Outsource When You’re Too Lazy To Do It Yourself
Many times the best time to outsource to the fruit of your loins is when you’re simply too lazy to do whatever it is that needs to get done yourself. Let’s use supplying lunch at work as our case study. Everybody needs to eat. Buying lunch at work can be expensive while packing a lunch can be time consuming. When faced with taking 10 minutes to pack a lunch or spending $7 bucks to buy some food many people choose to go ahead and pony up the cash. I certainly don’t make $42 an hour (~$87,000 annually) so paying that much for someone to supply me lunch is absolutely insane. I’d rather skip the meal than live so wildly outside my means. But what if I am chronically lazy and genuinely can’t overcome the gravitational pull of my couch (or am honestly “too busy”)? What can a brother do? Pay your kids to to do it on the cheap.
If you are going to outsource your lunch making anyway you might as well keep that money in the family. A Third Grader should be able to pack some left overs into a container for you to take with you to work. Heck, they might even be able to put an apple in a bag, make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich ala Clever Dude, and throw in a bag of chips. It could take them all of twenty minutes and you could pay a 7-9 year old a dollar for their time. That way you eat the food that you already bought and get to be lazy – at the same time. How sweet is that?
There are other benefits to outsourcing your lunch preparation to your children as well:
- It forces you to teach your child at an early age the nutritional content of food so they don’t stuff your bag full of 100 calorie Snack Bags or poop friendly yogurt. You may like the taste of these products but they will only lead to lots of time on the john and that can hurt your productivity at work. But at least your digestive system will be regulated.
- It will help teach your child to think about others. Since they are providing a service to a customer/parent they will need to know what you like and how you like it. It also gives them a great opportunity to leave you cool little notes or draw you neat pictures of how one day a sea creature came to your house and ate the dog, but that is okay because your child crawled in the creatures mouth, saved the dog, and found enough treasure to rule 10 islands in 2nd Life with a fist as hard as iron and a touch as soft as satin.
- Because your employee is a child, it will force both of you to learn to communicate with each other. Anything that fosters communication between you and your child has to be a plus since the strains of the day can easily creep in and steal precious parent-child moments. Now you can always start a conversation with you child by saying, “So about my lunch tomorrow ….” Isn’t that precious?
- It can replace the inefficient “allowance.” Those things suck and leave kids feeling like their parents owe them money or stuff when parents don’t owe them anything. Now you would be able to get your kids to do real work if they want to get real money.
- Any good work teaches the value of a dollar, and if you treat your child with respect and dignity as you employ them in the service of your appetite then they just might learn how much one of the multicolored things that pass as greenbacks these days is worth.
- With some luck, your careful parenting and outsourcing (because you are lazy) might get your child to work hard for the rest of their life. Instilling a good work ethic is a great gift a parent can give a child as it will help them until they one day have children of their own to let them be lazy.
So what are you waiting for? If you have kids whip out a contract and have them sign it in blood. If they fail to meet its draconian requirements send them to bed without any supper. That’ll show them for being so trusting and incompetent at the same time!
But seriously, think about if your child would be ready for this type of responsibility. Would it be a good vehicle to teach them a little something about you, their parent, as well as a little something about money? You could couple it with lessons on saving money, investing, teaching them what it takes to run and own their own business (a lunch making business is still a business), or how to work and have fun doing it. When it comes down to it, outsourcing work to your child (if they are young) may actually take more of your time than doing it yourself, but the benefits for your child are probably worth the effort on your part. So this can be a classic win-win-win if everything goes according to plan.
P.S. I expect a 10% commission on money saved by my brilliant idea. That’s why there are three wins in the above paragraph. You win by being a good parent, your child wins by learning life skills, and I win because you will make me rich for my expert* advice. Checks can be sent to the follow address:
North Pole
Me and him are tight from our summers of hunting for tadpoles and playing Jail Break on our street. He will be sure to forward all the cash along to me.
*I am not an actual expert, but my advice is.
I love this article! I’m going to pass it along via my website Homemaker Barbi. Thanks so much!
In my house there’s a sheet taped to the refrigerator that reads “Shake the Money Tree” and includes a variety of money-earning jobs my kids can do to make money. And yeah, most of the items are jobs I detest doing (scrubbing the kitchen cabinets, cleaning baseboards etc). It’s a win-win situtation, they earn money and I get things done around the house. As well as teaching them that “money doesn’t grow on trees”.
@ Marlene – That is a great idea. I think that one of the potential downsides of having your kids work for you is possible tension between employer and employee over the task assigned, but your idea completely gets around that problem by giving your kids a choice as to what they want to do to make some money. I may have to employ something like this one day with my own (not yet born) children. Thanks for the input.