Weighing the Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

Finding a fine balance

Lorna and I are really great at meeting deadlines for our clients. We really are. However, we – and most work-from-home-professionals that we know – constantly put our own work on the back burner and fly past self-set deadlines like we haven’t a care in the world. We have a separate blog for our business that is utterly neglected, we have really good marketing plans that we’ve yet to put to good use, and we have a number of small personal projects that we never seem to have time to even work on, let alone finish.

Oh, and we’ve tried to work around it. We have a “business account” that automatically receives 15 percent of everything we make, so we tried paying ourselves from that account as a way to get motivated. Basically, we hired ourselves to write blog posts for $10 each. I wrote zero. Lorna wrote two. That was a month ago.

We also sat each other down and put on our stern faces. “We need to get more posts up.” “You write two articles for the marketing idea, and I’ll do three. No backing out.” Of course, we backed out.

Finally, after much painful deliberation, we decided to outsource them to other writers.

Now, I’m a pretty logical gal. I know that paying someone else to write a $15 blog post for us is a big fat waste of money for two reasons:

A) I could write it myself at any point of almost any given day. It’s 30 minutes of work, tops.
B) We are paying out money that we earned (i.e., the $15 I made writing an article of virtually the same length has to be taxed, and is therefore actually only about $12 – so I am essentially losing $3 in addition to spending the same amount of time working anyway).

Still, it feels like the greatest idea ever.

The question of outsourcing has been plaguing us in more ways than just this. Lorna and I have both – completely independently of one another – been toying with the idea of hiring someone to come clean our houses. My house is a mess. There are dust bunnies under the couch larger than my daughter, my sink is full of dishes, and I believe we each have one clean pair of underwear left (which means I’ll probably buy some more when I’m out and about tomorrow rather than actually do the laundry).

Basically, we are willing to have complete strangers enter our homes while we sit at our computers, clean around us while trying not to let us see their faces of disgust, and charge us more than we will actually make in that same amount of time to make our environments livable.

Again, the logical Tamara comes out to play:

A) I will pay the equivalent of two hours of my working time to have someone else clean my house in one hour.
B) I will probably also take the time to make her some cookies and kiss her feet.

Again, I’m really starting to feel this idea.

I once came across an article by a freelance writer discussing the ever-present question of how much to charge (I can’t find it anywhere now, and believe me – I looked). Overall, he was really pompous and irritating. He talked about how his time is worth $100 per hour (or something like that), and that he never spent time on activities he deemed “less worthy” than that $100. So he didn’t mow the lawn because he could hire a lawn company to do it for $35. If he went outside and did it himself, he’d be wasting $65. He went on like this for awhile.

I had a few problems with this theory:

1. Once you start quantifying your time like that, how do you stop? If he’s having dinner with his wife and she starts discussing inane topics, is he going to cut her off and go take his plate to the computer instead? “Sorry, honey. You just wasted $50 with that stupid story about your yoga class.”
2. There is more value to an activity than just the time investment. For example, I wondered if this man belonged to a gym (insert: gym fees, gym clothes, gas to get there). Going outside and mowing the lawn would be excellent exercise, especially if he got one of those old push mowers. He could essentially save himself money in gym costs if he mowed his own lawn twice a week. Plus, there’s the simple benefit of going outside and enjoying the air. He could listen to some catchy tunes, meet some neighbors, or simply enjoy being alive rather than attached to his computer screen.

He would probably have a problem with my outsourcing idea – not because it is asking other people to do things that I can do perfectly well myself, but because I’m not making the wisest financial decision.

So where does the balance lie? Do my distaste of cleaning and my inability to self-motivate secondary projects qualify as enough of a cause to make outsourcing a good idea? Or am I just being lazy and financially irresponsible?