Outsourcing on Elance
The project summary in Elance
I just outsourced my first job via Elance- basically to find somebody to splice and code the Locra site from a basic Photoshop file to CSS-compliant webpages. As a team of mostly busy undergraduates, working on Locra means a trade off with either academics, activities, or sleep- and it unsurprisingly things move quite slowly as school life gets in the way. Hopefully, by outsourcing activities which are simple but tedious we will be able to move faster. It has been almost a year since the project has started and it is about time to make it happen.
This also made me think a bit about the opportunity cost of education. A few days earlier I received a warning from my scholarship provider as my grades for the past quarter had fallen well below an A- average (though my career average was ok). Outsourcing the more mundane tasks, and focusing on the important things (good grades?) will hopefully be better in the long run, though expensive in the short run. Typing this on a Saturday night (sigh) with 2 midterms next week, I sure do hope this works.
You will have to let us know how it works out. I fear that you may actually spend more time managing the mundane tasks that you would have just doing it yourself. We will see.
Good luck.