make reservations at a restaurant, or cancel your cable? Just visit
FancyHands.com
.
Have miscellaneous chores to complete? See if the folks on TaskRabbit
(
www.TaskRabbit.com
) will hop over to clean your oven, build your Ikea
furniture, or organize your closets.
And don’t forget, for all your general freelance needs:
www.fiverr.com
,
www.freelance.com
, and
www.upwork.com
.
When
The 4-Hour Workweek first came out, outsourcing was a novelty. Now,
it’s just assumed you can give
the work to the best people, and nobody cares
where they are located. With WiFi Internet access, Skype, email, and project
management communication tools like Asana (
www.asana.com
) and Slack
(www.slack.com), working with remote team members has become no big deal.
I live outside of Philadelphia and personally use “virtual” help for all kinds of
things:
Clarissa is one of my book cover designers; she lives in Singapore,
and I have no idea what she looks like (we’ve only communicated
via email).
Balaji
lives in India, and I’ve used his team to do research projects,
data mining, and slide designs.
Serena answers my Mailchimp email technical questions (when we
first connected, she was spending time in Ireland, and now she’s in
Thailand).
Camille is one of my book editors whom I found on
www.Fiverr.com
(her profile page says she lives in the United
States, but I have no idea where).
Matt and Chris are the two guys who handle my websites (I’ve
never had a face-to-face project meeting with them).
In addition to the team of remote freelancers I routinely work with, locally I
also outsource these items:
I pay $60 a week to a company to mow my lawn.
I pay $100 to a guy to plow my driveway when it snows.
I pay $150 every two weeks to a
cleaning service to clean my
house.
I pay $20 an hour to a woman to help me get my kids off to school
each morning.
I pay a bookkeeper to handle both my personal and business
accounting needs; I never write a check myself.
I hire plumbers, electricians, and painters to maintain my home.
But Mark Cuban Still Does His Own Laundry
So what shouldn’t you outsource?
Notice that while I have someone who stops in a few mornings each week to
help, I’ve never had a full-time nanny for my three kids. While I have good
friends who have live-in nannies
or daily full-time nannies, I just never felt
comfortable with that myself. For me, I don’t want a non-family member living
in my house, and parenting is my first value, so I want to do it myself as much as
I can. I’m fortunate in that I have a lot of schedule flexibility that enables this.
I’m not judging others who are making different choices; I do it consciously,
knowing that it is costing me potential income and career advancement.
I also do my own grocery shopping—almost
every day or every other day
actually. This makes
no sense from a time optimization standpoint. But I actually
like it. I like having the freshest fruits and vegetables and fish possible, and
zipping quickly through the store is my way of going to the market each day.
Since I work from home, it’s a good excuse to get some fresh air and sunlight.
Billionaire Mark Cuban revealed on
Shark Tank that he still washes his own
laundry. I do, too. It would be easy for me to have someone stop in each week to
do my laundry or to drop it at the dry cleaning place—it
would be easy for you
to do that too, and maybe you should. But I just find it grounding somehow to do
my own laundry.
The bottom line is you should try to outsource everything you can unless:
1.
You enjoy doing it and it’s part of your rest and recharging
process.
2.
It’s part of your values to continue doing the task.
3.
It costs you more per hour to outsource it than you want to make
yourself.
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