same to your assistant, assign him or her a dozen tasks without prioritizing them. Recall our mantra: Eliminate before you delegate. WHAT DOES A good VA task e-mail look like? The following example was recently sent to an Indian VA whose results have been nothing short of spectacular: Dear Sowmya, Thank you. I would like to start with the following task. TASK: I need to find the names and e-mails of editors of men’s magazines in the US (for example: maxim, stuff, GQ, esquire, blender, etc.) who also have written books. An example of such a person would be AJ Jacobs who is Editor-at-Large of Esquire (www.ajjacobs.com). I already have his information and need more like him. Can you do this? If not, please advise. Please reply and confirm what you will plan to do to complete this task. DEADLINE: Since I’m in a rush, get started after your next e-mail and stop at 3 hours and tell me what results you have. Please begin this task now if possible. The deadline for these 3 hours and reported results is end-of-day ET Monday. Thank you for your fastest reply, Tim Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, come from clear thinking. Think simple. IN THE NEXT several chapters, the communication skills you develop with our virtual assistant experiment will be applied to a much larger and obscenely profitable playing field: automation. The extent to which you will outsource next makes delegation look like finger painting. In the world of automation, not all business models are created equal. How do you assemble a business and coordinate all its parts without lifting a finger? How do you automate cash deposits in your bank account while avoiding the most common problems? It begins with understanding the options, the art of dodging information flow, and what we will call “muses.” The next chapter is a blueprint for the first step: a product. Go with the Flow H... is a flowchart of 4HWW from reader Jed Wood, who has used it for faster de