outsourcing - when to remove yourself from your own life

This is an interesting way of looking at it… I’ll use hypothetical numbers for the illustration.

This post is aimed at those thinking in terms of work or business, but the type of thinking can apply to anyone… I came up with a few creative ideas on how outsourcing can help ANYONE in this blog post, and there will be more along those lines. But have a look through this strategy – The hourly rate excercise alone is an interesting one.

Working Out Your Productive Hourly Rate (PHR)

1. What do you get paid per year? $52,000
2. Divide your yearly wage by 52 to get your weekly wage. $1,000 per week
3. How many hours do you work per week? 40 hours
4. How many of these hours are actually productive per week? 10 hours
5. Divide your weekly wage by your productive hours per week to get your your productive hourly rate. $1,000 per week / 10 hours = $100 per hour « Remember this figure.

Now – this is the fun bit.

Removing Yourself From Your Own Life

1. Over the course of a week make a list of EVERYTHING you do. Checking emails, making breakfast, ironing shirts, posting blogs, buying a train ticket… Researching things on the internet, updating Facebook, talking to your Mum, etc etc.
2. Take that list and circle everything that you do more than once over the course of the week.The idea here is to pick up all of the recurring tasks that can be made into a process and outsourced.
3. Create three columns: Column 1 is Me Tasks. Column 2 is Outsourced Tasks. Column 3 is Want To Do’s.
4. Firstly, move all the things that you like and want to keep doing into the Want To Do column. Stuff like calling your wife or girlfriend for a chat during the day, exercise (although you may not WANT to… you get the idea), etc… The things you enjoy.
5. With what’s left, apply this: ANYTHING YOU CAN OUTSOURCE FOR LESS THAN A QUARTER OF YOUR PRODUCTIVE HOURLY RATE SHOULD BE OUTSOURCED.

How to do it from there? I’ll cover that in another blog post on systematization. It sounds boring, but the time, brain space, and productive potential it frees up is phenomenal…

A couple of good places to hire people to do your work are:

• oDesk – www.odesk.com
• Elance – www.elance.com
• And then there’s your friendly credit card provider. Both Visa and AMEX provide concierge services which can be used to outsource both ad hoc (i.e. once of things like finding concert tickets or looking for a price on something) and recurring tasks.