Just A Few Reasons Why Outsourcing Should Be a Major Part of Your Productivity-Boosting Mission
Time is money, and the early bird gets the worm. Whatever it is you do in your professional life, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you can certainly be more efficient in one dimension or another – and that, by improving your efficiency, you could dramatically improve your professional prospects as a whole.
In fact, productivity is such a sought-after goal in the business world, that there are a virtually unlimited number of patented techniques and strategies out there for optimising and enhancing productivity in general.
Many new entrepreneurs, in particular, become almost obsessed with finding the best “productivity hacks” – and, that’s a pretty good sort of obsession to have, if you want to have the best possible chance of making real waves with your business concept.
Among all the different things you could do to become more productive, though, there are a few strategies and approaches that have the potentially life-changing payoffs as practising effective outsourcing. To that end, many leading productivity blogs will focus specifically on providing the right outsourcing resources to enable their readers to really master this fundamental skill.
Unfortunately, many new entrepreneurs, in particular, don’t feel very comfortable with the concept of outsourcing. Instead, there’s frequently a tendency to try and “micromanage” everything, and to maintain a tight personal grip on the nuances of everything that’s going on within the business.
Here are just a few reasons why outsourcing should, however, be a major part of your productivity-boosting mission.
1. Because different people have different approaches to problem-solving, and can often provide invaluable insights
No two people, in a business setting, are going to have exactly the same approaches to problem-solving – even if both are essentially “reading off the same playbook.”
One of the great things about people, is that everyone is unique – at least in certain ways – and, therefore, everyone is likely to have specific insights and approaches that might be just what’s needed for cracking a particular hard-to-manage issue.
When you try to run everything in your business by yourself, you’re essentially limiting your “creativity pool” to one person. Of course, you should do whatever you can to develop your own problem-solving abilities, and it’s certainly good to believe in yourself, and in your potential to thrive and overcome obstacles.
Still; two heads are better than one, and innovation and creativity are major drivers of success in every field of business, and in every company.
The sooner you become comfortable with outsourcing some of your services, departments, and professional tasks, the sooner you put yourself in a position where you are able to benefit from the nuanced and unique creative thinking skills and approaches of other people.
2. Because no matter how “productive” you get, individually, you are still always working with limited time
When people work to enhance their productivity, there are many different strategies that they will employ, and things that they will try to do. Limiting all distractions is a good technique. Time blocking major projects on a daily calendar is another pro strategy, promoted by some of the most widely acclaimed and successful business tycoons of all time.
Ultimately, a large part of enhancing individual productivity is about reducing the amount of wasted time in a day to zero – or as close to zero as possible – while making those precious minutes and hours count for as much as they can.
Here’s the rub, though: no matter how “productive” you become, individually, and no matter how good you become at managing your own time, you are still working with limited time, at the end of the day.
When you bring other people on board, and outsource various tasks and aspects of your business to them, a major part of what you’re doing is artificially expanding the amount of time available for running your business.
Of course, there’s nothing you can do to literally increase the number of minutes in a day. But, when each major project or role in your business is being handled by a different person – or several other people – things are compartmentalised in such a way as to mean that far more is being achieved, in a given space of time.
Time is one of the most important things that you have in your business – and, for that matter, in your life. Anything you can do to make your time stretch further is going to increase the net productivity of your business exponentially, which in turn is likely to give you a major advantage over any competition you may face who are trying to do things in a more “solo” way.
Of course, this implies that your outsourcing will be done in a very deliberate and careful manner, and that the people you’re outsourcing to will be able to competently handle whatever you throw them. But, it goes without saying that this should be a major considerations, anyway.
3. Because you will only ever be able to develop a certain number of skill sets
So, your time is certainly limited as an individual, there’s no getting away from that fact. But it’s not just your time. Your skills are also limited.
You might have heard different estimates of how many hours of intensive work it takes to become an “expert” in something. None of the estimates fall anywhere on the “short” end of the spectrum. To get good at something, you simply need to dedicate a major chunk of your life to it – both in terms of, time, and in terms of focus and energy.
Since you will only ever be able to develop a limited number of skill sets to a high standard, on an individual level, that means that by trying to run an entire business by yourself – particularly as the business expands in complexity – you are inevitably going to do one or two things well, while doing a lot of things to a mediocre standard.
Outsourcing is, fundamentally, a way of benefiting from the nuanced skill sets of other people, and utilising those skill sets to enhance the overall quality of your business in areas where you might be lacking.
if you outsource, therefore, you can enhance the general skilfulness of your operation literally overnight. If you don’t, then you’re going to face some very serious problems.
© New To HR