Outsource your life?

I just read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.  Ferriss advocates using virtual assistants (VA's) to improve productivity, replicate efforts and free up time to do things you either enjoy - or are more profitable - or both.

An obvious form of outsourcing is call centers, and I've always been interested in call centers after meeting several call center companies looking for industrial space.  Since learning about call centers and touring a few, I often ask where people are calling me from.  The result is that I still get a lot of US call centers, but more and more it is an Indian accent.  However, yesterday I asked a customer service agent with perfect English where she was based, and the answer was the Philippines.  Yes - outsourcing is taking over the world.

Travel in China, Malaysia and other lower cost parts of the world already has convinced me that money can be saved by hiring employees overseas, but it never occurred to me to outsource work in smaller chunks.  Now that I no longer have an admin staff down the hall, it is definitely time for an experiment in using VA's to build my new businesses.

Searching e-lance.com came up with potential Virtual Assistants in India, Hungary, Canada, South America and many other places, but I think I'll start in China since I'm already working on building a business in China.  Having Chinese translation and the ability to get tasks done inside China for the business makes a lot of sense.  

I'll keep you updated on the progress.  I welcome comments and suggestions.