Whether or not the world works like that, I’ve always though the idea of outsourcing certain things was always a really silly idea.   I come from a very talented family and from a young age I saw my father, grandfathers and uncles do everything from general construction to roofing to plumbing to painting to electrical work to building computers to working on cars.  Ever since I had things to fix or build, I always just did it myself unless my dad advised otherwise (you know…things like replacing the head gasket in cars).

When I bought my house 5 years ago, that continued on and I started tackling projects just the same (of course, enlisting extra hands from friends along the way).  I installed a new floor, replaced walls and doors and threw a big painting party to get the paint done.  Then it was time to bring my basement out of the 70’s into something a little more modern.  I knew it would be a long process if I did it all myself.  I was ok with that because I would be learning a ton and I had the aptitude to do it.  In the end, I was looking at improving the house AND learning new skills, so it all worked out.

Like any Webber, I took a deep breath and went in to knock out the projects myself. I generally did things as I had bits and pieces of time over weekends or evenings.  I started with replacing walls and some electrical and plumbing.  I then got some buddies to help hang the new drywall.   After looking into taping/mudding the drywall, I realized it was a good idea to outsource that.  Sure, it would cost me some $$, but the time and effort it was going to take me to do just as good of a job as having a professional take care of it really made it worth it.  I can’t say I was fond of shelling out the cash, but in the end it was really pretty nice to have that done and out of the way.  This was my first step into outsourcing bits of construction on my house.

When I started my company a few years back, it was just to do some freelance programming on the side.  After I lost my job and took my freelancing fulltime, I started gaining some pretty good momentum in clients and the amount of work I was getting in.  So much so, that I started to get overwhelmed with all the work I had to do.  I started working 80 hours a week to get all this crap done and realized this wasn’t sustainable.   It was somewhere in the midst of that where David Lingholm said on twitter “Strong Leaders identify people they can trust and let them do the work.  Weak ones need to do everything.”  This quote hit me square in the face.

I always believed I was good leader, but if I were to be defined by this quote I would be considered weak.  Now, I don’t think the quote necessarily applies directly to outsourcing, but I think the connection can be pretty strongly made.  When a company starts to grow, the leader needs to step out of the way so the work can be shared among people he (or she) trusts.  This also allows more work to be done in the same time span.

As the work started piling up, I quickly looked into my twittodex (twitter + rolodex = twittodex…right?) and found an awesome guy who has the same passion as me at turning out really good code quickly.

I found a guy I trusted, and started handing him the extra work I had and it was very freeing.

As work continued to grow, I had to enlist the help of other good programmers.  As I was finding more people I trusted, my company could then accept and handle more work while still allowing me to spend time with my family, work with customers who request me specifically and still continue to build my company.  I started liking this so much that I started thinking about other ways I could “outsource” my responsibilities and help more things knocked out of the ever growing todo list of life.

There were two places I started looking for ways I could get out of the way and give others a chance to step in and grow (or at least do what they are good at):  church and home improvement.

At church I started realizing that I was hindering the growth of my volunteers by always stepping in and taking care of problems.  At church, we talk about “Helping People Take Next Steps With God” and I was definitely hindering that by needing to handle everything and be there all the time. So, I started scheduling two people per Sunday to handle the computer and the video switcher.  I then started backing off and letting them do the work and troubleshooting when something went wrong.  I was there to help catch them if something catastrophic happened. The most amazing thing I am seeing in each one of them? They are getting more and more comfortable knowing they can handle things. I LOVE THIS!

At home, I realized that the unfinished projects looming over me were really causing some major stress.  I realized that there were friends of mine that could help alleviate some of that stress by me paying them for doing what they are good at.  In fact, right now, I have some awesome guys finishing up the work in my office so it’s not an unfinished space/storage room anymore.

Right now, this is just the beginning.  I’m working through organizing how I do business and starting to put processes in place.  I’ve been streamlining the process at church for a while.  It is now time to take what I’ve learned there and push it out to other areas where I am involved.

Overall this has been huge for me.  Leading others and helping them seeing into their potential and helping them be successful (whether in volunteering or by giving them business) has directly caused me to be more successful.

The part I didn’t talk about though is really how much I enjoy doing a lot of these things I’m outsourcing.  I still get to do what I enjoy, it’s just more in moderation and manageable chunks now.

How are you going to start outsourcing?

When the earthquake hit a couple weeks ago, I started thinking of all the ways I could help.  In talking with my friend, Bob Keesee, he planned on becoming part of the 2nd wave of help that would come through.  He runs an organization called Raincatchers that brings water collection systems to the Seguin region in southeast Haiti.

His plan was to start raising money for a few specific purposes to help get teams of people into the area.  With the earthquake, food and water is now scarce on top of the mountain.  I was thinking through how I could help him raise money to get the people on the mountain help.  The first thing that came to mind was that the word needed to get out.  Since I’m a pretty big web geek, I decided one of the best ways for that was to get a better presence on the internet… immediately.  After talking with Bob, we decided to launch his new site in a matter of days instead of the months we had initially talked about.

So, we put together a revised plan for the site that could launch in a matter of days instead of months.  After executing that plan, we launched the site yesterday evening!  We are very excited about it, and really helps Raincatchers have a better presence on the internet.  Go check it out:  http://www.Raincatchers.org

Ok, now that is out of the way.  Here’s the deal, getting involved in twitter can change your life and your career.  Just kidding…it WILL change your life.   The problem is once you get involved, it starts to take hold…THEN you go to a tweetup and you’re hooked.

I got my twitter account in June of 2007.  It took about a year for some more of my early adopter friends to grab ahold of it and get their accounts and start conversing on there.  Once we started talking and introducing each other to our other friends on there, we started hearing about these things called tweetups.  It’s a combination of twitter and meetup.  It’s basically an informal networking event where you can go around and meet other people.  I ended up meeting a TON of awesome people and I was seriously hooked.

As I met people and started following them, they led me to other cool people to follow.  I then went to more tweetups and met more awesome people and that led to even more awesome people to follow.  It’s an amazing endless cycle of new friends and flood of tweets.

The problem with meeting a ton of awesome people on twitter is that I wanted to keep up with them.  The problem with keeping up with all of them means there are a ton of new inputs into my life.  The problem with a ton of new inputs into my life is that it’s *really* *really* *really* distracting.

I really want to keep up with everyone, but I just don’t have the time.

So, to help deal with all the distractions, I decided to make some changes to how I use twitter.

• I don’t have twitter open all the time.  I open it up throughout the day.  I decided that it is ok to miss some things that go on.
• I started using lists of people. I figured out that I’m just not able to keep up with everything that goes on with everyone’s lives.  There are certain people that I would like to have more consistent updates from, so I set them apart with a list.
• I also stopped updating twitter all the time.  The less I put out there, the less people will respond directly to me.  This is a good and a bad thing.  It’s good to help keep distractions down.  It’s bad though, because I’m not participating in the conversation that is Twitter.

So, all that to say….I started using twitter in moderation.  :)

I’m not going to lie, I do miss all the interaction, but I have found it way easier to actually start to get things done.  I definitely plan on engaging quite a bit more once things get into a routine again with work, but until then…we’re sticking with twitter in moderation.  It really helps keep the focus!

You will probably get 2 posts this week as my schedule gets freed up later in the week.  It has been an incredibly busy past few weeks and even more so these last few days.  That said, something needs to get cut when the wrench gets thrown into the system.  I think what’s getting cut this time is a long blog post from me for your Monday morning enjoyment.

Nonetheless, I’m still trying to keep my word on the fresh content every Monday for you.

No matter how crazy life gets for me.  I do my best to come back and focus on what’s important.  To me, that’s God and that’s Family.   There is a verse in the Bible that I like to meditate on when things feel like they are getting out of control.  I want to leave you with this verse from Psalm for you to dwell on today: “Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46|10

In the spirit of simplifying my life and getting rid of unnecessary inputs into it, I started opening up those emails and clicking “unsubscribe.”  It was a beautifully freeing feeling and I loved going through and knowing that I wouldn’t be bothered again by these companies.   I decided that I didn’t need to be tempted to buy more stuff and I didn’t need them wasting my time every day by telling me what I should be buying from them.  I also didn’t need to have a list of someone’s published articles this week because I added myself as a user on their website.

After I went through and unsubscribed from all the email lists I got that morning, I took a big deep breath and exhaled a great deep breath of happiness.

Then something awful happened.

I woke up the next morning to another 15 emails.  It was a whole other set of websites that happened to schedule their emails on a different day. I realized that it would be quite a process to eliminated years of forgetting (or not caring) to uncheck the “allow us to spam you” checkbox when signing up for accounts.

Everyday for a week, I had to repeat the process.  I’m still going through my email every morning and finding some of those useless subscriptions, but now it is significantly less.  If I have 6 “useless” emails every morning, that is a heavy “spam” day.

After talking with my brother-in-law about this he asked if I subscribed to the GTD (Getting Things Done) system at all.  I laughed and said that I tried it once and just couldn’t deal with it.  I really like the idea of GTD, but I think I lack the self-discipline to actually put that into place.  After chatting a bit about the email, he said that he really appreciated having an empty inbox and urged me to give it a try.  We dialoged back and forth a bit more about it and then moved on in conversation.

After a couple days, I got back to thinking about our conversation and how freeing it had been to removing some of the constant emails into the inbox.  So, after some deliberation with myself, I decided to give the empty inbox thing a try.

I’m really enjoying it so far. I don’t have a system in place yet, but I’m generally replying to emails once I read them and then archiving them away.  I’m loosely basing my current archive method on the GTD Inbox to zero system, with a caveat that I’m still using the Inbox as a todo list.  Once I figure it out completely, I’ll fill you in with another post.

When I lost my job in 2008, I was in the middle of using Twitter and started meeting a bunch of new friends. We would get together at tweetups and other events and have some great conversations. A lot of us found each other on Facebook and LinkedIn and connected there in addition to twitter. It was awesome being able to keep up with everyone wherever I was surfing.

After a while I realized how much information was getting pushed in my direction. I was checking in on Twitter and checking in on Facebook and getting the same information both places. It started becoming a lot of information to process (even if I was just skimming the information) and I was checking in on both of them fairly often to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I knew I needed to take a look at how I was using Facebook and how I could turn down the amount of information it was pushing in my direction.

To do that I needed to define why I was using Facebook. I thought through a few different ways, but decided that only one was going to work for me. I decided that I would start using Facebook to reconnect with old friends and stay connected with friends and family that i didn’t interact with on a regular basis.

This made the most sense to me because it didn’t remove Facebook from the picture. It allowed me a method to connect and reconnect with people who don’t expect any sort of regular communication with me, but still want to get a general picture of whats going on in my life. Once I made the decision not to use Facebook as an everyday communication tool, I realized that I did not need as many emails coming through to me. I went through and removed almost all notifications in my Facebook preferences. This was an awesome for me because it meant that I had one less website to check throughout the day AND less emails coming through to my phone and computer.

By defining what Facebook is for me, I now can set expectations for myself and others as to how I will be communicating and how often I will be communicating on Facebook. I no longer need to think of this input as critical and now have one less place that will distract me regularly.

I am now one step closer to a simpler life and that is a good feeling!

As I started looking into my frustration, I realized something about myself. I realized that I classified everything asked of me as a critical need and I felt like I needed to respond immediately. The only way to respond immediately was to have my phone next to me at all times with work email, personal email, Twitter, Facebook, and instant messengers ready to ping me at a moments notice. Anytime my computer was open, each one of these were open as well. When I would get a ping from any one of these services, it would pop up on my phone and my computer disrupting everything I was in the middle of doing.

I started realizing how many interruptions I was having throughout my day and how much stress it was causing me by pushing things around and stopping/starting work back up. Realizing all of this started me on a path to look deeper into how I was running my company, how I was leading my team at church, and ultimately how I was spending time (or wasn’t) with my family.

The interesting thing about all of this was that I didn’t realize how much time I was actually spending “away” from my family because I was usually in the same room or at least in a room near them almost all the time. Once I noticed that I wasn’t actually spending time with my family, it really hit me harder that I needed to make some changes in my life if I was going to be a better husband and father.

I’m nowhere near where I want to be, but part of this website launch and picking up blogging again is about my journey in actively pursuing becoming a better husband and father and balancing that with running a better business.

I’m going to kick off the new launch with a series of posts on how I’m changing some of the inputs in my life to use my time wiser so I can accomplish these goals. This series of posts is also acting as a personal journal to help me remember why I’m doing this and to continue encouraging myself to continue pursuing a less stressful and more minimalistic lifestyle.

I hope you stick around and join me in my journey to become a better spouse, parent, and worker.

I’m going to kick off the new year with a blog series on some of the personal changes I’ve been making over the past few months. As the blog continues on, you will find things to do with technology, haiti, lifestyle and other random thoughts.

I’m also going to start queuing up blog posts and releasing them on a schedule so we can get some regular content going around here. I’m thinking that putting together a regular blogging schedule will work well for me. Right now, I think I’m going to start out slowly by posting blog entries on Mondays and sometimes on Thursdays as well.

As this moves forward, I want you to know that I welcome all interaction. Please give feedback/criticism/encouragement/whatever as it fits.

If you’re not already subscribed to my RSS feed, I’d definitely recommend adding it to your RSS reader. The URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/davesacre. If you’re not currently using a reader, you should be. I recommend Google Reader.

Enjoy your time and welcome to the conversation!

-dave

How do you duplicate that when you work from home or are a freelancer? It becomes difficult. There are companies out there built around this concept of “coworking” for freelancers/work-from-home types. I’m not interested in starting a company just yet to do that, but I thought it would be cool to get some local people together and do some coworking.

The idea is this — we all have our own projects and our own stuff to do, so let’s get our own stuff done, have some interaction with one another, and have some coffee. If you’re interested, David Murray (@DaveMurr) and I will be at the Biggby on Novi road at Grand River in Novi, MI on June 2nd to kick this off.

And, as with all things twitter related, we need a hashtag. Let’s call it: #SEMIcowork



See you there!

If you have known me for any period of time, you know that I have a heart for the people of Haiti, and specifically the work being done through an organization called Raincatchers. Raincatchers provides families in the area of Seguin, Haiti, a water collection system. The people there have to walk 2 hours each way to get clean water, and can only bring back what they can carry (think about carrying a 5 gallon bucket of water 4 hours a day just to stay alive). Raincatchers provides families with the abilitiy to collect 55 gallons of rain water from their roof.

If you have not heard stories from anyone on a Raincatchers trip, or seen pictures, please check out the video i linked to below. They are an amazing organization doing some awesome things for the people of Haiti. I am proud to be able to tell you about them and what they are doing. Please check out my blog entries from my first trip as well. The blog entries are here: http://www.davesacre.com/category/haiti, and go forwards. I also have pictures from both trips I took to Haiti on my (old) blog (look at the top right hand side of http://www.grillmasta.com for links).

I’m not asking you for any bit of money, but for 5 few minutes to watch a video and to fill out 4 fields + 1 selection box on a web form. This will really help Raincatchers continue helping the people of Haiti. To vote for Raincatchers, please visit the link provided below. Once you are there, select the P-Z categories, then pick Raincatchers and fill out the 4 identification fields.

Here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14zHxzEBGs
Here is the page to vote: http://www.miproconsulting.com/mipro-gives-back/finalists/
and here is their website: http://www.raincatchers.org

Thank-you so much for your help! You are showing your support to an incredible organization doing incredible things in Haiti.

-dave