When doing it yourself gets expensive

There is a point at which thrift becomes the most expensive habit in the business, and it arrives long before most people notice, because the cost of doing everything yourself never appears on any statement.

Handling something yourself feels like saving money because the alternative has a visible price and your own time does not. That asymmetry is the whole problem. An invoice for help is a number you can see; four hours of your evening is a number nobody records.

The comparison that actually matters

The wrong comparison is between what help costs and what you can afford. The right comparison is between what help costs and what you would produce in the same hours doing the thing only you can do. If those hours would have gone to sleeping or to family, help is a lifestyle purchase and should be judged as one. If they would have gone to work that earns, help is an investment with a rate of return you can estimate.

Most people never make this comparison because it requires admitting how those hours are currently spent.

“The hour you saved was not free; it was taken from the only work nobody else could do.”

Delegate the repeatable, not the difficult

The instinct is to hand off what you dislike. The better rule is to hand off what is repeatable and describable, whether you like it or not. Anything you can write down as a procedure can be done by someone else at a predictable standard. Anything you cannot write down will come back to you regardless, having consumed both their time and yours.

This means the first work of delegating is writing, not hiring. If you cannot describe the task in a page, you are not ready to give it away, and the failure that follows will look like the other person's fault.

Standards drop, and that is often acceptable

Work handed over is usually done slightly worse at first, and sometimes permanently. The question is whether the drop matters. For a great deal of ordinary business activity it does not, and holding everything to the standard you would apply to your own best work is a way of guaranteeing you keep doing all of it.

Decide in advance which tasks have a floor that must not be crossed, and accept adequacy everywhere else. Refusing to name that distinction is how people end up doing their own bookkeeping at midnight while calling it attention to detail.

A worked example

Say a routine administrative task takes six hours a month and could be handled by someone else for a modest monthly figure. Six hours is not much. But over a year it is most of a working fortnight, and it is a fortnight taken in the fragmented evening hours when you would otherwise do the thinking work that has no deadline and therefore never gets done.

That fortnight is where the pricing note above never gets written, the trace of your last five jobs never gets done, and the second demand channel never gets started. The cost of the saving is the entire category of work that has no external deadline.

What to do this week

List everything you did last week that could be written down as a procedure. Price the cheapest one out. Not to hire immediately, but to see the number next to the hours, which is a comparison most people avoid making on purpose.