This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All) by Hanne Blank Boyd.
Click here for the full table of contents.
One way to get necessary things done is to hire someone else to do them. This is a perfectly reasonable and legitimate thing to do. The thing to remember is this: when you outsource the labor of getting something accomplished, you still aren’t outsourcing the responsibility.
Someone else does the labor. You arrange for it to happen and you pay for it. But that doesn’t mean you can simply disengage from it altogether. Just because someone else is going to physically do it doesn’t mean you never have to think about it again. Nor should you.
I mean, you’ll have to think about it because you’ve got someone coming to your house to do this work. You have, by hiring someone to do this labor for you, become an employer. Congratulations! That means communicating with your employee, answering their questions, directing them in regard to what they’ll be doing and how, and providing feedback, all in addition to paying them fairly and promptly.
You also will have to be responsible for all the various bits of oversight all employers must handle.
