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Four Hour Work Week for a Photographer

I am a photographer and I do a lot of assignments that can take me to different locations and venues, sometimes at a moment’s notice. It is a fun job, more a hobby that anything else and it inspires me to take the pictures that people want to see and go through until they are old and gray.

Fun as the job may be I found that I had no time left to do the paperwork that needed to be done for the office. The communications and scheduling were greatly affected because sometimes clients would just call or come into the office and I was not there. The payroll, taxes and other menial tasks got left to the background and I ended up paying fines simply because I had no time left to do all of them.

Someone mentioned that I should hire a secretary and someone else to do the bookkeeping for me. I started thinking about it but when I did some pencil pushing I found that I would have a spend a lot of money to hire these people and whatever net income I would gain would just get lost in the payroll, the insurances and other benefits that were part of the employment.

Then someone mentioned the 4-Hour Work Week to me. I thought that they were joking but I was also interested in the concept. For whatever it was worth, I decided to buy the book and read. It was hilarious, that book talked about outsourcing and I laughed. Who would have thought of outsourcing the menial tasks in my small office?

But the more I read this book, Tim Ferris actually was convincing me to take charge of my life, be more productive in my work and relegate the menial tasks to virtual secretaries. At first I had no idea what a virtual secretary was and how it worked but the more the book explained the concept, I got intrigued.

So off I went to the computer and browsed ‘outsourcing’ and ‘virtual secretaries.’ I was shocked to see that there were a lot of businesses that made things easier for people like me from across the ocean. So I did a little experiment, I hired a virtual assistant and she asked me what the tasks I wanted done and when was the deadline. I thought deadline? Okay, why not. So I gave her one week to do the tasks, answering phones, arranging my work schedule, do the bookkeeping and others.

That was the best week I ever experienced. She did it so fast and well I realized that I was the incompetent one. Because of this virtual assistant, I have now more time for myself and my family and best of all, she had increased the number of clients that hired me, simply because she was there to answer the phone and to schedule the appointments.

Thanks to the 4-Hour Work Week, I have taken charge of my life, and thanks to my virtual assistant, my work is now right on track.