Kolz Blog

Report: Many U.S. Parents Outsourcing Child Care Overseas How far can you push personal outsourcing? Can you outsource your dating? I did. Can you outsource your worrying? AJ Jacobs did. Reading to your children or bickering with your spouse? No problem. Send it all to Bangalore or Bosnia. Even mainstream media like the Wall Street Journal is starting to explore the basic options, but we’ve been there and done that. The mundane is simple if you can cover the ridiculous. So the more interesting question becomes: What are the limits — and the most entertaining uses — of personal outsourcing? One friend of mine insisted last April that there were serious limitations to what could be effectively “outsourced.” What about face time? Not in work, mind you, but in the harshest competition of all: mating. In Silicon Valley, where Santa Clara is called “Manta” Clara and San Jose is called “Man” Jose, the odds are against heterosexual men. Bets were placed over a few glasses of wine, and so it began: I would outsource all of my dating for four weeks. Even if you would never consider doing something this outrageous, the results were beyond belief, and the process used to pull it off can be used for almost all personal outsourcing. If hacking matchmaking isn’t of interest, no worries. How about a personal chef for $5 a meal? Just keep reading… (more…)