Microtasking

"Why should I pay someone to do something that I can do myself?"

Of all the questions we regularly receive, this is one of the easiest to answer, but yet the toughest to explain. Once you've adopted a broader mindset of what outsourcing really is, the question becomes superfluous, rhetorical. Getting to that broader mindset, however, can be a little jarring.

The simple truth of the matter is that you're already quite comfortable with paying other people to do work for you - you may just not realize it. To take an extreme example, consider your shoes. You could make your own shoes. You could buy yards of leather and rubber, cut them to the shape of your feet and sew them together with tough thread. Ostensibly this would be cheaper than buying shoes because you'd be buying the materials in bulk and using your own labor to assemble them.

But you don't make your own shoes. You outsource that task, opting instead to buy your shoes prefabricated, distributed and resold by a retailer. Why is that? We've established that you could, in principle, construct your own shoes cheaper by doing it yourself. So what keeps you from doing it? What stops you from checking out a book on leather work and getting started?

Time. You value your time more than the difference between the cost of the retail shoes and the hypothetical cost you'd incur sewing your own.

Ok, maybe cobbling is a bad example - I mean, who would challenge the necessity of specialization when a manufacturer can obviously achieve much lower aggregate costs than you could ever expect to.

Let's pick an example a little closer to home. Presuming you have a car, do you change your own oil? Why not? You could acquire the blocks to put your car up (fixed cost), buy the oil, drip pans and tools and do it yourself. It'd be cheaper in the long run than the chain store mechanics. What's stopping you? Why don't you read an article online about how to properly drain a car's oil and get to it?

Time again. Learning to change your car's oil takes time, which you don't care to spend. And even if you get good at it, there's a fair chance you'll never be faster at it than the specialty shops with all their fine machinery.

Then again, maybe that's a bad example too since vehicle maintenance is a specialized skill, just like cobbling. Let's see if we can find an activity you probably outsource that doesn't require a great degree of skill.

How about food preparation? Tossing a salad, boiling some noodles and heating up some sauce are not difficult tasks. In fact, if you follow the instructions on the packaging, it's pretty difficult to mess up. Given that basic food preparation is so easy, and that raw materials are so cheap, why are companies like McDonald's and Pizza Hut so effective?

Of course, the answer again is the value of time. Fast food companies allow you to exchange money for time - it takes them less time to provide you with what you want than you would take making it yourself. Even in the case of an actual fancy restaurant, it's quicker to have the chef prepare you a high quality meal than for you to purchase all the requisite ingredients, follow a recipe, and clean up afterwards.

Once you realize that you're already paying people to do things for you, the "why" becomes obvious. It's because you value your time. Having other people work for you is not just for the rich, it's an everyday fact of life.

One question remains: now that you're comfortable with the idea of trading money for time (which you do daily), what other kinds of tasks can you offload? What, in your life, takes up time but doesn't require your own personal creative expertise?

That's what you should microtask.