One of the best ways to save time is to delegate. Properly done, you can multiply your efforts by spreading work and save your energy for the most strategic work — work which presumably only you can do.

There are a number of firms that provide virtual (remote) assistants.  I have used both offshore and USA resources. Individuals that work for these firms will perform a wide variety of tasks for you from updating websites to sending flowers to your wife.  If you can state your needs clearly, they can save you a lot of time and potentially money as well. If you’re not in the habit of being crystal clear, however, you can frustrate yourself (and them) in the process. This is true even in local face-to-face delegation but it is a more acute problem in the offshore model where you face cultural and language differences.

Tim Ferris (author of The Four Hour Work Week) has assembled a list of firms through which you can hire a remote assistant. Some firms have areas of specialty (Agents of Value) while others are more general (AskSunday).

For work that requires a high-touch phone presence (scheduling sales appointments, for instance) or discernment about American culture (we speak more slowly in the South), I recommend using a local person. Check out Cindy Filer’s Innovative-Outsourcing for superb USA-based virtual help.

When your social life gets in the way of all that great business productivity, there is a solution…

As seen on HumorHotlines.com.

Blissfully let society pass you by, while you concentrate on more important things

Social networking is close to mandatory nowadays – if you don’t check your facebook account for a couple of weeks, you’ll find your new pokes and requests met with stony silences by shunned friends … Twitter bills itself as the modern antidote to information overload, but if you fail to update your status at least daily, you’ll find your Mom, your best friend, and your supervisor all calling your phone asking what you’re up to. It’s enough to make you become a hermit mountain recluse, isn’t it?! If only I could afford a mountain retreat…

We’ve recently found a couple of new services that make the pervasion of social media a little easier to deal with – Nutshell Mail is extremely popular and well regarded, and Fuser is older, and works on the same principle but is often blocked by company firewalls as an evil, personal service.

All your social networking updates in a you-know-what

Nutshell Mail can consolidate updates and information from many popular social networking sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace and Twitter, and also has the capacity to consolidate mail from more email accounts than any rational person needs.

It will collect all of this information and deliver it to you at times you specify, rather than when everybody else is doing their thing on the web. Slackers.

Some of the email providers and networks from which Nutshell Mail can collect - click the pic for the full list.

You can access the service through your most commonly used inbox, which, incidentally, can be your work email address. Nutshell Mail updates are not blocked by company firewalls, and you don’t need to log into a web service to get them.

However, you will have to write down those witty replies that come to mind when you read people’s status for later – you can’t reply through the service! We’d have to write about that aspect in our blog on how to waste time, for people that have too much J

Fuser was recently relaunched, and includes several new features and benefits. Fuser also aggregates all the biggies – most major email providers, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc. The performance of the old version was reportedly sluggish, but has been improved. The navigation for Fuser is simple (saves you time on learning the new software …!), with a logo and account name in a panel at the top left of screen.

Fuser screenshot

You can choose not to receive mail from some accounts and not others, as well as choosing the types of updates you receive for each service (for example, status updates but not comments on facebook). And for those crazy people who actually think the Gmail display is more intuitive than Outlook (I love the service, but I’d happily throttle the designer!), it retains the display features of Gmail.