This is day 10 of My 4 Hour Work Week Journey. Please make sure you read the rest of the articles that came before this one to understand where I am in the journey. Click here to buy a copy of the 4 hour work week and go on the journey with me.

You will notice that by this point, I am writing less and less about the book and getting straight into the Questions and Actions. Please read the articles that came before this one, listen to the audios and videos I have embedded in those articles or buy the book to fully understand the logic behind what I am doing here.

VA is short for “Virtual assistant”.

Some Security Measures When Working with VAs

These are for those people who might be scared and/or paranoid about working with virtual assistants who would have access to their delicate information. A couple of quick tips if you work on blogs and websites, like I do.

1) Create unique username and password for VAs to access your website:

A friend of mine is currently paying me to help him create and optimize his blog ( If you are interested in this service, please send an email to masmilele@thedisplacedafrican.com ). He is the person who best taught me this lesson.

We hired a technician from rent a coder to take the domain name that he had already bought and create a WordPress blog from it and install some plugins and software into the WordPress blog.

Obviously, this would involve the technician logging into my friend’s hosting and domain account. However my friend is quite the risk manager. Scared that the technician may play around with his domain settings, he went the extra mile and created a limited authority account for the technician that has access to his domain and hosting account.

For those of you working with people on your WordPress blog, its possible to create such accounts as well.

From now on, every time I work with a VA, for the next redesign of the site for example, I will create a brand new username and password for their use.

2) Use credit cards instead of debit cards: It’s easier to erase huge credit charges instead of debit charges.

Questions and Actions: Outsourcing Life

1) Get yourself an assistant even if you don’t need one:

I have already assigned more than a dozen tasks to VAs in the USA, India, Bangalore and oddly enough, Baghdad, Iraq (more power to Iraqis if they actually have Internet now).

As a matter of fact, there is one task I can think of that needs a VA’s touch right now……..look out for an article coming out soon that will have “the VA’s touch”.

2) Identify your top 5 time consuming nonwork tasks and 5 personal tasks you could assign for sheer fun:

Hmm this one will be tough considering I spend so much time online But if I were to outsource more than I do already, here are a couple of things I would consider outsourcing:

i) Find the absolute cheapest ticket to fly to Kenya over the next 6 months: I recently created a video over the course of about a week where I tried to see if I could get cheap airplane tickets to allow me to visit Kenya sometime this year using the site rentacoder.

It gives some helpful tips of how one might be able to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars on flights from Melbourne, Australia to Nairobi, Kenya. I will release this as its own independent article because I think cheap airfare is always worth discussing for immigrants.

ii) Buy me a very very cheap pair of size 10.5 sneakers: I haven’t bought a new pair of shoes in a very long time, but its quite difficult to get a nice, comfortable pair of sneakers that doesn’t wear out quickly at a cheap price.

iii) Figure out the best place and price for me to sell my car: My car is at the end of its life and I want to find out how I can sell either the parts or the entire car for the best price.

iv) Perform most of the research necessary for me to create my cash flow muse: This will make a lot more sense once we get into the chapter on automation

v) You know what Tim did it, me thinks I might outsource my dating 🙂 : Hmm, now should I outsource the search for dates or just the organizing of dates?I will let this marinate in my mind. It’s definitely something that I would do. I think the pure fun and novelty of having “my assistant” call a girl to confirm plans I have with her would make my day, and hers, pretty memorable.

Onwards and upwards to infinity and beyond,

Mwangi

Tags: 4 hour work week, 4 hour workweek, cashflow muse, Four hour work week, lifestyle design, Tim Ferriss, Timothy Ferriss

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 2:05 am and is filed under My 4 Hour Work Week Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.