Agreed. As a few individuals have really make some big impacts I have been sure to thank them personally for working hard and helping us hit our date. I intend to thank the team publicly as well once we are live but I guess I was looking if there would be something in addition to verbal praising that would be meaningful.
Sorry, by publicly I meant in front of the rest of the team, not like in a blog post (which could be nice as well). Really you want to make them feel like a highly valued member of the team.
I use mine to research all the conferences & trade shows for the upcoming year that I might want to go to. They find out the price to sponsor as well as the price to attend. They even go as far to look for flight and hotel costs.
The best advantage I have found with our VA is having them listen to all the podcasts I want to listen to, summarize the articles and send me the transcript. Then I can skim in 30 seconds what use to take me 45-60 minutes to listen to.
Also, I have found Odesk very helpful when our sales people ask for custom demos for clients. Instead of distracting our team I hire someone on Odesk to reskin our demo app. The best part is I know exactly how much that demo costs and like to let sales know so they can decide for their self if a demo is warranted in each situation.
As for personal tasks, I love using the concierge service attached to my credit card. Just recently I had them research all the candidates up for local election for me, find out how to return a jacket I bought on a business trip across the country, and suggest some recipes for a halloween party.
>> The best advantage I have found with our VA is having them listen to all the podcasts I want to listen to, summarize the articles and send me the transcript. Then I can skim in 30 seconds what use to take me 45-60 minutes to listen to.
If you could produce a complete transcript, I bet the podcast hosts would be delighted to post it for each episode. Not only would it be useful for listeners, but it would help them show up in web searches on their topic.
Perhaps the hosts or other listeners would even help pay for the transcription.
For the podcasts - have you tried listening to them at 1.5x or 2x speed? I started doing that & it's saved me tons of time & I can get through way more content (doesn't sound that weird once you get used to it either).
On your credit card - is that the Amex Platinum? I have a friend that uses them as a personal assistant basically.
I do use the 1.5x feature but save that for the podcasts I actually listen to. By reading the transcripts I can "monitor" 3-5 weekly, hour long podcasts in 15 minutes.
As for the card, yes I use an AMEX Platinum but believe Visa Signature and MasterCard World Elite also offer a similar service.
I've used the Visa Signature service a few times from my Chase Sapphire Preferred. They've gotten me reservations at restaurants that had often claimed to be booked full.
I used them for a trip this past weekend just to get from CLT-PHL, a route I thought I knew every trick to flying. They saved me between $75-$100 for that simple flight.
One trick they used which I know well is booking one leg of the flight to a ghost or hidden city. For example my outbound flight was CLT>PHL>LGA. Not always the case but there are certain routes where it is cheaper to add a 2nd leg on. So in this case I booked that leg but just didn't take the flight from PHL>LGA. Incidentally this trick only works if you are carrying on your bag and you are on a one way flight. If you did this on a round trip on your outbound flight the airline will cancel the rest of your ticket.
What impressed me though is that they found a flight that I could not find on the airline's website. I don't know if it was a code share flight with some other airline but I looked all over USair's site for the flight I bought from some random discount site and could not find it.
I have a bit of experience with this. Flight "hackers" use a number of varying techniques. As simple as using low-cost airlines that are not registered with the main services, to very crafty means to circumvent fuel surcharges. travel and flight hacking is a very interesting world!
The Lean Startup is good but I found Running Lean to be much more tactical. Plus the guy who wrote it, Ash seems to be very active in providing content beyond the book in his newsletters, blog posts, and his Lean Canvas.
Get a 2nd job. For two years while I had a 100% telecommute job I worked as a white water raft guide and a ski instructor. They started as just on the weekend but before long I was working my 2nd job 4 days a week.
Incidentally, I did my best work when I was working the most rafting/skiing because life was great and on the 3 days I did my real job, I was completely focused because I had no time to mess around.
How many users/customers we talk to each week. The higher that number gets, the more momentum we feel and the less we feel like we are lost in the woods.
