WAKEshine

You’ve been developing a website for some time and you’re getting close to launch date.  You’ve decided to contract out to somebody to write the user’s manual.  But now that the task of specifying what you want is coming up, you’re starting to have doubts.

You think "By the time I spec it out, I’ll have put in almost the same work as writing it myself."  Or: "They may not even do a good enough job, and I’ll have to send it back and ask for a rewrite.  That’s more trouble than doing it myself."

You know what?

You’re probably right.

You know what else?

Learning to outsource part of your work is not an inherent skill, it’s one that needs to be developed.  The first time you do it, it could be a disaster.  It likely will be difficult.  But in order to move up the value chain, to become a provider of greater value, this skill is a must.

You can read about it, but in the end you will develop it through practice.  This practice will give you greater skills in managing people, it will force you to think about your project at a higher level, and it will build your network.

Once you get past the point where outsourcing is more trouble than doing it yourself, you have increased your reach.  You are now investing resources other than time to produce something that is bigger than what you could do yourself.  This leaves you time to work on the most critical parts of your business.

Before I learned this, I would be making big charts of what needs to be done in the project.  As I wrote down steps that I don’t like doing (at that time, just about anything other than programming), I could see my evenings and weekends slipping away.  It was a mental drain just to put it on the todo list.

Now that I have learned to pay others to do a lot of this work, I no longer need to put it on my todo list.  In terms of my stress over it, it’s "done" as soon as I think of it.  I have somebody I trust who will take care of it.