Outsourcing? You'll still be a resource

It's hard to reduce labor to zero, but that's OK

Longtime readers know I advocate outsourcing lots of tasks. Often, a manageable amount of money can free up good bit of time. Rather than spending your weekends cleaning or running errands, you can spend them hanging out with your family. At work, rather than handling every detail, you hire a team and you provide direction. Even for folks who work for themselves, having an in-person or virtual assistant can be quite helpful.

However, it’s helpful to realize this: when you outsource, you’re still a resource. When you outsource a task that would otherwise fall to you, and that actually needs to get done, you won’t be able to let it go completely. You will need to have some level of involvement. It will just be way, way less involvement than when you were handling the task directly.

People are much happier when they focus on the reduction, rather than the small amount of lingering mental load.

A little bit of supervision

So, for instance, you might like to imagine that having a cleaning service come every week means that you won’t ever have to spend time cleaning your house again.

But that is not true. At the beginning you might need to show the cleaners around the house and let them know how you like things. Some weeks you might need to ask for some area to get extra attention. Perhaps it’s important to really spiff up the guest room because company is coming. You’ll probably wind up picking up things before the cleaners come so anything small and important doesn't inadvertently get put in the wrong spot. You’ll need to tell the cleaners when you’re canceling a week because you’re on vacation or moving the time because you’re having a gathering at the exact moment they’re coming. And of course if the cleaners are cleaning your kitchen on Wednesday, that doesn’t do your dishes on Saturday.

So even if your house cleaners do almost everything, you can’t check housecleaning off your list completely. You just don’t have to do most of it. You’ll be a lot less annoyed by the little things you have to do when you remember that fact.

Likewise, as convenient as grocery delivery can be, someone still has to order and put away the groceries. It’s also wise to check your bags to ensure you received what you ordered. This will mean fewer unpleasant surprises when it’s time to cook dinner!

Even when you’re hiring a full-time staff member at work, you can’t just hand a person a job description and assume everything listed will get done perfectly without you lifting a finger. If you hire a direct report to support your work and take on some things you had done yourself, you still have to be a resource. You may not have to perform the work yourself all that much any more, but supervising and supporting your direct report does require time and attention. If nothing else, you want to keep this person happy!

The truth about ‘passive income’

This concept of still needing to do some work, even if you’ve offloaded a lot, also comes into play with the idea of passive income. I maintain that there aren’t a whole lot of truly passive forms of income out there. I get royalty checks from books I wrote 15 years ago, but that’s because I’m still out here talking about time management all the time. Dividends and interest come closest to being truly passive, but they do require book keeping and making sure your accountant has the right forms. And most forms of so-called passive income require way more work than that. If you have a rental property, even if you use a property management company, you’ll need to make sure they get paid and check in occasionally to see that they’re doing a good job. If you’ve got a website where people can pay for virtual courses, even if you’ve already made the courses, you’ll need to check that the website is still working, and if the search engines change their algorithms, you’ll need to update things too.

So it goes. If you were hoping to spend 100 percent of your hours on leisure, this would be really annoying. But when you realize that’s close to impossible, you’ll be a lot happier.

There is no free lunch. There are very few instances in life when you can get something done and have nothing required of you. So when a little is required of you — and a lot is done by someone else — best not to resent the little you have to do. If you’ve made wise choices and trained people well, it probably will be just a little after a while, and that is a lovely thing indeed.