During the past few months, I have had a personal assistant from the Philippines. He works for me between 7pm and 3am my local time. The intention of doing this was to see if I could delegate some of my responsibilities to my personal assistant. Here is a summary of my experience so far:

1. I thought there may be language barriers, but there hasn’t been any so far.
2. I wondered how much of the internet my assistant would understand, and he understands a lot.
3. I wondered how well he would do working on his own, and he works very well and is very responsible as long as I detail what I expect from him. He is also very good at restating to make sure he understands.
4. I was surprised one night with the initative that he took when he found a tool that would do a task I had assigned him in 1/4 the time.
5. The first night working together we spent about 4 hours going over introductions and expectations. Since then I have spent less than an hour chatting over Google Talk with him each night. If he is performing the same task for many days, we do not chat for days.
6. He emails me when he gets stuck and he informs me whenever something goes wrong or if there is something getting in the way of his success.

Overall, this has been a great experience of Outsourcing Personal Assistant from Philippines. I still have the same assistant, and hope to for a long time. The biggest challenge for me is taking the time to train him on a new task that I would like him to do for me. We use a tool called Basecamp to keep track of our work. During the day I will do work and record it in several excel documents and save it to Basecamp which is internet based. Every evening at 7pm or so he will work on the same documents until he is done at 3am, and then he will save them to basecamp where I will open them at 7 or 8 am. It is a great system.