The Power of Delegating
When it comes to growing your business, much of what we hear has to do with employing people or resources to do the busy work so you can focus on doing what only you can do. As a father of 5 trying to get my business up and running, I definitely feel the pinch on my time when I find myself doing tasks that I would rather hire someone to handle for me, so I can focus on doing the work that I do best. For me, busy work comes in the form of things like audio editing, filing, invoicing, deposits, etc. I am still a ways off from being in a position financially to make that investment, but you can be sure that I’ve got it on my radar.
Where Am I Spending 85 Hours Per Week?
As I have considered how my business might scale in the future, I realized there is another area that I also need to scale. The home/family. We don’t often think of our home as something to grow or scale, but if you look at it from the right angle, the home is very much like a business (except that you can’t really fire the “employees”). The home has a monthly budget, needs regular maintenance and cleaning, has a set of routines and rhythms, and also goes through various seasons of growth. In my current season, the home/family is very demanding. I spend an average of 12 hours/week preparing food, 3 hours/week bathing children, 1 hour/week doing some form of yard work, 15 hours/week tidying and cleaning, 30 hours/week spending time with my kids/as a family, 15 hours/week caring for children while my spouse works, 7 hours/week spending one on one time with my spouse, 1 hour/week fixing/maintaining things, and then there’s travel time, holidays/vacations, birthdays, accidents and spills, sleep, and the list goes on. Oh, and there’s a baby on the way. Yikes, I spend nearly 85 hours per week on average on home/family related stuff and at least 35 hours of that is stuff that I could have someone else do without taking time away from my family.
Investing When You Can’t Hire Someone
I have to remember that my time is valuable. If I am capable of producing more value in an hour than it would cost to pay someone to do the things that currently take up my time, hiring someone is a good investment. Also, the time I get to spend with the ones I love is WAY more valuable that what it would cost to hire someone, which is an investment I plan to make as soon as I can afford to. I want to free up my time right now though! What are some things that I can do now without hiring people, to make the home run more smoothly and save myself some time?
Here are some ideas and some things we already do:
1. Scheduling time more intentionally
When we don’t have a good schedule in place for home related stuff, we are in danger of using our time inefficiently. By adding better structure to our schedules, we may only be saving 15 or 30 minute/week, but over time, those minutes add up.
2. Getting help from family
About once/quarter our extended family schedules a family work day to pitch in and do maintenance work on someone’s house. We rotate from family to family. One weekend, we had Grandmas and Grandpas, aunts and uncles, cousins all come to help us get started on a storage shed for my backyard. We finished it that weekend! Not only was it a great way to get the work done, but it also allowed us to spend some quality time together as a family.
Additionally, if you have parents living close who may be willing to watch their grandchildren for a few hours/week, that could be a tremendous help.
3. Getting help from friends
Similar to what I said above about family, you can work out arrangements with close friends. One of the best things you can do in either case is to present a clear picture of what they are helping you do. You might even go as far as to make a business presentation so they can see the value their help is providing.
4. Dialing back the perfectionism
I tend to be an all or nothing kind of person. My wife gives me a hard time because I take so much longer with some of the household chores than she does. I realized one day while cleaning the baseboards that I was cleaning at a rate of about 6 inches per minute. I wanted them to be spotless! At some point, it’s better to let something not be perfect, than to spend unnecessary time. It might mean letting some of the mess go *twitch.
5. Employing my spouse
Regardless of what it is, I always see what my wife is doing as in support of my business. Even the stuff she does just for herself is ultimately a benefit to my business. She is an equal partner with me in everything. She is a much better writer than I, so from time to time she edits my writing. Alternatively, I have much of the web and design knowledge that she lacks, so from time to time, I do some work for her. Though you can do this, in our situation we don’t give each other paychecks, but we do recognize that our time is valuable. If your spouse has a skill set that your business requires that doesn’t essentially have to come from you, they may be willing to invest in the business with you by freeing you up to do other things.
6. Employing the kids
So technically this may fall under “hiring” someone, and I don’t have much experience with this yet. Our oldest is 8 years old, and right now he and his younger siblings (5 and 4) help with the after dinner chores. We pay them a base monthly allowance for the after dinner chores and a few other responsibilities we’ve given them. At first it was really difficult and time consuming. It would have been easier to just do the work ourselves. But as time went on, they got better and better at doing their chores and now it saves us a lot of time as a family to do other things. We are already talking about other responsibilities we can start giving them that will allow us as a family to share more of the load.
It helps me to remember that, while I keep aspects of family and business separate, both influence one another as to how I spend my time. An investment in one is a benefit to the other, therefore it is a good practice to actively look for ways to scale the “home/family business.”
Are there things you are doing that I didn’t list above that have allowed you to spend more time doing your best work or with the people you love? If so, please share them in the comments below. I’d like to do a comprehensive follow up on this soon to share more detail with you about how our home and business runs from day to day, and how these ideas are helping me.