Time is one of your most valuable assets. With never-ending to-do lists and career responsibilities, knowing what to outsource and what to handle yourself can make a significant difference. It will help out with your productivity and well-being.
Outsourcing isn’t just for businesses but is also a strategic approach to optimizing your life. How do you decide what’s worth delegating and what requires your personal attention? In this article, I am going to break it down for you. Let’s start.
What is Outsourcing?
Outsourcing, in general, means making someone else do a certain task for you in return for something. People outsource all the time. From asking a friend to help you out with running some errand to hiring a freelancer to do a project, it’s all outsourcing.
It has become one of the most useful ways of being productive. When people realize they can hire someone who can do the job better and save them time, they outsource the task.
What’s Worth Outsourcing?
There are different things that are worth outsourcing. I’ve discussed the major ones below:
1. Household Chores and Maintenance
Cleaning, yard work, etc., take up precious hours every week. Consider hiring pros if you struggle with household upkeep and duties on a regular basis. Your schedule may be freed up for more purposeful pursuits with services like house cleaning, handyman repairs, etc.
2. Transportation and Delivery
Getting engaged with transportation and delivery tasks is also time-consuming. So, instead of making multiple trips yourself, you can use services like Shiply Shipping. It will help to find reliable transport solutions for large or fragile items. You can do it whenever you want to transport and deliver something to save time.
3. Grocery Shopping and meal prep:
Well, many of us love cooking but we know that it takes a lot of time. So, it’s better to outsource this thing as well in order to be a bit more productive. The best way to do that is by ordering groceries. Besides that, subscribing to a meal prep service can also help save time.
4. Administrative and Errand Tasks
Virtual assistants are also capable of organizing paperwork, scheduling trips, and coordinating appointments. If you manage a firm or put in long hours, assigning these little but time-consuming duties to others can boost productivity and lower stress levels.
5. Childcare and Pet Care
Finding trustworthy caregivers for your children or pets is essential. Hiring a babysitter, nanny, or pet sitter allows you to focus on work easily. You can handle your work while ensuring your loved ones are well cared for.
Things That You Should Always Handle Yourself:
Here are the details of these things:
1. Financial Planning and Budgeting
It’s true that outsourcing things like tax preparation is useful. However, finances are something that you should handle yourself. The same goes for budgeting. Handling these tasks yourself helps with understanding your financial situation better and helps manage it properly.
3. Health and Fitness
You can hire a personal trainer or a nutritionist for guidance, but ultimately, staying active and making healthy choices is up to you. Your well-being is too important to be left entirely in someone else’s hands.
4. Career Development
While you can delegate tasks at work, your career growth is your responsibility. You should always handle this thing by yourself instead of involving someone else. Try to build networks on your own and learn new skills to grow in your career.
5. Hobbies and Passions
Well, the whole point of hobbies is to enjoy free time, right? So, what’s the point of outsourcing them? It is usually wise to handle your hobbies and passion yourself. Enjoy these things whenever you have free time and don’t ask someone else to do them.
Final Thoughts
Outsourcing can be a powerful tool to create more time for what truly matters. People usually underestimate this power to improve productivity. It is a process that can be used in both professional and domestic tasks.
However, it is important to understand what types of things are worth outsourcing. Also, there are some things that you shouldn’t outsource at all. So, it is important to understand both of them and outsource more carefully to get the best results.
FAQs:
What do you mean by outsourcing?
Outsourcing means hiring an external party to handle a task. It helps people save their time and spend it on other more important things. These chores can be both domestic and professional.
What things can you outsource?
You can outsource any type of thing that takes a lot of time. Also, you can ask someone else to do the task in case you can’t do it yourself the right way.
What is the best example of outsourcing?
The best example of outsourcing is hiring a freelancer to do a job. People use platforms like Fiverr to find a talented individual to do a certain task, such as designing an ad poster.
What jobs get outsourced the most?
There are different types of jobs that people prefer to outsource. Some of the most common ones include call center services, SEO, Digital Marketing, etc.
