What is your time worth?
It’s the one commodity that you can never re-acquire. Once it’s spent, it’s gone forever.
This is more than just the hourly wage you make/can charge for your services. You also need time for relaxing, sleep, friends and family, exercise, etc.
We all have 168 hours in a week. What are those hours worth to you?
Outsourcing life isn’t a new concept. Tim Ferriss covered it in his book “4 Hour Workweek.” He probably wasn’t the first to think of it. I learned about it through him though.
It’s a really smart idea. You aren’t great at everything (neither am I, despite how often I tell people I am).
You also shouldn’t bother doing trivial tasks when you could be accomplishing so much more. That’s why you should outsource.
You could hire a personal (virtual) assistant for a few dollars an hour and have her handle your repetitive tasks, scheduling, reminders and other minor tasks to free your time to focus your efforts on the bigger decisions and ideas.
If you charge $60/hour for your services, why not pay someone $15/hour to manage your mundane tasks and free up your time to focus on things only you can do?
Staring at your inbox and wondering why you let it get to 10,267 unread messages? Dreading actually going through them?
Don’t. Outsource it instead. Hire someone across the world to go through all of them, delete spam/marketing emails and push important ones to the top of your inbox again.
You just need to give clear directions on how you want everything done and — poof — done. Magic.
Outsourcing tasks make economic sense.
And buys you time. And makes the world a better place. You created a job. And freed up your limited energies to tackle bigger problems. Creating better solutions for the world.
If you’re tired of running errands, there’s an app for that too — TaskRabbit. Hire someone on Fiverr for creative tasks that aren’t your forte.
You can have groceries delivered now. Amazon’s same day delivery beats fighting a crowd at the store any day.
If you’re running a startup — outsource all the tasks you aren’t great at doing. Build a team around you that covers your weaknesses so you can leverage your strengths to achieve more.
This means you have to honestly assess your skills — know your strengths and weaknesses. Instead of wasting time trying to get better at your weaknesses, be amazing at your strengths and pay someone who already has the right skill set to handle your areas of weakness.
You build a team that needs each other (all good teams do). Create synergy with a small group of individuals, each with their unique talents. This will make everyone better.
You can’t spend 10,000 hours doing everything to get good enough to run every aspect of a business.
Let go — outsource to your team. Delegation is key to success.
Outsourcing — whether in your business or in your daily life — can be a huge lift to your spirit, energy and time (and probably profit).
Don’t try to be someone you are not. Be the best you.
Be amazing at what you enjoy doing. Outsource the rest.
