I got this concept from my #1 favourite book of all time – The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris.
If you do draw up a list of stuff which you want to delegate, take a long hard look at it first and see what you can actually eliminate.
I was about to hire a VA (virtual assistant) to check all my e-mails and then it dawned on me that since 80% of them were SPAM I would be paying a human spam filter. Plus the fact that they would have to learn which was and wasn’t SPAM so I would be answering a lot of questions for a long time.
I decided to get rid of 100% of my SPAM. How did I do it?
I set my e-mail server to forward all messages to a gmail account. That’s it. No more SPAM.
The message again is – eliminate before you delegate.
Paul Browning – 3rd July 2010