Buying time; The role of outsourcing in a self-reliant family

As a couple that is striving to be more self-sufficient and self-reliant, we find that we both have strong internal drives to do things on our own.  Everything.  Always.  Regardless of the number or complexity of projects going on, we would constantly worry about how we would find the time to get them done, let alone how we would learn the skills that would be needed to do some of them that were new to us.

Personally, I felt like I was not doing things “sustainably” unless I was doing them all on my own.  Of course, if anything is unsustainable, it is trying to do everything by yourself!  Funny enough, this realization came to me as I was reading to our kids one night from the “Little House on the Prairie” books (a great read for kids that are just getting into “chapter books”, by the way).  The family in the book has the skills to do almost anything required on a homestead…build a house from scratch, hunt and forage for most of their food, make their own clothes, you name it.  But even they needed to rely on their neighbors or visiting family for help once in a while.  In reality, it is nearly impossible for anyone to be completely self-sufficient.  The amount of skills, resources, and time required to do so are just not attainable for a single person/small family.

After a few years of crushing ourselves, Maria and I finally gave in and opened ourselves up to the idea that others could help us too.  At first, we had a really hard time picking which projects we could call in the cavalry on, and which to still tackle on our own.  Enter outsourcing!  As a person that manages people in my day-job, I routinely need to make decisions about what to work on myself, what tasks should be given to others, and who they should be given to.  At the core of this decision making process is a series of questions that you should ask yourself for a given task.

1. Do I have the skills and tools that I need to do the job myself? If not, is it a skill that I want/need to learn?  If so, is now the right time, or is this the right job to learn these skills on?
2. Can I do the job better than anyone else?  If not, what are the consequences if I do it incorrectly?  Could I use outsourcing the job as a way to learn some skills in a safer way?
3. How long will this job take if I do it?  Can I afford for it to take that long, and what other things will not get done if I decide to do it myself?  Are there other places where my time would be more well-spent?
4. How much would it cost for me to do the job myself in both time and money?  How does that compare with what someone else would charge to do the job?  Is it worth it?
5. Is this something that I will get a significant amount of pleasure from doing?  Is there a strong personal driver that makes me really want to do it on my own?

Hopefully, by answering these questions, you should have a pretty good feel for what tasks/projects you want to get help on.  How different people answer these questions for the same task will very greatly depending on their skills, personal capacity, and finances, so don’t feel bad if at first you are making the decision to outsource some important projects.  We have been doing it much more often now, and have found some consistent themes for ourselves. The three most common examples of scenarios where this has led us to considering outsourcing are:

• There are others that can do the job much better than us, and the consequence of doing the job incorrectly are high.  Good examples include felling large trees near our home, installing a transfer switch on our junction box for the generator, and building an elevated deck off the back of our house.  I felt like I could do most of these, but if I did them wrong, someone could get seriously hurt.  In these cases, we seek to take an “apprentice” approach to the outsourcing, offering our labor as a way to safely learn some skills and perhaps get a small discount on the job.  As an example, when we put our deck on a few years ago, I really wanted to learn how to frame, so I took three days off and helped the contractor to do the job.  He cut a few hundred bucks off the price, I learned some new skills, and in the process, I got hooked on country music!  Not a bad deal overall…

• We need/want the job done quickly, but don’t have the time/skills to do it ourselves right now.  A good example here is replacing flooring in our bedrooms.  I knew how to do the job, but couldn’t dedicate the time needed to do it without significant interruption to sleeping arrangements, and we really wanted to get the old carpets out fast to alleviate the allergen load on Maria and the kids.  These are the hardest ones for me to let go because I know that I could do them if I had the time, but having a structure for the decision definitely made it easier.

• Routine tasks that are preventing us from making progress against other important objectives.  Our best example here is hiring a cleaning service.  We spend SO MUCH TIME cleaning our house, and it still feels like a wreck most of the time.  We currently only have a cleaning service in once a month, but the time that it frees up is amazing and totally worth the money.  Also, the relief of knowing that we don’t need to constantly be chasing dirt around the house in order to keep up is extremely liberating.  Another great example here is periodic short term child care.  Certainly, no one wants to think about the outsourcing of their own children 😉 but done in small bits, it can be very effective.  For example, Maria has found a small playgroup where she can drop off our youngest son for 2-3 hours once a week while the older guys are at pre-school.  While it seems like a short time, the amount of productivity that she can achieve with those few hours to herself is awesome.

“No man is an island”, and no family can be 100% self-reliant all of the time.  Once we came to this conclusion, we found that outsourcing could be a highly effective way of staying focused on the important things.  We are now able to get so much more done around the homestead, even freeing ourselves up where we are able to help others out and pay it forward, giving us an even higher feeling of community sustainability.

How about you?  Are there things that you are struggling that could benefit by getting some outside help?  We would love to hear examples of things that you have outsourced in your life!