We are always looking for a way to work smarter and be more efficient in our work. In a perfect world I would be billing for every hour I work but that’s not possible. The amount of administrative and sales work I have really cuts into the time I have for work and making money. To help with this my first thought would be to hire an assistant, but who has the money or time to deal with that?
In the virtual office there are many more options to help with your workload. An option I turned to recently is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This is a crowdsourcing internet marketplace that coordinates the use of human intelligence (people around the world) to do tasks that computers are unable to do. This could be tagging photos, writing product descriptions, identifying peformers on cd’s or any of a host of other things.
The reason I am using the Mechanical Turk is that I needed email addresses. I am getting ready to so some prospecting and I plan on using emailings for part of it. I have a list that I built that I want to contact but I have no emails. I could search for them myself but how many billable hours would I burn doing that? I could spend hundreds of dollars in billable hours but instead with the Mechanical Turk I am spending about $25. That’s right, for every email address I am paying about 5 cents.
Business hacks like this are a smart way to do more in your business day. It is my goal to find more ideas to help improve my own productivity and to pass it along on in this blog.
On a side note, the mechanical turk was an infamous Turkish automaton that could play chess. The Turk won games against many people for nearly 84 years including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Only years later was it revealed that a human was conceled inside.
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