I just took my longest break away from full-time work since college. Some of it was Christmas and family, but most of it was a bathroom remodel. Maybe “break” is the wrong word for it, but I wasn’t sitting at my desk doing my normal thing.
As much as I loved the chance to build something with my hands, I couldn’t keep from drawing parallels to my real job.
Just like any project, I had to answer a specific question over and over again, at large and small scales.
Should I hire someone to do this for me?
The answer’s rarely clear. Here are some reasons that swayed me one way or the other:
Reasons to say YES:
-They’ve already got the specialized tools.
Maybe you don’t, and sometimes they’re expensive.
-It requires skill that’s difficult to learn without experience.
You can learn a lot on Youtube, but you can’t get experience
-You need a predictable timeline.
One of the key things experience gives you is the ability to predict how long something will take
Reasons to say NO:
-You don’t know anyone you can trust to do it better.
No one cares about your project more than you.
And you know what your capabilities are.
That other guy - maybe they’re great, maybe they aren’t.
-The experience is valuable in itself
If you’re going to do it again (and again) you might as well start learning.
Or else you’ll always be dependent on the people with experience
-When you’re done, you own the results, good or bad.
Do you want to be able to point to an outcome and say “we did that?”
Or is “we paid for it” good enough?
That’s enough for today, maybe tomorrow we’ll talk about a couple examples of Yesses and Nos 🙂
It’s good to be back!
-Brian Schoolcraft
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