Outsourcing the Workload: How to Hand Stuff Over

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0:58Hello, everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. This is Amy. Today, we're going to talk about outsourcing the workload, how to hand stuff over. Some of it, any of it. This was a topic suggested by Caitlin on Facebook. Can I just get right to it and tell you what she said? It's like a mailbag and topic in one. You absolutely can in May, Amy. All right. So Caitlin said, OK, fellow mentally overloaded executive function challenged moms, have we figured out any ways to outsource some of the load? We recently moved into an area where there are high income families who have nannies that seem to double as household managers, random stuff doers.

1:38And it seems very nice. We are not in that tax bracket. So has anyone figured out how to outsource some of the pain points on a budget? Great question, Caitlin. So I thought today we'd talk about why it's hard to outsource, how to know what to outsource, and then like tips for outsourcing. Awesome. I have a good one. So I'm going to find my spot for it. Okay. All right. Caitlin, she put this in a term that I thought was very useful. She said, I am cognitively exhausted being the emotional barometer and manager of the house. So like, yes, same. And I think we can start from the point that probably just about anybody listening is the manager of the stuff that needs to happen, big, small, emotional, and literal for you and the people around you.

2:23And then I think taking an even higher 30 ,000 foot view of it, we all know from work, managing the house or managing anything, that the amount of time it takes to teach someone else to do something, and then if they're not going to do it correctly, it's like, okay, it would take me, let's say, half an hour to go clean the kitchen and put everything away. It would take me X long to teach someone else to do it. And then they wouldn't do a good job. And then they would put stuff in the wrong place so that it would cost me more time to go find the stuff that I actually need when I need to do it. Outsourcing help is challenging.

3:06I try to talk to my husband about this about his job sometimes. Like, why are you doing that part? It seems like that should be someone else. You know, he's also been kind of like, well, I can do it in five minutes. I'll give you an example, booking travel. Shouldn't someone else be booking the travel? If you're at a company that has a travel booking person, okay, I'm going to that meeting, get me there and get me home and here are my parameters. But if there's not, by the time you're like, here's my middle initial, I just could have booked the flight myself already. This gets harder before it gets easier, right?

3:40The offloading, the outsourcing is in itself more work before it's less work. Definitely. And I think that that's totally true. And then we can stop a little bit too quickly because it is easier to just do it yourself. But then you're doing it all yourself forever. I haven't thought about this because we've been talking a lot about family systems recently. It's interesting how like themes start to come up and we don't plan them. It's just like, oh, this reminds me of the thing we were just talking about. Yes. So lately on this show, I feel like a lot we've been talking about our family system, the way your family operates, which is assuming everybody's safe in that system.

4:11It's morally neutral. We stay up late. You get up early. You run late. You're on time. These are just systems, the way you operate. And it is the system that needs to be addressed for people like Caitlin or me or the typical person listening that you're holding the bag and everything that has to be done. That's a system problem. That's not a you problem. Right. And yet I think so often the fixes get put on like, well, you need to ask better, differently, sooner, more nicely, you know, like all that stuff that it becomes like you're doing it wrong and you need to ask better and then things will happen.

4:45No, this system. The system needs to be changed in which one person is holding everything. So Greg McCone, he wrote a book called Essentialism, which is a very good book, not about parenting, but it could be just about like figuring out what really needs to be done in your life and then not doing anything that's not that. So he says in every busy relationship, there are three people, quote, person A, person B in the system. When things feel overwhelming, most people point at themselves or their partner to explain it. But more often than not, it's the system. That's the problem. Yeah. And I think this is true, but also frustrating because sometimes the system really is very overwhelming and the solution has to be closer to you.

5:27Right. I guess what I'm talking about is like the kind of thing, like often the advice is you have to be, you have to be okay with things not being done perfectly or the way you would do them. It's your maternal gatekeeping. It makes you only think that you have to be in charge of everything. We have an episode of maternal gatekeeping. Like, I don't think that's usually true or fair. I'm going to give you this. Zahnville lines. She wrote a substack about this whole idea, about how the fair play approach. Fair play is a book by Eve Rodsky. It's a great book. We also have an interview with her, which we'll link to.

5:57It's a great book and it underlined a huge problem. And it got everybody talking about the mental load. But Zahn and her substack kind of takes apart the limits to this. She says the entire fair play system is premised on the idea that men will just change if they're just asked the right way. And Zahn says, this is the same old you should have asked, but don't nag, double bind, dressed up as a new approach. That everybody else around you kind of likes things this way, kind of likes you doing everything and being in charge of everything. Right. It works great for everybody else. And so the problem is not that you're not asking the right way.

6:37The problem is that the system, the world thinks that you should be doing it all and nobody else really wants to do more. They're not bad people for that, but why would they? Zahn is arguing shortchanging things by making like all you have to do is explain to them that it's totally unfair and things will change. Yeah. And I think where it gets confusing is active versus passive. Like people are not actively saying, well, Amy will do it all and she's good at it and I wouldn't do as good a job as her. So let her do it. Right. It's just a passive life is moving fast. The river you're on is moving fast.

7:10And when you feel like the house is on fire all the time, there's no time to think about an approach like it can feel like you're always so deep in it that changing it. There's no time, but there's never going to be any time. Right. And when you hand stuff over, I would argue like you delegate. It isn't just like maybe they won't load the dishwasher the way you would think they should load the dishwasher. No, maybe they won't load the dishwasher at all. And then the kitchen will be filthy and then you'll get cockroaches. Like that can be what happens next. Absolutely. And another example is family gift giving.

7:48If the people on my husband's side of the family don't get a call and don't get gifts, that blowback does come back to me. I somehow am the default person who should be in charge of gifts. It's hard to be like, I'll do my side, you do your side, because I'm still in trouble. It's somehow my responsibility in the minds of other people. So if you don't do it, no harm, no foul to you, but shade to me. And I think like the let things break response is like, so fine. So maybe there's cockroaches. So maybe this. I think that there are times when you can do that. And there are times when your kid doesn't have a costume for the school play, because your spouse said they'd handle it, and then they didn't handle it.

8:33And now the kid doesn't have a costume. Like that's kind of not okay. The kids shouldn't have to suffer the consequences of things getting dropped. Absolutely. If a kid's old enough to know that tomorrow's, you know, crazy shirt day, and they don't have a crazy shirt, and they're 15. That's different. I'm talking about like the tooth fairy didn't come because somebody dropped the ball is unfair to the kids. You can't let that happen. Or at our age, you miss like the FAFSA deadline or you miss like really big things about college that are going to cost you thousands and thousands of dollars. The thing that I find all the time is the modality becomes I hand it to you.

9:12I worry all night whether or not you're doing it. Yes, I remind you 45 times. And it's just feels very stressful to let it out of my hands because on the things that matter, if it gets dropped, we got a real problem. There's two things recently that I've like sort of run an experiment on because you can't do everything. You shouldn't do everything. You have to delegate. You have to be okay with it, not being perfect, like whatever. Okay. So what are things? And I don't mean like wrap this present and I don't care. Like I wanted to get bigger than that. I want it to be systemic change. So there are two things that recently I chose that were important but not urgent, like in that quadrant of kind of need to get done, but not necessarily on a deadline.

9:56And one of them was my kid getting a driver's license. Now I live in New York City, at least most of the time. And so it isn't crucial. My kid can get where they need to go without driving. They can take an Uber, they can walk, they can take the subway. So they're kind of de-incentivized to learn how to drive. I think it's important to learn how to drive. I think it's important to do it. But it's not crucial. And so I outsourced it to my spouse. You and I both think that our kids learn how to drive before they leave for college. I'm handing it over. And I handed it over specifically because I knew that the leaving for college could happen either way.

10:31And guess who doesn't have a driver's license? Guess what just got left in the road? Two weeks ago, I was like, oh, you were supposed to get your driver's license. Oh, I wonder if we could. Nope, too late. It's not going to happen. I only handed that over because I knew it didn't really matter if it didn't happen. And it didn't happen, which is like a little frustrating. But one, I really didn't care. And two, I do feel like there ends the whole, well, if you just would let people do things, right? Right. It was kind of big and it didn't happen because I did not follow up once. Not once, not a list, not a reminder, not a quick email.

11:05I just dropped it. We talk about this on our, I think we did an episode about nagging, that it can feel like your two choices are nagging, following up, doing all the emails, or kind of laying traps, which are like, I'm just going to sit back and watch you not do it. Both of those options do not lead to marital harmony. And I will say sometimes for myself, I think we've gotten better at this, but I think when I was first married, there was a part of me that loved that trap laying in terms of like, you're going to see that you're not going to do it. It's complicated because nobody gets what they want in those situations.

11:47That's right. This was kind of the perfect experiment because it was big, like I said, important, but not urgent, right? Complicated, but I don't know where you go to get a driver's test. I'd be looking it up just like you would, and I didn't really care. And so I was okay with this going into the ditch. And I feel like that's kind of rare, you know, that there's a like a complicated project that doesn't actually matter that much. Like, does the bathroom get renovated this year or next year? Something like that. Just leave it. But to my non-surprise, it's not like, and then you'll see, it'll magically happen without your nagging.

12:20No, it won't. It definitely won't. That I think is the heart of the dilemma, which is you do want this thing to be done. You do want this person to get a driver's license. But if you don't do it, it doesn't get done. And then there's a kind of now what coda to that in terms of, do we all learn an important lesson and next time it will get done? No, no. So like, what was the heart of the exercise other than like, I was right, which like, by the way, you were right. Right. Well, I think it makes me feel like, okay, I'm not nuts. It isn't. Haven't you learned that you can just let things go and they'll magically, not so much.

13:01You let things go and they magically won't get done, which doesn't solve Caitlin's problem of how to outsource. So we should start talking about how you know what you actually can outsource and want to get done when we get back. Love it. Amy, let me tell you about a magical place that is so exactly designed to be enclosed space, year round fun for the whole family that I bet you already know what I'm going to say before I even say the name. Let's say it together on three. One, two, three. Great Wolf Lodge. You got it, Amy. My kids loved Great Wolf Lodge when we went. You probably already know that it has a huge indoor water park with a wave pool, lazy river, a bunch of massive water slides.

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17:21These are the most important things. I think it can work. What I was thinking about listening to you is the term scaffolding that we use a lot with our kids, that you don't go in and take the test for them, but you build scaffolding around the building. I guess scaffolding is a funny metaphor, though, because it's not really scaffolding doesn't hold up the building. It's more buttressing that you want, You have things that are leaning to hold the building in place. This, for me, is going to turn out to be very key in how we're approaching this. And this is one version of this that might work for some people.

18:03My husband and I have a Google Doc. And again, do we not look at it for four months? Yes. But it has all the to-dos and who's doing them. So it's something that we can look at once a week. And I will say, I think that this was the biggest problem that I had in my marriage was this constant feeling like I was doing everything. I got married at 37, had three kids right away. Both my husband and I had lived, you know, completely independent lives. And then we came together and he had an extremely demanding job and I had three children under four. and the central fight of our marriage was, I do everything, you do nothing at home.

18:45You know, I mean, that was where we were. I try to hand stuff over to you and you forget about it because my husband is also a total nutty professor type in terms of like, and I still to this day find myself saying, hey, will you make sure to blah, blah, blah? And he's like, yep, I will. And I'm like, I'm going to watch you set a reminder in your phone because I realized that conversation is not it. Me reminding him something while he's driving a car, there's no point. And now he's in a situation with one of our kids where there's a project that they have been trying to do together for a long time.

19:24And I'm watching them and my son is basically nagging him about it while we're like on the sightseeing bus in Helsinki that we visited this summer. And I'm like, you both need to find time when you're home and the task is doable. I'm going to remind you about it when we're 8 ,000 miles from home and looking at the sites of Helsinki. It's not going to happen. And so I don't know that the approach is bad. I think that the big picture of it is maybe the problem. There are also things that I think it's important to set aside like the big things that happen like kid needs to have get a driver's license which is like in new york state like you need lessons you need a certificate you need a five-hour class you need after me saying i didn't know the steps i do know the steps um oh i know the steps the other people involved don't know the steps because they never looked them up but it happens once and it's done and let me say one more thing about that sitting here i'm like oh but there was really one good outcome of that which was i wasn't fighting with my kid about it It was one less thing to fight about with my kid this summer.

20:35P.S. It didn't happen. But if I had left it on my list, I would have been like, and we have to go figure out a time for you to go to your driver's test. It would have happened, but it would have been more fights. So at least it saved me some fights over something that I didn't have to oversee. Which is important. Not nothing. It's not nothing. So things you're outsourcing can be either we have to get somebody to come in to fix like the hole in the ceiling and then make sure that happens. And then there's like unloading the dishwasher, mowing the lawn once a week, whatever, like the stuff that has to happen all the time.

21:05The medication has to be refilled. And then the big stuff like planning the family reunion that happens once in a while. Right. And I feel like understanding which bucket that is, is important because when Caitlin said back to Chavanger, when Chavanger said, pick the one to five most important things you need to help with. And Caitlin was like, I need help with everything every day, constantly. And her thing is they've just moved into a new house. You have to decide where like the Roomba goes, right? Everything needs to be put away. It all needs to happen. Somebody needs to be in charge of the best place for things to go.

21:36But this won't happen next week. This is only a once thing. And I feel like When you have a house and children, I think it's hard to fathom before you do it that there's always a list. You know, like right now, sometimes in the summer, and I haven't really done it because I've just been not in the mood. I walk around and I'm like, okay, there's still that weird hole where we moved in and we went through the sheetrock when we were moving a table. There's that. There's also the fact that the fan makes that clicking sound so we can't use it. And these are things that my husband can actually fix himself, but it is hard to prioritize.

22:15We have one hole that we never dealt with. And then I opened the drawer. It's like in the kitchen somewhere. And I realized there'd be mice in. It's like, okay, this goes to the top of the list now, fixing the hole. There's an old tweet that says marriage is just saying next week will be easier until you die. Like there is this kind of rushing waterfall that's coming through. Everything is always in motion. So I understand her point of saying it's really not here are the five tasks because the minute someone helps you with those five tasks, there's five more tasks. The spring is always springing.

22:50What it seems to me, too, is like you're talking about the fan, for example. I feel like the person listening or you or me tends to be the person in the system who looks at that fan. And every time you look at it, like there's a clicking thing we got to fix with that fan. or you walk into the room and see your kid and flashing over their head is driver's license. Like, did you order this? Did you pack this? Did you have that form? I see that stuff floating in the air above the blissfully unaware family members who are going to be really annoyed if I bring it up again, but you see it. And so I do, that's where I think like the fair play and the list making and just being really literal about it, that that can be helpful because you You need a list.

23:34You need a list or else it just lives in your head and then you nag people. And one of the things that we've talked about forever, it was Nick North's theory of giving stuff a number of importance because I also think we can become, as the nagging wife, just a megaphone of, and the clicking, and the laundry thing, and there was a mouse, and why aren't you fixing that thing? You actually do need some systems. I go back to my like once a week meeting, which believe me, maybe we do it I don't know maybe once a month But just for me when things start to come out of control It's like let's go to our list and see Where we're doing things and how we're doing things My husband has a busy job out of the house.

24:18He comes home. He's not walking in the door I'm like can't wait to fix that clicking fan. He is busy and overwhelmed by stuff and he doesn't see the glowing box over everyone's head that's like, this person needs back to school supplies. This person's winter coat isn't going to fit this year. He does not have that channel in his brain. His gift for one of his family members has been sitting on our living room floor for four weeks. He just doesn't walk by it and get a desperately upset feeling. You're just like, give me a little bit of that. Yeah. But I do think the Helsinki bus problem, I'll call it, he's walking out the door to work.

24:58And I'm like, you realize this gift is still sitting on our floor, right? Oh, my God. Yes. It pours into his like, oh, my God, I'm stressed and overwhelmed cup. But then when he comes home, it's long forgotten. Yeah. That's why Eve Rudd talks about outcomes versus tasks. I think this was her idea. I tried to look up who it was and I couldn't find it. So I think that I got this from her. I think about this all the time, like outsourcing successfully, as I've learned the hard way, isn't make the doctor's appointment. Well, I call, but nobody answered. OK. Oh, yes. Right. Like the outcome is the kid got her shot, not did you make one phone call and stop at the first hurdle you encountered and getting better at understanding the outcomes.

25:40And again, when it's like a big one time thing, it's easier. So I have a kid getting ready to leave for school. I have had to turn off Instagram because it is turning me into have you thought about this 700th thing mom who's packing your kid and it really is it's just an algorithm straight at like you need to be doing more than you're doing and organize more than you're doing and you need to buy more than you're buying you need to buy more than you're buying right this none of this is a good message for me but because we're doing it once of course there's lots of tension involved I have really tried to like okay the one thing I'm making sure that my kid is going to leave with is medications and over-the-counter stuff they need.