Previous essays: 3: My Man in Belorussia 2: A New Renaissance 1: In the Beginning

I am, I hereby declare, going to outsource everything. No more shall I toil at angle-bracketed drudgery, no longer shall I spend my days designing or coding or doing my accounts. I'm going to embrace the global economy and get some other fool to do it for me, and spend my time perfecting my espresso-drinking techniques.

Personal offshoring has been done before — it was good form in the Russian Tsar's court to send shirts to Paris to be laundered — but what was once the preserve of big business is now available for the individual. And, armed with Paypal and a distinct need to do less and read more, I'm so there.

It's working out rather well. First up, some coding. I needed a selection of little programs to do things with my email. But I've never had the time, or the patience, to write them myself. After a visit to RentACoder.com, I was able to file a request for bids from programmers around the world. It's just too easy, frankly.

Prospective coders can view all the requests on the site, and bid for the ones that interest them. Once I'd accepted a bid — it was less than $100 for a fortnight's programming work — I paid the money to the site, which placed it in escrow. My coder, a young man in Belorussia, completed the work, and once I'd checked it was up to scratch (it was), I instructed the site to release the cash. Double martinis all round.

This sort of auction and escrow arrangement is commonplace with personal offshoring sites. Both you and the business at the other end are protected from fraud and non-payment and, by off-loading the credit checking and banking systems to the credit card companies, the offshoring marketplaces can be very efficient.

So, with my coding done, I needed a webpage built. Web designers are everywhere, and web hosting is cheap. It is just much cheaper in India. So, $20 paid via PayPal.com to templatekingdom.com got me a website design, an hour of the designer's time for changes, and a year's hosting for good measure. In 24 hours, and for less than the price of a few rounds in a pub, I had a new, uniquely designed website up and running. For small businesses needing a home page, why spend hundreds on a domestic designer, when something just as good can be commissioned from designers in India or Bangladesh? And for me? Another espresso? I thank you.

I should also note that I'm not actually writing this. I'm dictating it. Like many journalists, I interview a lot of people, and find that transcribing the interviews afterwards is the least fun part of the job. So I don't any more. Like many legal firms and large hospitals, I have found a company that will do it for me. Mine is in New Zealand (www.expresstype.co.nz), where the time difference works in my favour. At the end of the day, I email the recordings of my interviews to my contact, and by the time I wake up in the morning they are Word documents in my inbox. For a few pounds per hour of recording, this is the working writer's idea of bliss. This is going to be a very good year. More coffee, anyone?

Geek extraordinaire, open source icon, and Guardian correspondent Ben Hammersley will entertain Technica readers each month with various musings from the world of science and technology. Click here to visit his website.