Unfubar your life.

If you read the popular blogs and business books de jour, most notably the four hour work week, you’ll hear much about outsourcing any tasks that cost less than the value of your time. Calculating the value of your time is important as it allows you to make better decisions; not only when choosing to outsource, but when making any purchase.

The easy version of this formula is to take your annual salary, say $50,000, cut off three zeros and divide by two to get $25 per hour. So the theory goes that anything which costs less than $25 an hour should be outsourced. Well, I’m hear to to argue that your time is simultaneously worth far more and far less than that $25 per hour.

Why you’re worth far less than your hourly rate

The first chop to your hourly rate is the tax man. This is any obvious one. According to wikipedia the average tax rate in the US is between 30 and 40 percent. So in our example above, we’re down to around $16 per hour. But what else comes out of that $25? The first factor that determines what we make each hour is the number of hours we work. The simple formula above assumes that we work 40 hours. I average about 50 hour per week and like most proffesionals I don’t get paid for the extra ten hours. So now we’re down to about $13. This isn’t looking so good. But wait…it gets worse. Do you get up at 6:30 and put on a tie every Saturday? No, of course not. We’ll estimate a conservative half hour drive each day to work, which puts us under $12/hour. Add the cost of gas and $500 in clothing (a few shirts, a pair of shoes, and a cheap suit) and we’re at $11. Triple these expenses if you live in a major city. Do you eat $9-12 lunches and drink Starbucks on Saturday? Let’s say we eat or drink an extra $5 per day as a result of going to the office. Now we’re at $10.50 and I’ll bet you can think of other expenses you end up with because you show up to the cube farm. All of the sudden all of those virtual assistants charging $20 per hour aren’t looking so hot.

Why you’re worth far more than your hourly rate

So why should we pay some guy from across the pond $20 per hour to set up our website or affiliate marketing campaign when we’re only making $10 an hour? Well, we probably suck at affiliate marketing. We probably suck at html and programming. I do, and I spend half my time in college programming. What don’t we suck at? Telling other people what to do! It is infinitely better having others work for you than working for someone else. You will never be rich or have time if you spend your time making others money.

The other reason to outsource is that those $20 virtual assistants don’t cost $20 per hour. If you’re smart they cost nothing. Here’s how:

• The Internet - Thanks to Al Gore, starting a business is easier than ever before. We can set up a store front, find manufacturers, create ads, etc. in minutes not years. This means that you need very little virtual assistant time to set up or even run your business. If it only takes a few hours to be up and running you can turn a profit that same day. Read Tim’s blog for some tips.
• Deliverables - Whenever you hire or sign contracts you should specify measurable deliverables. My favorite of these deliverables is profitability. Second only to profitability are deliverables that directly correlate to profitability; click through rate in advertising for example. If you we’re running an ad campaign designed and implemented by your virtual assistants you can specify a certain return on ad expenses in the proposal. If you don’t get paid they don’t get paid. Another example: offer them a percentage of the revenue as payment (for a specific time period). Not everyone will go for this, but there are an unlimited number of people to outsource your work to.

Without virtual assistants most of us will sit around watching tv or perhaps reading business books, not starting companies or making millions.  We have a limited amount of free time and don’t have much to show for it.  $10 per hour?

Think about your average morning before work. If you’re anything like me it’s a frantic race against the clock. Jump out of the shower, jog to grab a shirt steamed in the dryer, brush your teeth while chugging a protein shake; and that’s on a good day. Compare this to your weekend. Sleep in, think about what you want for breakfast, lay in the tub, and all the sudden it’s noon before you’ve even gained consciousness.

We all fear the weekend of checking off the to-do list instead of just relaxing, but often that very fear keeps us from what we really want. Maybe two hours laying in bed, thinking about getting up, isn’t as satisfying as a solid half hour of real meditation. Maybe that half hour shower doesn’t feel as good as the weekend road trip to the vineyard in Missouri you’ve been meaning to do but never seem to have time for.
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A hand full of actions or lack there of are responsible for 99.9% of the things that go wrong in our lives. Most of what’s left is made up of other people.

If you write down all those things that your unhappy with in your life and ask yourself why they happen, there’s probably only a few reasons.

• You eat crap

• You don’t work out or at least with enough consistency and intensity

• You spend your free time doing things to distract you from what you do in your non-free time (most likely shopping or watching TV)

• You spend most of your waking hours in a job that has no chance of making you happy even if you were wildly successful at it.

• You or the people around you do not understand the fundamental attribution error.

• You base your happyness and/or self esteem on how much money your make, how much stuff you have, or how you look.

Why is not so important. There are a million reasons. What’s important is that with only a few problems, we should be able to fix some of them. This site is dedicated to finding some of the answers to these problems.