I’m too picky about what I say and how I say it to put my name on someone else’s words.

It’s funny you should mention this – Tim Ferriss posted this post on April Fool’s day last year.

If it’s fun there’s no question you should learn it yourself. I would guess you will enjoy learning the technical aspects more than outsourcing them.

If you want to make it into a real business that generates real income, seriously consider a small amount of outsourcing. In the long run you will be much happier once you’ve built the skill of outsourcing. It’s like a muscle – it has to develop over time.

It’s not to say you cannot have a project that’s both fun and a business, but it seriously decreases your chance of success. There are a few examples out there, but they are the one in a million long-shots that you shouldn’t count on.

If you’re trying to build a real business, learning new skills that you can otherwise outsource for little money is not an optimal business decision.

I started a project recently and just started thinking about outsourcing parts of it. The thing that makes me ponder it is that, on one hand, I know that there are many parts that I’m not an expert in and could use some help, but on the other hand, I think I’d enjoy learning them. The engineer in me would be proud to finish the project by himself!

Of course, it’s all a matter of how much risk I’m ready to take (money spent outsourcing vs. time lost learning) and how much of an opportunity I think this project is…

Still pondering.