That’s right – for just $60 a week, I’ve bought myself some time to chase after some dreams: more time to workout, play guitar, and write in this blog. For $60 I managed to free up 10 hours every week!
Some of you reading might be thinking, 10 hours isn’t that much time. Really? Imagine what you could do with just one of your long term goals with 10 hours a week. If you are trying to lose weight, that 10 hours a week would buy you enough time on a treadmill to burn 2000-5000 calories a week (depending on your personal level of fitness). If you wish you could spend more time with family, imagine having 10 hours a week more quality time with your loved ones. Trying to start a home business? I bet you would love 10 hours a week more to work (or maybe just to catch up on sleep!).
Data Mining for Hours
I’m a total data mining nut. I love gathering data, looking for patterns, discrepancies and seeing what I can learn. For many years I’ve made schedules for what I intend to do throughout the days and weeks, and then compared it to what actually happens.
We all know when we spend 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours at work, an hour a day at the gym, etc – but where does the rest of the time go? Everyday I bet each of us spends 3-6 hours that go unaccounted for, for tasks that we don’t even realize are sucking away our days. To find out where my time was leaking, I painstaking logged everything I did for a month – from the time I woke up, to the time I went to bed, everything went into a large spreadsheet. I learned that these were of some of my biggest time wasters:
- Cooking
- Washing dishes – especially pots, pans and knives that can’t go in the dishwasher
- Shopping – especially for food!
- Driving out to get take out (just DRIVING!)
All told, these tasks took anywhere from 9-15 hours a week, for an average of 12 hours a week. See a pattern? These tasks are all related to eating. And I’m not counting the hours I spend eating out – just preparing meals. Eating out with friends is a social activity, and hardly time I would call wasted. However, I have no desire to get any better at cooking, and I don’t enjoy cooking, washing dishes, shopping or getting take out. So I decided I needed to deal with this situation.
Considering My Options – How Could I Save Time?
After I discovered how much time I was losing preparing, picking up and cleaning up after myself making meals, I thought through a few different alternatives. I had just recently finished reading The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris (a great book that discusses, among other thing, outsourcing various tasks in your life) and thought about various ways I could outsource my meal preparation:
- Eating out for every meal – The biggest drawbacks here were 1. it would be expensive 2. it is hard to find food as healthy as the meals I like to eat, and 3. if I have to drive to get take out or eat at a restaurant I may not end up saving any time.
- Ordering in bulk for take out – There’s a restaurant my father frequents where they cook a variety of low cholesterol meals just for him – fish, chicken, etc. The food is reasonably healthy and reasonably priced. The downside here is I would need to schedule pick ups with them, and I would not have complete control over the menu.
- Hire someone to cook for me - This seemed like the optimal choice to me. I decided I would hire someone to purchase food while they were shopping, come to my place, cook and wash dishes. Assuming they are a better cook than I am, they should be able to cook faster than I can. Also, since they could purchase ingredient while shopping for themselves anyway, it should add relatively little time to their shopping trips. I decided this was the path I was going to take – hire someone to cook for me.
Now We’re Cooking! Craig’s List, Here I Come!
Having chosen my plan of action, I went to Craig’s List and researched full time chef/cooking jobs. I learned the average wages paid were $9-14 an hour. Based on this, I decided I would hire someone twice a week for 2 hours at a time, and pay $15 an hour, plus costs for ingredients. I posted an ad detailing the postion on Thursday night, fell asleep and expected to wake up with a handful of applicants. How many prospective cooks could there be who needed a few hours of sporadic work each week?
Well, it turns out quite a few and when I woke up I was in for a surprise. What a response! I had over 30 emails already! By the time I finally took the ad down (posted in “gigs”) later that weekend, I had received over 70 applicants. I was stunned.
We Have a Winner!
After corresponding back and forth with a few of them over the weekend, I finally settled on one who I’ll call “Casey”. Casey proposed that rather than coming to my apartment and cooking, she would cook additional food at home when she was preparing meals for her family and bring them by my apartment twice a week. In my original ad, I had stated I wanted someone to come and do the dishes and fold my laundry, and she stated she was willing to do that provided she was compensated. I no longer cared about the dishes or the laundry – if she was able to cook at home and deliver the food directly, that was even better! She suggested a menu with various healthy meals she would prepare for the first couple weeks, and was flexible on the drop off time to meet my schedule.
Compared to some of the other people who contacted me, Casey was organized, motivated to do a good job, and clearly understood exactly what I was looking for and how to alleviate my problem – she was interested in making this work as smoothly as possible, and simplify my life. We had a winner!
We settled on $60 plus cost of ingredients, and I asked for references. I called them up and they were absolutely stellar, so I told her to start Monday – 10 days after I had posted the ad.
The Results So Far
I’ve been doing this experiment for 3 weeks now, and I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. I literally never have to go out shopping anymore, and I hardly even need to use dishes as she prepares everything so I can eat it directly out of tupperware (which I can place in the dishwasher). Best of all – I now have over 10 hours a week that I didn’t have before. I bet it doesn’t take her more than an extra hour or two a week worth of effort, since she’s cooking meals for her family anyway – and I don’t care if it takes her only 10 minutes a week. The extra time I have is worth it. She asks for my input, but I for the most part ask her to make any healthy food she wants (high in fiber and protein, lots of fresh vegetables/fruits, lean meats etc etc). It is the first time in years I’ve had fruits and vegetables fresh from the farmers market. I’m eating better than ever, and cheaper than if I was going out to restaurants.
Your Thoughts?
Are there areas in your life you think you can outsource? What do you think of this experiment? I’m interested in hearing your thoughts as well!
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