My main man Merlin Mann just posted an interesting missive to the kiddies over at 43folders. Merlin seems to share my intoxication with the concept of “outsourcing your life,” which has proliferated recently thanks to Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Workweek book, probably the most practically inspiring and thought-provoking book I’ve read since Getting Things Done.

The idea is simple—labor arbitrage 101 and the theory of comparative advantage. Hire folks in the developing world to do the menial (internet- and phone-based) chores of your life so you can focus on things you do better. I’ll share below some of my personal experience putting this technique into practice with my own work, and also discuss a little bit of the politics, economics, and even emotions involved.

A case study

On a given week, no fewer than five firms in the developing world help me do the work that keeps my little companies going. (Not to mention considerable automation thanks to Amazon web services.) One of those firms (a software development consultancy) does very high-quality, sophisticated intellectual work equal to or exceeding that of American firms we’ve dealt with, but in this article I’m interested more in the little tasks that a person might not otherwise think to ask another person (or company) for help with.

Don’t mistake me for some big-spending mogul, however. My main company, Lovetastic, may technically be an investor-funded start-up based in Lower Manhattan, but we spend less than $100 a week on outsourcing. If it weren’t for this fact, our employee-free company wouldn’t be able to get nearly as much work done as we do, no matter how hard my partner and I worked.

Right now, my assistant Suresh at GetFriday is my point-man for this work. He helps me find new firms to handle work I need help with, and acts as a liaison once I’ve found them. Suresh also helps me filter through support e-mails—responding to commonly-asked questions with standard replies on my behalf, and forwarding anything to me that doesn’t fit into the 80% of most common inquiries. He does all sorts of one-off research, such as finding contact information on the net, and he even once called around Boston for me to find out which Starbucks was open latest. (I got the results in a meticulously-prepared spreadsheet.)

Suresh works in a Windows-only environment, but we’ve somehow managed to find a lingua-franca in the form of PDFs. I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap (Mac version)—which is incidentally the most amazing non-Apple consumer product I’ve ever used in my life—and I use it to very rapidly scan in documents. I can then send them to Suresh for maintenance, categorization, filing, etc. In fact, I recently scanned in a whole magazine that I wanted to archive (which took about a minute), and forwarded it to Suresh, who then sent it back to me as a searchable PDF with all the ads removed for easy reading and archiving. Incidentally, a welcome side-effect of having a remote assistant has been that I’ve been going almost entirely paperless. I keep all of my documents in PDF form, encrypted and backed-up to Amazon S3. My GTD “reference” filing system has suddenly become much easier to maintain, and much more useful on a day-to-day basis so I can shuttle documents across the Pacific with ease. I haven’t touched my labeler in weeks.

I don’t answer the office phone anymore. Voicemail gets transcribed and sent to me as an e-mail so I can respond in the most efficient way rather than getting distracted and interrupted all day.

Very soon, we’ll no longer be batch approving a lot of content on our personals site directly; we’ll be outsourcing the approval process automatically the moment someone uploads a photo, improving the user experience and making the site cheaper for our customers.

These are just a few examples.

Making good use of outsourcing requires considerable creativity: a podcasting example

One caveat is that I actually have trouble coming up with work for Suresh to do on a regular basis. An amazing amount of pointless, tedius tasks in life actually require one’s personal presence: stuff like dealing with the DMV, calling up credit card companies, etc. Other stuff simply takes longer to convey to another person (especially someone on the other side of the ocean who isn’t entirely familiar with your culture) than it takes to do it yourself.

And as I discover better technological tricks in my life, this issue only becomes more salient. When I get an iPhone, for example, I imagine that I’ll be calling Suresh less frequently to look up little tidbits of info on the internet for me while I’m out and about. (Right now, it’s actually far less painful to call someone in India and ask them to search the internet than for me than to wrestle with my Treo’s nearly unusable browser.)

But I am particularly proud of one way I’ve used outsourcing to work smarter and more effectively. We do occasional podcasts at Lovetastic, which consists of my interviewing artists and singer-songwriters who might be of interest to our customers and then releasing those as sleekly-edited radio-style interviews on the site and on iTunes. The editing process is enormously tedious and often takes me upwards of 20-30 hours to turn a two-hour interview into 30-40 minutes of talk and music. Sure, I’m a slow and completely retarded amateur when it comes to audio editing, but that’s beside the point. Now, I send the raw audio to Ashish at a transcription firm in India, who promptly sends me back a flawless transcript in text form. I then mark up that transcript by hand in red ink and scan it rapidly to PDF. I send the edits along with the raw audio to a firm in Argentina who edits it all together as a seamless podcast. The whole process costs us less than $75 and saves me vast amounts of work.

Comparative advantage

This whole outsourcing thing, especially in the case of India, has a sort of unsettling imperialist feel about it. One hesitates to be the big-shot American ordering people in the developing world to do our boring tasks. I shudder at the thought of ending up like a figure out of the British Raj—someone like Ronny Heaslop in Forster’s A Passage to India. But the mutually respectful cordiality of the actual experience, combined with my recollection of the basic facts of globalization reminds me that outsourcing is, more often than not, the opposite of exploitive.

There are 37 bajillion people (give or take) in the developing world sitting around twiddling their thumbs in relative poverty while we fat Americans sit around wasting our expensive educations filing things, replying to repetitive emails, and Googling for showtimes at the local multiplex. Meanwhile, we hoard our wealth by recycling it within our own economy and throwing it into places where we don’t have a comparative advantage. We hire brilliant well-trained college grads here in America to do menial cubicle work that they’ll end up hating because it’s a waste of their talents. We have the best educational system in the world (particularly our public universities,) which attracts the best and the brightest from the world over. Yet much of this wealth is squandered by employing people doing stuff other than where their best talents lie, simply because they happen live nearby.

Right now, our comparative advantage as a nation lies in developing new markets and innovating intellectual and cultural products. Other countries can manufacture t-shirts for the Gap better than we can, because their relative costs of living (and therefore labor and materials) are low. What they’re not so great at is designing shirts that people everywhere will want to buy. For whatever reason, that sort of thing seems to be something we Americans do well. We should focus on what we do well. The standards of living in the developing world will never increase until we start sharing the love with them and giving them some of the work that they’re better at.

This is why protectionism is damaging to global development and the fight against poverty. It’s also partially racist. If an Indian or a South Korean can do work for less money and with equal quality that an American could be doing, why should we be wasting our time and effort holding that work from those workers who are quite happy to have it? Are Americans somehow more entitled to wealth and work (and less obliged to be economically competitive) than our colleagues in India? Isn’t it wrong not to leave the data-entry and sewing to the folks who count those jobs among their best opportunities in life? Because we can afford it and have the infrastructure to support it, we should then reallocate the displaced American workers to more productive (and comparatively advantageous) jobs.

(For a thoughtful, evidence-based smack-down to all the arguments against outsourcing, read the excellent article “The Outsourcing Bogeyman” from Foreign Affairs.)