The Greatest Thing Since Crushed Ice

I love research. Maybe it's the lawyer in me, but for whatever reason, I really enjoy the process of digging out an answer. I believe it's also a critical aspect of business development -- arming oneself with research and information is a tremendous force multiplier. The more you know about a market, a client, a competitor, the more focused and therefore effective your efforts will be. All well and good. The problem, however, is that research takes time and money. As my practice grows, as much as I love it, I cannot justify taking a few hours to figure something out, unless it's really a crisis.

Fundamentally, this is a time-management problem. I do not have much time, so I need to be very mindful of what I devote it to. Sound familiar? There are many, many personal productivity blogs that address this issue, of course, and some of them have very elegant approaches to analyzing time expenditures. For example: http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/?p=145 However, most of these posts are about tasks rather than research. Ferreting out information is a very different kind of work than, say, getting your car serviced because the more research you do, the more research you realize you need to do. If you enjoy it, you can easily get sucked into it far too deeply. Here's an example. I was at a holiday concert this past Christmas, and a couple of the songs they performed were of the kind of Jewish/Hebrew/Eastern Europen music you hear in "Fiddler on the Roof". I don't know any better way to describe it, because I don't know much about this kind of music. It seems to come in two categories -- joyful, and mournful. And although I am almost perfectly ignorant about it, I know it when I hear it. And as I sat there listening, I had a thought. If I had a great deal of money, I would hire a couple of people whose full-time job would be to research subjects like this -- things that interested me, but that I didn't have the time to research myself. In the case of this music, I'd send out an email describing the music, and telling them that I wanted a ten-page report on it: sources, instruments, historical meaning, characteristics, typical themes and so on. I would also request a CD burned with twenty or so examples of this music. Then, rather than spending the day digging, I'd simply read the report, and I'd know what I needed to in half an hour. Last night, I was relating this fantasy to Chris Burry, a friend of mine, and in typical Chris fashion (I talk a lot; Chris doesn't talk, which is why we're such good friends -- opposites attract) he said "That's Google Answers." And he was right. I tried it out last night, and I'm addicted. Here's how it works: You create an account, submit a question, and price it. The price is the amount you'll pay for an answer. Somewhere out the on the Internet, a real, live human accepts the offer, researches the answer, and provides it. Google takes a cut, the researcher gets the rest, and I get my answer quickly, rather than spending hours digging it up. Last night I submitted a test question -- "Can you give me a few online message boards for entrepreneurs?" The price was $15. I had already tried figuring this out myself, spend 45 minutes, and got nowhere. This morning, at 7 AM, I had my answer. And it listed eight separate message boards. I do not have the slightest idea who the researcher was. Nor do I care. For all I know, they were in China. But that's the beauty of the concept. What Google has done is create a vastly more efficient market in research. If my $15 is a day's pay for someone in India, and it's worth it for them to spend four hours answering the question, then Google has connected a seller (me) with a buyer (them) in a frictionless market. I get great answers, at a rock-bottom price, and can spend my time on other, more profitable stuff. Like blogging. Try it out: http://answers.google.com/answers/