Outsourced My Life

I currently have 4 “virtual assistants” on oDesk (by VA I mean personal assistant, programmer, designer, etc.) and each has very different degrees of skills and the ability to know exactly what I want from them.

I’ve also worked with many different virtual assistants over the years. Each has had very diverse skills, experience, and personalities (much of which I’ve found can be formed by local culture). One of the things I’ve struggled with is finding the perfect balance between a virtual assistant that takes the right amount of initiative… not too much, and not too little.

What do I mean? Well, I’ve found that in some cases, initiative and following explicit instructions can be mutually exclusive. Still not sure what I mean? Maybe a few examples will help from two virtual personal assistants I had last year:

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I’ve been very impressed with my most recent virtual assistant from oDesk. His English is better than most I’ve used, and he mentioned that he enjoys writing. I asked if he’d write a quick bit about his background and experience / thoughts on using oDesk, so here it is: (more…)

Here is a video created by the team at oDesk.

Here are a few of my thoughts while watching it: (more…)

Anytime I begin a relationship with a virtual assistant I enjoy hearing about their background.  I ask them why they are working as a virtual assistant, what they like and don’t like about providing remote assistant services, and where they see themselves in 3 – 5 years.   I’ve also found that most of the stories about outsourcing internationally that I’ve read are from the perspective of the buyer of virtual assistant services (people like me), but few are from their perspective.

A few weeks ago I dipped my toe into, and wrote about my first experience with the Amazon Mechanical Turk system.   Compared to my normal virtual assistant projects I never had a single conversation with the provider.  I didn’t know their name, skill-set, background, geo location, nothing.    Well, for fun I decided I’d post a “HIT” (project on “MTurk”) asking for a provider to write about their background and experience working with this system.   Below is what I received, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing (more…)

A few years back I heard about Amazon’s new “Mechanical Turk” service. Basically you post a task, an amount you’re willing to pay to have it completed, and then people from all over the world work on it.  In my opinion it is best suited for super repetitive simple tasks that you can’ have a computer program do.  For example:

• Visit URL xxxyyy and copy the article author’s name, and date of the article
• Look at this video and tag it with 5 relevant / descriptive keywords
• Choose the best category for this product
• Flag offensive content images

It seemed like a great idea, but in a cursory view it also felt like an overly complicated process, and at the time I didn’t have thousands of simple and similar tasks that I needed cranked out.

Fast-forward to this evening (yes, it is 1:00 am right now) and just as I was about to send off a mind numbing task to my new virtual assistant I paused… then the image of the Mechanical Turk came into my mind.  Not only did I feel this project was a perfect match for what I understood about Amazon’s groupsourced system, I was excited about the opportunity to finally test it out.

While Amazon could do a better job with documentation and training videos,  the process honestly wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.

My task:  Visit all the URLs in a spreadsheet and copy specific information from each one and fill in the blanks.  Basic data mining / data entry.

Here are the steps (simplified) that I went through: (more…)