The Latest in Personal Knowledge Management?
Monday’s Globe and Mail has a story about personal outsourcing: The $2,000 Executive Assistant. New media law guru Rob Hyndman was interviewed:
“Last year, Mr. Hyndman paid nearly $2,000 for a ‘virtual administrative assistant’ to schedule his meetings, organize his contacts and do all the other office work that once kept him behind his desk until late. As the personal offshoring business evolves, he’s finding more and more tasks he can farm out to India.”
The article also talks about busy businessman and athlete Timothy Ferris who only puts two to four hours a week in at the office with similar assistance from India, the Philippines and Jamaica.
This is yet another example of international outsourcing that we have been watching.
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May 8th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Rob’s a smart guy. The idea of concierge style executive services has a lot of merit, especially for a solo practitioner. The ability to identify the biggest time wasters, and outsource those tasks one-by-one is both cost effective and time efficient. Plus, the lack of employee overhead, red tape, training, etc.
Not sure if this is PKM Connie (typo?), although I guess it could be if he was hiring a digital law librarian :-), but it is good business.
Relates to your comments last week on the virtual law firm, and Simon C’s post about the ethics of outsourcing. A lot of advantages to being small and nimble these days. Some risks depending on what’s being outsourced, but lots of advantages. :-)
May 8th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Well, I figure managing your personal work/flow of info for your own work is part of PKM. I did qualify it with a question mark since I first heard that term here at the CALL conference two days ago.
May 8th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Whoops. missed that ‘?’ at the end. :-)
Also noted, a number of services offered by the company quoted in the article have a PKM bent to them.