To work only four hours per week and still lead a life of adventure and luxury - Tim Ferriss says you can do it, in his book «The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich».

Part of his concept is to outsource time-consuming, but well-definable tasks (he's calling that «Geo-Arbitrage»). Doing some experiments, i want to find out whether this can work and how.

The task

My goals are:

• Test coordination and communication across continents. Since I've already been doing this in my career, I don't expect big surprises here.
• Get a significant task done. It must resemble the things I want to get rid of.
• Build trust. The whole experience (choosing a service provider, agree on the tasks, payment modes, …) will tell me whether an individual can successfully and repeatedly outsource tasks to whatever countries.

My choice is a small redesign of this website. As a matter of fact, I don't enjoy fiddling with stylesheets, PHP and HTML. Furthermore, I have to admit I'm just a mediocre designer. I've spotted two great templates and I'm confident I can list the adaptations and modifications I want to see, in sufficient detail.

What candidate service providers should I choose? Not hesitating for too long, I'll give the providers mentioned by Tim Ferriss a try: Your Man In India (YMII) and Brickwork India. Two mails that were nearly identical went to India:

Hello,

I'm interested in outsourcing a web site design project. A few words on the scope and the skills required:

- the site (http://www.evomend.net) uses the Drupal CMS system
- I'm not satisfied with the current look
- I'd like to swap the current theme in favor of the "…" theme (http://drupal.org/project/…), plus some corrections/enhancements
the corrections and enhancements do involve the positioning and display of standard template features (fields, CSS, HTML, page templates), but no changes to Drupal itself
- an excellent working knowledge of Drupal theming is required, because my own is mediocre and I'm looking for something better

One special requirement:

- I intend to blog about my experiences with this project. This may result in this email and all subsequent communication artefacts and results becoming exposed to the public. Therefor, I require professionals who appreciate this and whose English is both fluent and free of slang.

What I plan to do is: have 4-6 short iterations of 1 day each. I'd describe what I need by email before an iteration starts. At the end of the day (iteration), I want to see and (privately) test drive on my web site the results that have been achieved so far. After that, I'd mail what I'd like to see in the next iteration.

In case you can offer such a service to me, I'd be looking forward to your reply (please include an informal indication of the costs per day).

How things turned out

Both companies responded within a single business day, and both were very polite. Here's what YMII said:

Hi Rolf, I'm sorry, but your task is a little too technical for our team at this point in time. I'm afraid we won't be able to do it. Check out www.b2kcorp.com. They might be able to help you. Regards Venky

Well, at least there is a funny cross-reference to my other candidate. Now for Brickwork:

Thank you so much, Rolf for contacting us. Billy from our office will be in touch with you within the next two weeks. We apologize for this delay, but due to an unexpected increase in business, all our resources have been working overtime to meet our client demands. We are currently focusing on ramping up our team size, to minimize such delays and inconveniences caused to our prospective clients. We do appreciate your understanding in this matter. Best Regards,

OK, I needed to wait a little. Billy got in touch with me after a few days. We discussed the details of the task. Billy listed a few reference sites (really nice ones) and I told him that, fortunately, I need something that is way simpler.

The rate is an astounding US$ 19 per hour (might be acceptable though, if both the results and the process perfectly suit my needs). I asked for the next steps and there comes the next unpleasant surprise:

Once we come to a mutual conclusion on the scope of work and pricing. We will send you a Master Services Agreement (MSA). This will encompass details such as Data security; implying that we will not share any of your details with others, details of the project, terms, conditions and so on. You have to sign the same and on receipt of the signed MSA we will start the project. Once the project is underway we will send you weekly or monthly reports based on your requirements. This will enable you to have a better understanding of where we stand in terms of the project.

Since this will be an hourly project the upfront payment will be US $ 500, which will be adjusted with the final settlement. Sorry to tell you that as of now we have wire transfer as the only mode of payment. We are working on paypal which should be up in the near future.

Didn't quite sound like what I need:

• No daily chunks of work
• No payment by credit card accepted
• Both upfront payment and hourly rate are unproportionally high, compared to the task

Now what's next?

I canceled this variant of the experiment. It would neither have saved me time nor money, and it would have imposed a process on me that does not correspond to the work style I want to establish. As a customer, I want to see my processes supported, even if that has an impact on the bill.

For a first, trust-building test this was getting way too complicated and way too much determined by how others wanted to work. Measured by the tiny task, I also feel a lack of attitude to get things done quickly - it rather seems like Parkinson's Law would work to my disadvantage.

My next experiment will be to try a variant that involves more market forces and thereby more competition. But that's another story, enough for today - see you!