Things you can outsource, but shouldn't

(If you haven’t already, check out the posts from yesterday and the day before; this post closes out the series.)

A little multi-order thinking around outsourcing, services, and the general theme of delegating things to others, usually for money.

If you’ve selected a task that you just don’t like doing, and it’s not core, and it’s not working on a relationship, and especially if it costs less money than your money-weighted work rate would for the amount of time it would take to do it yourself, of course it’s a no-brainer. Delegate the damn thing.

If it’s your core competency, don’t delegate it. If it’s building a relationship, you can’t delegate it.

Okay. Those are the poles. The middle’s more interesting.

Consider the tradeoffs in the middle ground

Your car broke down, and needs a replacement part, and the labor’s involved and expensive. What do you do?

Maybe you don’t like working on cars. Okay, easy.

What if you find working on cars it soothing, but in the time it would take you to do the car repair yourself, you could make more money than you’d pay for a mechanic to do it?

What if you value the sense of accomplishment that comes from doing the work yourself more than what you’d spend your time on otherwise?

What if the tradeoff is that you’d have to skip your kid’s birthday party to do the repair work?

What if…

Think it through

Most of us delegate and outsource far less than we should, and “just outsource it” isn’t a terrible default. There’s few decisions in life that we can’t revisit later at lower cost than it might seem upfront. But as you get in the habit of delegating and outsourcing bits and pieces, it’s worth periodically reviewing the nuance involved, and if there’s things you find you miss doing for yourself–and whether that’s worth the cost.