A couple weeks ago, I described (here and here) my initial attempts to establish a relationship with an Indian outsourcing company, in the hope that I could offload some of the relatively mundane technical/administrative things that a freelance knowledge worker like me would either have to do himself, or subcontract to a local worker at a fairly substantial rate. Having actually managed to outsource one task successfully, I can report on what’s going on — and then start organizing some additional tasks.

I initially contacted two companies, based on recommendations that I found in Timothy Ferriss‘ The 4-Hour Workweek: Brickwork India, and GetFriday. The both responded within a day or two, and both quoted rates in the range of $10-20/hour for their services (with lower rates for higher volumes of work); however, I got the impression that both companies have become somewhat overwhelmed because of the attention they’ve gotten from books (e.g., the Ferriss book), newspaper articles (e.g., “Outsourcing Your LIfe,” in the June 2, 2007 Wall Street Journal) and blog articles all over the Internet. Indeed, I was unable to reach an agreement with Brickwork, because the smallest “chunk” of time they could deal with, for a one-shot outsourcing task, was 30 hours. Since the whole point of the initial task was to see how well it worked — if at all — I wasn’t comfortable risking several hundred dollars, especially since the nature of my initial task was almost certain to take far less time.

However, I did reach an agreement with GetFriday, and I sent off the details of my first task: go through one of the presentations on my Slideshare page, and test each of the hyperlinks I’ve embedded throughout the material, to ensure that it’s not broken (i.e., something that would generate the dreaded “404″ error message from a browser), and that the hyperlink actually points to the right page. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to carry out such a task; and if I had been willing to take the time to export the presentations to HTML files, I could have tracked down a relatively inexpensive program that would have scanned for broken links automatically. But this would have taken a couple of hours of my time, and it would have cost a modest amount of money (the last time I tracked down such a program, which I’ve since lost, it cost about $50), and it would not have found the embedded hyperlinks that were “valid” (in the sense that they pointed to a real page out on the Internet) but nevertheless wrong.

So I sent off an email message describing the task to be done; and I’m pretty sure that I specified that only one of my presentations should be reviewed, with a “ceiling” of no more than 16 hours to be spent on the task. I had been told, when I first signed up with GetFriday, that they were so swamped with business that they wouldn’t be able to actually start working on my tasks for three weeks. I was a little disappointed, but figured I had nothing to lose; and I resigned myself to the likelihood that, with the Christmas holidays looming ahead, I probably wouldn’t actually see any work being done until the beginning of January.

During the ensuing six days after I sent off the description of my task, there was basically silence from GetFriday — except for a couple of cheery “Have a great day!” messages from time to time. But this morning, I got an email message with a lengthy Microsoft Word document detailing all of the errors they had found in my embedded hyperlinks. More interesting was the fact that instead of reviewing just one of my presentations, it appears they had reviewed all three that they found on my Slideshare page. And even more interesting was that the aggregate effort for doing all of this was 11 hours. To give you a sense of what’s involved, the largest of my three presentations (”Web 2.0, version 50“) is 122 pages long, with roughly 500 embedded hyperlinks.

I’ve done a quick spot-check of the work, and it seems to be accurate. I’ll know for sure when I do the work that, unfortunately, I can’t easily outsource: manually examining the broken links and figuring out whether the Web page I was linking to has expired or moved somewhere else, or whether I had an utterly incorrect URL (the default URL for embedded links in Apple’s Keynote program, which I used for these presentations, is www.yahoo.com — which is almost certainly not what I intended to use for the link). But without having outsourced this initial activity, I doubt that I would ever have gotten around to the second part of actually making the corrections.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a couple more small projects that I’m going to send GetFriday; these are tasks that I need to accomplish, and they’ll give me an opportunity to practice describing tasks more clearly and crisply, as well as refining the communication protocol with the “primary assistant” (PA) who coordinates the actual performance of my task by a “team pool” of anonymous workers.

This concept of a PA and a team pool, shown below (and described in more details here on GetFriday’s web site) is actually one of the reasons I think it makes sense for me to work with an offshore outsourcing firm, rather than simply hiring a local college kid at roughly the same rate of $15-20/hour. Eventually, I hope to outsource some work that will actually require the equivalent training and education of someone with a B.S. or M.S. college degree; but finding broken hyperlinks in a Powerpoint document could be done by any reasonably intelligent college kid — heck, maybe even a high school kid. But finding such a kid would be a nuisance; managing and babysitting them would also be a nuisance; and dealing with their unpredictable moods and vacation schedules (e.g., “hey, dude! It’s spring break and I’m going to Cancun; if the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll is as good as my buddies are telling me, I might not ever come back!”) would be an even bigger nuisance. With GetFriday, I don’t have to worry about any of that; I don’t even have to know who’s doing the work, as long as I can communicate via email with my PA.

All in all, it’s been an interesting experience so far. I’m sure I’ll need some time and practice to make it work as smoothly and productively as possible, but I’m pretty optimistic. I’d recommend that you give it a try, but frankly, I’d be just as happy if you didn’t. After all, if I can use a low-cost, well-managed workforce to make myself more productive and efficient, then I’ll be that much more competitive than you… heh, heh, heh …