Why did we start outsourcing (almost) everything?

Some families outsource household chores and personal decisions to simplify their lives and make more money.
photo: Unsplash

Sarah Greener built a business by paying people to do the chores she didn’t want to do (or that slowed her down at work).

She doesn’t clean the house or hang out the laundry. She doesn’t go shopping or plan meals. She hires a stylist to help her plan her outfits. Someone else does the gardening.

Instead, she focuses her energy on business coaching and helping other entrepreneurs, mostly women. Many of her talks involve encouraging these clients to free up time and mental space in order to accelerate their business and make more money.

Sarah Greener is a business coach who encourages her clients to free up time by outsourcing household tasks.
photo: supply

“I still talk to women who run full-time businesses and they still act like 1950s housewives who cook, clean or raise kids,” said Greener, founder of the Moxie Movement, a hub for self-help podcasts, books and services for female business owners.

Outsourcing is not new. For thousands of years, the wealthy have employed maids, butlers, and sometimes servants and slaves. Now, some working women are seeking support to simplify their lives and be more efficient. Groceries can be delivered with just a few clicks of a mouse. Someone will pick up, wash, fold, and deliver your laundry right to your door. Services like My Food Bag reduce the decision fatigue of cooking dinner every night. Personal stylists are no longer for celebrities, but for everyone.

“Relieve the mental burden”

For Casie Smith, owner and creative director of New Plymouth-based graphic design company Design Garage, personal outsourcing is all about “reducing the mental load” of all the little decisions that can come with home life, like cleaning, planning and scheduling. Paper Mental workload is divided into four categories: anticipation, recognition, decision, and monitoring.

Casie Smith is the owner of Design Garage, a graphic and web design studio based in New Plymouth.
photo: supply

“If it’s something that’s taking up your brain space, then you can outsource it to someone else so I can be more efficient in my business,” said Smith, who has two children and whose husband also runs his own business.

She has her house cleaned weekly, frequently uses a meal-planning service, meets with a stylist annually to streamline her clothes shopping process, and has hired a business coach and a nutritionist in the past.

Spend money to make money or save money

Clients, including Smith, pay Marianne Nairn to review their wardrobes, look at their personal style and buy clothes for them, but Nairn thinks many people would make more doing so.

Not only do they save time, but they also spend less money on useless purchases. “It’s about making functional choices,” says Nairn, whose clients refer to the work she does for them as “power shopping.”

For Toyah-Maree Langeveld, hiring a cleaner was a simple math equation. If the cleaner charged $50 an hour, could she make more by spending an hour on her business? The answer was yes, but she needed the encouragement of a business coach to accept that answer.

“My most valuable commodity is time, but it may not be the same for other people,” said Ms. Langeveld, who runs Shadow Administration, a virtual assistant service for traditional workers, and has three children, one of whom has a chronic illness. She also uses a pet groomer, shops online and has someone clean her house a few times a year.

Marianne Nairn is a personal stylist based in Taranaki.
photo: supply

Downsizing can be free or low-cost

This doesn’t always require investing cash upfront to free up time to earn money. It could include asking your partner and older children to take on more household responsibilities, says business coach Greener. study The study found that household responsibilities are evenly distributed in a couple household only when the woman is the sole breadwinner, meaning she does 100 percent of the work but still has to do 50 percent of the cleaning, cooking, planning, and so on.

“Women have decision fatigue,” she said. “Where can we make one decision that reduces all the other decisions to reduce decision fatigue.”

One of Greener’s clients shares meals with another family. Each family cooks three large meals per week, for a total of six meals per family. This reduces the labor of shopping and cooking, as well as the time spent deciding what to eat each night.

Outsourcing could also mean busing kids to school (her daughter’s bus fare costs $4.50, adding 45 productive minutes to Greener’s day), making deliveries or swapping babysitting duties with another family. You could also hire a cleaner to do the occasional job you really hate and put off, like cleaning the oven.

“I think you still need a village to raise a family,” she said. “The problem is the village is no longer free. The village no longer lives with you.”

Marie Kondo is a personal organizer from Japan.
photo: Netflix

‘People are very angry’

When cultural moments like the traditional wife movement or Kid Popular on social media, the idea that women have it all — career, family, nice house — has come under fire. (Traditional wives assume the traditional housewife role, focusing on labor-intensive activities like churning butter and making bread. Bratt means messy and proud.)

Liz Bradley, known as the “Tidy Lady,” offers tidying services, a concept popularized by Japanese personal organizer, author and TV host Marie Kondo, who helps people around the world clean out their cupboards. Some of Bradley’s clients ask her not to put any signs on their cars, though, because they don’t want neighbors to know they need help.

Greener said she often receives comments from people who express anger at her lack of interest in cleaning, laundry and cooking.

“People are really mad at me for not picking up the kids, not showing up for school events, not baking for events, not cleaning, not doing laundry,” she said. “That’s what they’re mad at.”