Outsource Your Personal Chores

Did you ever wonder how great people achieved greatness?

Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Isaac Newton, Chuck Norris — how’d they do it? Genius helps. But they also had one thing you probably don’t have — servants.

You could probably achieve great things, too — right after you do the dishes, pay some bills and walk the dog.

History’s greats didn’t have to worry about all this, because they all had other people to do all this work for them. Here’s the news: So do you.

By “outsourcing” low-value work, you can focus on the high-value work that enables you to make more income, achieve more and reach your bigger life goals.

Wait, “outsource” menial chores? Sounds crazy — unless you consider that you’re probably already doing it. Paying the neighbor’s kid to mow your lawn, hiring a baby sitter and taking your clothes to the cleaners are all normal, common, accepted forms of outsourcing. For some people, so are hiring a housekeeper, taking the kids to daycare, using a landscaping service, hiring a personal trainer and more.

I’m here to tell you about the abnormal, uncommon and not-yet-accepted forms of outsourcing facilitated by a new generation of personal outsourcing sites.

For example, why not outsource some of your work — such as research, or developing reports, or organizing a staff outing? You can outsource personal projects, like cleaning the garage once and for all, or scanning all your old photographs.

Think you can’t afford a personal assistant? Think again. There are a million things you can outsource. But how?

Here are some of the best new sites available that can help you find someone to do your boring, repetitive and unpleasant tasks for you — so you can focus on greatness.

DoMyStuff.com

DoMyStuff.com is designed mostly for finding people to do random personal chores, errands or projects. The bidding is a bit like eBay, and the site keeps a cut of the fee.

Brickwork India

Brickwork offers highly skilled and educated personal assistants — some specializing in industries like Retail, Healthcare, IT, Law, Banking and Investment, Insurance, Education, Automobile, Market Research, Real Estate and others — at pennies on the dollar what it would cost you to hire an in-personal assistant. Brickwork is probably the best outsource companies of its kind because it has been featured in bestselling books, such as Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat,” and Timothy Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek.”

Elance

The Elance site divides outsource areas into “Design,” “Programming,” “Websites,” “Writing,” “Consulting” and “Other.” You can simply “Post Your Project,” and let the bidding war begin.

Kasamba

Kasamba focuses on expertise, from coaching and personal development to tutoring. You search it like Google to find the help you need.

Still haven’t found the outsource resource you’re looking for? Try these:

Guru.com

oDesk</>

iFreelance</>

Your Man In India</>

In addition to writing for Datamation, where this column first appeared, Mike Elgan is a technology writer and former editor of Windows Magazine. He can be reached at mike.elgan+datamation@gmail.com or his blog: http://therawfeed.com.