Stop wasting your time, learn to outsource

Outsourcing is a learned skill. To get better at it, you need to practice, practice and practice more.

Start small to acquire the outsourcing mindset

Tim Ferriss recommends you to start outsourcing small tasks, unimportant stuff, to get you into the mindset of outsourcing.

This kind of tasks might not be worth outsourcing if you only consider productivity as a measuring factor. You will spend more time explaining the task than doing it yourself or it might not be as good as if you had not it yourself.

I think you should accept it, you do it for the learning experience, not for the productivity, yet.

Overtime, you will start to see more and things that can be outsourced, especially recurring things you do daily someone else can take over.

Systemize what you do

How do you go about writing a new blog post? Do you just wait for inspiration of a new topic and start writing and publish it. Done?

Instead you could see blogging like a process:
- Keyword research: what do people want to know?
- Writing
- Editing / Reviewing
- Publishing
- Promoting to different websites
- Setting an alert for when to write the next blog post

What are the benefits of systemizing everything?

1. You can articulate what you do and gain perspective on it
2. You can improve the processes now that they are written
3. You break big chunk of work into smaller tasks
4. You may be able to outsource some tasks
5. You can give the process manual to someone else

Review the return on investment of outsourcing

Once you get the outsourcing mindset, you might go into the other extreme, trying to outsource everything like crazy.

Sometimes it just doesn't make sense to outsource a task because it would take you too long to explain, or the results won't be what you need, or it is too expensive to outsource, or the task shouldn't be done at all.

Eliminate, automate, outsource.

- First ask yourself, is this task really moving my business forward? People tend to go and implement short term tactics that won't have ANY impact on the business. "Will this task really make any difference?" No? Eliminate.

- Many things you do can probably be automated by some tool. For example, how many people still repost their blog articles inside their Facebook page manually? I am sad just to imagine of the number. Once you have your processes documented, find tools to automate them.

- Finally, if you can't eliminate the task and if you can't automate it, try to outsource it. Customer support is a good example of this. You can't get rid of it and it can't be automated. Outsource it and focus on what you are good at, focus on your strengths.

So to recap: start outsourcing now with small tasks, then start seeing your business like a list of processes and finally only outsource when benefitial.

1 Comment

• Benard O.

  about 1 year ago

  Well Said Sir, Outsource, outsource, outsource. It is a good thing for small companies that need to break out of the early stages of company growth.

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