The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Update - Timothy Ferriss [53]
3. Hughes had a barber on call 24/7 but had his hair and nails trimmed about once a year.
4. In his hotel-bound years, Hughes was rumored to have instructed assistants to place a single cheeseburger in a specific tree outside his penthouse room at a 4:00 P.M. each day, whether he was there or not.
Such a world of possibilities! Just as the Model-T brought transportation to the masses, virtual assistants bring eccentric billionaire behavior within reach of each man, woman, and child. Now, that’s progress.
Without further ado, let me pass the mic. Note that YMII performs both personal and business tasks, whereas Brickwork focuses solely on business projects. Let’s start with the important but dull stuff and move quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. To give a true taste of what to expect, I have not corrected non-native-sounding English.
Venky: Don’t limit yourself. Just ask us if something is possible. We’ve arranged parties, organized caterers, researched summer courses, cleaned up accounting books, created 3D drafts based on blueprints. Just ask us. We could find the closest kid-friendly restaurant to your house for your son’s birthday, finding out costs and organizing the birthday party. This frees up your time to work or hang out with your son.
What can we not do? We can’t do anything that would require our physical presence. But you would be surprised as to how small a set of tasks that is in this day and age.
Here are the most common tasks we handle:
scheduling interviews and meetings web-research following up on appointments, errands, and tasks online purchases creation of legal documents website maintenance (web design, publishing, uploading files) that doesn’t require a professional designer monitoring, editing, and publishing comments for online discussions posting job vacancies on the web document creation proofreading and editing documents for spelling and formatting online research for updating blogs updating the database for Customer Relationship Management Software managing recruitment processes updating invoices and receiving payments voicemail transcription
Ritika at Brickwork added the following:
market research financial research business plans industry analysis market assessment reports preparing presentations reports and newsletters legal research analytics website development search engine optimization maintaining and updating databases credit scoring managing procurement processes
Venky: We have a forgetful client who has us call him all the time with various reminders. One of our clients on a custom plan has us wake him up every morning. We’ve done the legwork and found people who fell out of contact after Katrina. Found jobs for clients! My favorite so far: One of our clients has a pair of trousers that he really likes that aren’t in production anymore. He’s sending them to Bangalore (from London) to have created exact replicas at a tiny fraction of the price.
Here are a few other YMII custom requests:
Reminding an overzealous client to pay his current parking fines, as well as not speed and collect parking fines.
Apologizing and sending flowers and cards to spouses of clients.
Charting a diet plan, reminding client on it regularly, ordering groceries based on the specific diet plan.
Getting a job for a person who lost his job due to outsourcing a year back. We did the job search, did the cover letters, did the resume tuning, and got the client a job in 30 days.
Fixing a broken windowpane of a house in Geneva, Switzerland.
Collecting homework information from teacher’s voicemail and e-mailing it to the client (parents of the kid).
Research on how to tie a shoelace meant for a kid (client’s son).
Find a parking slot for your car in some other city even before you make the trip.
Ordered garbage bins for home.
Get an authenticated weather forecast and weather report for a particular time in a particular place on a particular day, five years ago. This