After reading “The Four Hour Work Week,” and hearing author Timothy Ferriss extol the virtues of a virtual assistant, I figured I’d give it a shot, after all, I’m game for an inexpensive way to offload the more monotonous aspects of my work, such as reporting on client coverage and handling mailings.

Let me tell you, it seems like I need an assistant to help me track down a virtual assistant.  My criteria were, I thought, pretty simple - inexpensive to moderately-priced support for about 20 hours per month. Well, you’d be surprised by how this can be a challenge to find.

First off, i went with the sites recommended in Ferriss’ book, starting with TasksEveryDay.com. They offer some good pricing plans, but none quite matched what I wanted. They wanted to set me up with a permanent assistant, someone specifically assigned to me, which meant I needed to lock in a set amount of hours per week, and guarantee 40 hours per month. After some less-than-masterful haggling on my part, I got them to agree to 20 hours per month, but they wanted it split over two 10-hour weeks. Knowing that my needs don’t just fall at the end of the month, I began the haggling process anew with them. This time, they agreed to let me split it out on a daily basis, if I bought a 40 hour plan, agreeing to 2 hours max usage per business day. That seemed agreeable, until I found out that time does not “bank” if it’s unused. So, for example, if I didn’t use my assistant on Monday and Tuesday of a week, those four hours were lost, just “poof!” - gone.  Knowing the way the PR biz works, some days you need no help at all, and then some days you need someone ASAP. Thus, I headed off to try something else…e-lance.

E-Lance was another site recommended in the book, and while it’s definitely more expensive than something like TasksEveryDay, it lets you find people better matched to your needs, and more accommodating to your scheduling. For example - I just found someone to help me with end-of-month reports, which can take 10-20 hours. But it’s not the quickest, nor easiest process in the world.

The process started out simple enough - just post a “job” and wait for the bids to roll in.  After waiting a few days and getting no bites (and I wasn’t even trying to be cheap!) I started to search e-lance for specific providers and directly offer them the option to bid. This worked better, but for five offers I sent out, only one replied.  Thankfully, she’s worked in PR in the past, and knew exactly what I was looking for. Easy enough, right?

Wrong…next up, the actual follow-up process. First, you have to put money in an e-lance escrow account.  The amount is based upon the person’s bid, so you’re pre-paying, but it sits in the account until you both agree the work’s done.

Once the funding is done, you are expected to use their internal contact system to upload instructions, supporting documents, messages, etc to the bidder. It’s fine if you’re into a system that looks like it was written back in the Web 1.0 days, but I needed more immediate results, especially since e-lance seems to take several hours to a full day to send you update emails. Thankfully, I found my new assistant’s email, and we started corresponding directly. Much more efficient, and via Google Docs and Zoho Creator, I was able to set her up with all the info she needs. We’ll probably still use e-lance for the “bidding,” just so e-lance can do the legwork of producing 1099’s for her, but to get the work done, I’m working directly with her.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a pretty good book on time management, check out “The Four Hour Work Week.” There’s some pie-in-the-sky stuff in there (like really, a four hour work week?, c’mon!), but the sections on time management are very helpful.

So this morning I received a 12MB attachment in an email, and thought, “Wow, this person should lose email privileges for a day for that!” It’s a good thing I’m using Gmail for Domains and its web interface, and not something like a Blackberry or Outlook, otherwise, I’d be waiting all day for that download to finish before I could actually see the rest of my inbox.

After dealing with that attachment — and jokingly threatening the client’s well-being if he did it again, I wondered if some people don’t realize there are better options for attachments, both large and small.

Personally, I’m a big fan of YouSendIt. It’s quick, secure and easy, and if you use the Windows/Mac uploader, it’s even able to resume a crashed upload. Once the file is uploaded both you and your intended recipient receive a link to download the file, instead of a massive attachment. There’s a very usable free account, and the paid accounts each offer something for every user. I find the “Pro” level does more than enough for me.  I’ll take using this over FTP any day, and my clients and contacts likewise find it useful.

Of course, there are other options, two that I’ve tried and find useful are Senduit and Drop.io. Senduit doesn’t seem as secure, and doesn’t offer additional tools like a client application, but it gets the job done. Drop.io is my preferred alternative to YouSendIt, as while it doesn’t have a client app, it has other features that allow you to define the name of your upload folder and allow others to add/remove files from the folder. So it’s more collaborative than YouSendIt. Instead of sending a link automatically, like YouSendit and Senduit, you define the link, then copy/paste it into an email.

Now, next time you’re thinking “That PowerPoint file can’t be too big, I’ll just attach it,” do us all a favor and use an upload service!

How many times have you been at an event or a meeting, and either forgot to bring business cards, or ran out, and now you need one ASAP? It happens to me constantly, and now, rather than having to carry an extra 100 with me to an event every day, I’m pretty psyched about Dropcard (thanks Lifehacker). 

Just head over to the site, and set up an account with your contact info. The next time you meet someone and don’t have a card handy, just send an SMS message to 41411 with the text “drop johndoe@email.com”, obviously replacing the “johndoe@email.com” with the correct address, and no quotes. About a minute later, their email will happily light up with a message from you containing all the contact info you share on Dropcard. 

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can go to the same url (mydropcard.com), log in, and get a simple web interface for sending the cards. 

Finally, a cure for the fact that I can remember to bring along DVI-VGA adapters, tons of power chargers and a gazillion batteries in my bag, but cannot remember to bring a few dozen of those sexy Moo cards I had printed up.

(Apologies to Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove)

I sometimes feel that I’m being tested by some outside force, or the old saying “things happen for a reason” often applies. Something really bad happened today, and as they say, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

Ok, I promise no more cliches. Last night I was having some hard drive problems, so I ended up having to run CHKDSK on my external hard drive. You know, the one where I keep all my documents and the 250GB of RAW and retouched photos that I’ve worked on over the last 2 years. Yes, you guessed it — I woke up this morning to find that I couldn’t access my drive and it asked me if I wanted to format it.

#&%@! I said a few more than just that. Then I held my head in my hands and wept. Felt sick to my stomach. Why? Because I had been procrastinating about backing up my important data for months, but never did it.

Hit the jump for the rest of the story and find out what you probably already know, but need to be told again.

continue reading "Backup or: How I learned to stop procrastinating and love the data"