Outsource The Tasks That Don’t Require Your Voice

It’s easy, as an entrepreneur, to feel like you’re spreading yourself too thin. You can feel like you’re committing yourself to way too many items, projects, tasks, work, etc.

You can feel like everything is mounting up and you don’t have the bandwidth to handle any of it. That sucks. It really does.

Like Bilbo said in Lord of the Rings, you feel like not enough butter scraped over too much bread. I’ve been there multiple times in my life, and every time, I’ve struggled with the solution.

At the end of the day, the solution is always going to be this.

You can’t accomplish the work of 10 people without the support of more than just yourself. So what do you do? You learn to outsource.

• You outsource because the one resource you can’t generate more of is always your time.
• You outsource because businesses and projects don’t succeed by having their founders manage every detail — they succeed by getting things done.
• You outsource because if you overload yourself with crap that you can’t manage, you’re going to go nuts.

You can outsource anything you don’t have to do yourself.

That’s really all it is. You have to find someone else who can shoulder the load, or find a way to accomplish your tasks without handling them personally. How you do that depends on your budget, your needs and your time. But if you don’t do it, you’re only going to drag yourself down.

I’ve got a simple rule of thumb. I try to outsource anything that doesn’t specifically need my voice in order for it to get done.

Anything that requires my voice in person, my voice in emails, or my voice in blog posts, I have to do myself. Anything else, I can delegate. For example, I need to write my posts on Medium as me. But I can get a freelancer to do the research for me.

My posts are still going to be of a high quality, because I’m working my ass off to write them. But now, I’m doing it with the references already picked out and all the information I need at my fingertips.

That’s a simple way to get something done without spending hours on it myself.

I do the same thing for sorting my leads, for editing and proof reading, for calendar management. At Speedlancer, it’s pretty much par for course that if we’ve got a series of tasks that have to be done, we’d rather delegate to freelancers than commit management resources.

It lets us scale. It lets me scale. It lets me turn my hours into resources.

I can take those hours and do something of a lot more value. In terms of my own life, I’d value being able to watch a couple episodes of Stranger Things or work on some actual strategy over saving a few bucks. So, I outsource.

And as crazy as I am, I’d be a lot crazier if I didn’t, trust me.

Credit Source: 

 Jon Westenberg