John Jonas argues that busyness culture wastes your most valuable resource: time. He delegates programming, bookkeeping, video editing, and social media to remote workers in the Philippines, and says you should too instead of bragging about long hours.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 325. Being too busy isn't something to be proud of. So this is less about outsourcing, although it definitely is, and more about one of my priorities in life. In the US we have this super messed up culture where we are proud of how busy we are or we're proud of how much we work. We celebrate people who work 60 to 80 hours a week. We brag about the fact that we rarely take vacations or work. We only sleep four to five hours a night. It's like we equate our value with how much work we do and how little we do other things. The more we work, the more valuable we are to life or to the world or. I don't know, because I think it's ridiculous. And I'm not the only one who thinks it's ridiculous. If you've read Rework by the guys who own Basecamp, David Henmeier, Hanson and Jason Fried, they say work life balance is a misnomer. It's work life, sleep balance. Because businesses often just want you to work. They don't really care what you do outside. But you should get some work life balance as long as that work balance is the priority. And they say that's complete garbage. You should be sleeping eight hours and you should be having family or lifetime for eight hours. And you should be working for about eight hours. But there's a really good balance there. And work should not be creeping into your other time, specifically not your sleep time and not your lifetime. For me, time is the most important resource that there is. Like, it's the most valuable thing. I can always make more money. I can't make more time. I kind of can by hiring someone else to do the things that I need to get done. But there's a limit to that. Like, I can't outsource skiing. I don't get to ski more by having someone else ski. For me, I can just create as much time as I can for my skiing by having someone else do the work that I should be doing. So that my work time, instead of being eight hours a day, is two hours a day, which is approximately where I am right now. Now, I know that I'm a unique case in this. I know that very few people work two hours a day. But I hear so much of people saying, oh, I've worked for the last 20 years and not seen my kids. I didn't See my kids grow up or my kids don't even know me, or I'll travel. My when I retire, I think is really, really sad because as people retire, they start to realize, oh, yeah, retirement was a giant fraud, and it doesn't work like that. You can't just walk away from working when all you've done your whole life is work. And I know that work is important, but not all work has the same level of importance. I watch friends of mine who watch YouTube videos at work just so they can spend their time in the office or they have a couple meetings a day and they dink the rest of their time away because they don't have responsibilities. And that's super crappy business planning by their managers or whoever's in charge. Also, crappy business policy. Like, you're getting your work done in a couple hours a day. Why do you need to sit there and watch YouTube the rest of the time? And this is like big corporate stuff that I'm talking about. So, yeah, not all work is created equal. And frankly, you shouldn't be doing probably a lot of the work that you do because someone else could do that work. So ask yourself, what are the most important things you do and what are the things that you don't necessarily need to do that might make you not so busy? Because working 60 hours a week is not something to brag about. So for me, I focus on content creation, which is this podcast. I focus on making sure that people have answers to their questions. People in the Philippines who work for me so that they can push projects forward so they can get their work done. I work on creating solutions to problems and then assigning the implementation of those solutions to other people. I work on coming up with new ideas and then discussing those with other people and then assigning that to other people to carry it out. What I don't do is log into Shopify or WordPress or write code or do customer support or website design or. Or social media marketing. I never. I don't log into Facebook. I don't do any programming. I don't do SEO. I don't do the bookkeeping or the video editing or the. I don't do any of it because it's not time appropriate for me to do those things, especially when someone else can do them. So I understand that this episode, especially when someone in the Philippines can do them and probably faster and better than me, and if not faster than better than me, it's still not me doing it. Now, what prompted this episode was having a couple people Tell me they're too busy to hire someone in the Philippines, which to me is like a giant red flag. Stop and think about what you just said to yourself. You're too busy to do the most important thing for your business, getting help for your business. To me, that's time to step back and reevaluate what you're doing with your life. Especially when it's so easy to find someone in the Philippines to do stuff. Someone who's going to work from home. You're going to make their life better by giving them more time, taking away six hours of daily commute for them while paying them the same amount they were working making in an office so they have time for their friends and hobbies. And maybe you have some time for your friends and hobbies or family or church or hiking or whatever it is that you want to do. So I understand that this episode was a little bit. Let's say, hi, I'm. I'm on a soapbox. And. And I'm also in a unique position to say make yourself less busy. But I've seen a lot of people do this. I've seen a lot of people hire in the Philippines and get some time back and build their business differently. And there, there's. And I just want to say there's nothing wrong with being busy. But if you're keeping yourself busy because you get satisfaction out of telling people you're so busy or you're too busy to do whatever it is, maybe you should reconsider your priorities. You. Yep, go ahead and send me an email telling me I'm wrong and I'm okay with that. But if you're ready, now's a good time to take a leap and hire someone in the Philippines to take some of that stuff off of your plate. Make a change. Go to onlinejobs.ph hire an OFS. It'll change your life.
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