Some homes are outsourcing domestic duties and personal decisions to streamline their lives.
Sarah Greener has made a business out of paying other people to do chores she doesn’t want to do - or that will slow her down.
She doesn’t clean her home or hang out laundry. She doesn’t do the grocery shopping or meal planning. She enlists a stylist to help plan her wardrobe. Someone else does the gardening.
Instead, she focuses her energy on business coaching and helping other entrepreneurs, mainly women. A lot of her conversations are encouraging those clients to free up time and brain space so they can accelerate their business and make more money.
“I’m still having conversations with women that are running full-time businesses and still behaving like 1950s housewives where they are responsible for the cooking or cleaning or the parenting,” said Greener, founder of the Moxie Movement, a hub of self-help podcasts, books and services for female business owners.
Some working women are enlisting an army of support so they can amp up productivity. Photo / 123RF
Outsourcing isn’t exactly new. The wealthy have done it for thousands of years with maids, butlers, and, at times, servants and slaves.
Now, some working women are enlisting an army of support so they can streamline their lives and amp up productivity.
Groceries can be delivered in a few clicks. Someone will pick up, wash, fold and drop your laundry right back at your door. Services like My Food Bag reduce decision fatigue on what to cook every night. Personal stylists are no longer for celebrities but for everyday people.
‘Lifting the mental load’
For Casie Smith, the owner and creative director behind New Plymouth graphic design agency Design Garage, personal outsourcing is all about “lifting the mental load”, all the micro-decisions that can come from family life such as cleaning, planning and scheduling. One academic paper broke the mental load down into four categories: anticipate, identify, decide, and monitor.
“If it takes up your brain space then you can outsource it to people so it means I can be more productive with my business,” said Smith, who has two children and a husband who also runs his own business.
She has a weekly cleaner, often uses a meal planning service and meets yearly with a stylist to help streamline her clothes shopping. In the past, she has used a business coach and a nutritionist.
Spend money to make, or save, money
Clients, including Smith, pay Marianne Nairn to audit their wardrobe, eyeball their personal style and do their clothes shopping. However, Nairn believes many come out financially better off.
Not only are they saving time, but they’re wasting less money on dud purchases. “It is about making function choices,” said Nairn, whose clients refer to what she does for them as “power shopping”.
Enlisting a cleaner is the result of a simple maths equation for Toyah-Maree Langeveld. If her cleaner costs $50 an hour, can she make more than that by pouring an hour into her business? The answer is yes, but she needed the encouragement of a business coach to come to peace with that answer.
“My time is my biggest commodity that is precious to me whereas that may not be for other people,” said Langeveld, who runs Shadow Administration, a virtual assistant for tradies, and has three kids, including a chronically ill baby.
She also uses a dog groomer, does her grocery shopping online, and has someone powerwash her house a few times a year.
Free up money-making time by asking partners and older children to take more responsibility for household chores. Photo / 123RF
Streamlining can be free or low cost
It’s not always a matter of investing cash upfront to free up money-making time. It could include asking partners and older children to take more responsibility for household chores, according to Greener.
She pointed to a study that found household duties are only evenly distributed in husband/wife households when a woman becomes the sole breadwinner, meaning she does 100% of the work, but still 50% of the cleaning, cooking, planning etc.
“Women have decision fatigue,” she said. “Where can we make one decision to reduce all the other decisions to reduce decision fatigue.”
One client of Greener’s shares the meal load with another family. Each family makes three bulk meals a week, providing a total of six meals for each family. It cuts down on shopping and cooking labour, and deciding what to eat each night.
Outsourcing could also mean a child catching the bus to school (her daughter’s bus costs $4.50 and adds 45 minutes of productive time to Greener’s day), getting most items delivered or swapping childcare duties with another family.
There’s also the option to get a cleaner in very occasionally for jobs you really hate and procrastinate over, like cleaning the oven.
“I would argue that you still need a village to raise your family,” she said. “The problem is that the village is no longer free. The village is no longer living with you.”
When cultural moments like the trad wife movement or brat are trending on social media, the have-it-all idea for women - the career, the family, the nice house - has come under fire. (Trad wives take on traditional homemaker roles and focus on labour-intensive activities like bread-making. Brat is about being messy and proud).
Liz Bradley is known as the Tidy Lady and provides a decluttering service, an idea made popular by Marie Kondo, a personal organiser, author, and TV presenter from Japan who helped the world clean up their cupboards.
Still, Bradley has clients who ask that she has no signage on her car because they don’t want the neighbours to know they needed help.
Greener said she is constantly attracting comments from those outraged over her limited interest in cleaning, laundry, and meal preparation.
“People are highly offended by the fact I am not doing pick up, drop off, going to every school event, baking for every event, cleaning, doing my laundry,” she said. “They’re just offended by that.”
