It's difficult to make decisions about delegating or outsourcing if you're not aware of the true trade-offs. It works best to have a monetary value attached to everything (nearly everything has a price). This process begins with knowing what your time is actually worth. We wrote a post on this (see button below), but here's the gist:
- Take your gross annual salary. We'll use $200,000 for this example. A nice round number.
- Ballpark your average amount of productive hours worked per day (we've found most people over-estimate this number - a safe average is 6 per day)
- Multiply your productive hours per day number by 236 working days. This assumes 8 holidays, 10 days off, 5 sick days, and 2 personal days. Make adjustments as you see fit. If you keep our 6-hour, 236-day assumptions, you're left with 1,416 productive hours per year
- Divide your annual salary by the productive hours per year. Our $200k client's effective hourly rate is $141.
There are endless variables you can adjust for this calculation, but this is a great back-of-the-napkin way to begin thinking about what your time is worth. And remember, the whole point of this exercise is to create a new filter through which all spending, delegation, hiring, and outsourcing decisions pass through.