Source Control By David Walsh – Outsourcing, Efficiency, Virtual Assistants

Source Control
By David Walsh
Outsourcing, Efficiency, Virtual Assistants

“To live extraordinary lives, we need to own our hours.

The fewer hours we control, the less fulfilled we’ll be.

If we want to own our time fully, we need to stop doing worthless things.”
– from Source Control by David Walsh

About The Author – David Walsh

David Walsh is an entrepreneur who has spent the last few years traveling the world while investing in his company and building products.   He is the founder of  Arsenal, a virtualized global outsourcing & research provider with teams around the world in the United States, India and South America.

He’s a systems builder.  This is not some guy who felt like writing a book because he’s a writer – this a guy who put together an information product because he needed a more efficient way to share his knowledge.    The past few years he has learned more about outsourcing than most other people learn in a decade – because of necessity.  In his own words:

“It was the trial-by-fire I needed to learn two things: ultramobility & outsourcing. I had no choice. It was either spend every waking moment working when I’d rather be seeing the world, or find better ways to get work done.”

Summary of Source Control

Source Control is all about “systematic outsourcing for the dangerously ambitious” – and that sub title couldn’t be more accurate.  Having done a fair amount of outsourcing myself, I was excited to take a look at Source Control and take David’s ideas for a spin.  Cover to cover the book is filled with practical tips, advice and is a step by step how-to manual for people serious about outsourcing to virtual assistants.

The main thrust of Source Control is David’s focus on helping you create a solid outsourcing system.  The book walks you step by step through David’s reasoning and then lays out some rules for what this system should be.

The end goal?   To help you define a scalable, process-driven workflow producing consistent outcomes with minimal intervention. The attributes required for such a system are:

“If we want to own our time fully, we need to stop doing worthless things.”

• Newbie-Friendly. Your system loves the new guy. Your system gets someone up and running immediately,and ensures the results will be as close to the previousperson as possible
• User-Agnostic. Your system doesn’t care who’s using it. You system is unaware of and indifferent to your [virtual assistants'] personality, moods, location, language and level of skill.
• Modular. Your system keeps everyone on a need-to know basis. Not every assistant or new hire will need to handle every aspect of your life or type of task.
• Organized.  Your system has obsessive-compulsive disorder. No more digging up old files. No more emailing attachments back and forth. No more chaos.Your system expects everything to live in its proper place and sets rules to ensure they stay there.
• Evolving. Your system learns from its mistakes.  Elements of your system should track what’s been accomplished, what’s changed, and who changed it. As new scenarios emerge, your system has a place to hold new rules to simplify for the future.

Source Control discusses step by step how to break down tasks so that virtual assistants can handle them, discusses the pros and cons of different types of assistants, and explains exactly how to recruits, screen and even review your mobile workforce.  David’s attention to detail is excellent.  He even lists approximate costs you should expect to pay for different types of services (page 71).  He provides templates as well to help you get started, including an example template for process instructions and task details.

My Personal Review of Source Control and Favorite Quotes

I enjoyed the whole book. My favorite part hands down is the approach that David takes to the problem of outsourcing.  Most people miss the forest for the trees – they get caught up in asking themselves who is the right outsourcing firm, or how will I know what to outsource.  David steps back and looks at the problem as being an entire system – and then breaks down piece by piece how you can put that system together. Often as I was reading along something in my head would click – most of the lessons here are things that I too learned by trial and error, and it’s refreshing to see someone else who has been through the same process and come to many of the same conclusions.  Seeing David approach the same problems as I did, and often come to the same conclusions gives me confidence in knowing he’s not full of it – this guy has walked the walk.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“To live extraordinary lives, we need to own our hours. The fewer hours we control, the less fulfilled we’ll be.”

“If we want to own our time fully, we need to stop doing worthless things.”

“The act of doing doesn’t make it important. Being the person that does it doesn’t make it important.”

“To stop doing something ourselves, we need to eliminate it or enable someone else to do it.”

“Always seek to eliminate first. If it’s not possible, we remove ourselves from the process.”

“Since we can never technically increase the total time available to us in a day, it is absolutely critical that we use the time we have intelligently.”

“Assigning low-value novelty tasks to an assistant doesn’t change the fact that it’s low-value.”

Recommendation

If you’ve read the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris and thought to yourself – “Yes! That’s for me! Now…how do I start outsourcing?” then Source Control is for you.  David’s insights, expertise, templates and “swipe file” of common documents will save you hours of labor and headaches – and hopefully save you from repeating some of the mistakes I made with my first virtual assistant.

Source Control – Preview

Here’s a preview with one of my favorite parts of Source Control – David’s discussion of an Ideal System:

Chapter Listing For Source Control