Outsourcing: And Why I Do It.

It has become more and more apparent to me (especially after having kids) that time is a limited commodity.  There are 24 hours in a day, and not one person on earth has any more of it than the next person. It has also become painfully clear to me that if you choose to do something with your allotted time, you are (even if you are not aware of it) choosing not to do something with that time.

We all make little decisions every day regarding what we choose with our time.  If we choose to sleep in, we are choosing not to go to the early morning gym class.  If we choose to go out to dinner with friends, we are choosing not to do the list of chores waiting at home.  If we choose to go to the park with our kids, we are choosing not to work on the long list of emails waiting in our inboxes.  There’s no right or wrong, it’s just a fact of life.

There are two major things that I have chosen to outsource to help “give me back” some more time in my days.  These are two things that I think have made a difference in my efficiency and my overall happiness. They are: online grocery shopping and delivery and using a housecleaning service.

I used to enjoy taking trips to the grocery store several times a week.  I would go when my son was in preschool or I would take him with me as an “outing.”  If I went alone I took my time and perused the aisles. If I took my son we would play games and make a whole morning out of it.  Then I had my daughter and things got a little chaotic. It was a lot harder bringing the two of them to the grocery store and harder to actually find a good time to do so.  It wasn’t enjoyable for me anymore and I was forgetting items or impulse buying things resulting in our spending more money.

Then we started using Instacart.  I was nervous to hand over the task of grocery shopping to complete strangers.  I liked to pick out my produce and look at all the new items at the store. But I got desperate and desperate times called for desperate measures.  At the end of the day we just needed supplies and we needed to eat! Our produce is not always perfect and sometimes our shoppers can’t find what we need but hands down the grocery delivery service has been pretty amazing.  I am able to shop 3 grocery stores at a time, which covers all our needs. Everything gets delivered when I want it to be (I just schedule it). We are saving money and I am not forgetting items we need because I make a list throughout the week and stick with it.  I have given our family back a half a day a week by using this service. Sure we do market runs (ahem Trader Joes) when we need to and the kids have fun. But it’s not for a huge load of groceries we would otherwise HAVE to be conquering every week. So it’s rather pleasurable just to shop for fill-in items!

We also use a cleaning service once a month.  This does not mean that I can get away with no cleaning. We clean and tidy quite often, especially our floors, kitchen and bathrooms (they get yucky).  But it’s fast and not thorough, just a surface clean. In order for us to deep clean the house the way the cleaning service does from top to bottom would take us double the time and I don’t think we could do it as well.  And…let’s be honest...it’s not always what we want to be doing. Sometimes cleaning is therapeutic. But sometimes it’s a huge pain. But it’s something that has to be done. So outsourcing to a cleaning service has also saved us some time and some sanity!