I've been distracted for the past two months, since I've been focusing on consulting more than on my personal projects. Now that things are stable again, I'd like to see if I can make better use of delegation as a way to expand my capabilities, learn more, and spread the opportunities. There are so many people with talents and skills out there, and there must be a way that I can get the hang of this.

The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It (1995)

What's getting in my way?

Mostly it's that I haven't sat down and thought about:

• The projects I'm willing to invest money into, in addition to time – although maybe I should just treat my time as fungible and delegation as a skill that's worth learning anyway, so I should open up all my personal projects for consideration
• Specific processes that I want to delegate, although I do have a decent-sized process library that I even share publicly
• How I can reduce my involvement in things that are tied to me personally, and focus more on things where I can bring in other people

I also have some guilt about the distinction between tasks I can definitely defend as being business-related, and tasks that are much more personal. For example:

• Reviewing my accounting records and draft tax return – Definitely business.
• Transcribing Emacs Chat sessions and recorded presentations – Well… Technically, people sometimes pay me for Emacs-related things and I'm working on packaging some things up as pay-what-you-can guides, so that's okay, I guess?
• Filling in recipes from Hacklab cooking nights – Definitely personal

The main benefit of claiming things as a business expense is saving roughly 15% in tax, but if that's mentally getting in the way of my just taking advantage of this, I should totally switch the contracts over to my personal credit card and just go for it until I've gotten the hang of this again. I'm nowhere close to my target of fully replacing the hours I've spent earning during this experiment (2829.6 hours worked, 486.8 hours delegated through oDesk, plus more through Paypal). But on the flipside, I don't want to assign makework that I really should just automate or eliminate. Although maybe I should challenge myself to find something useful, since that gives people an opportunity to work and to improve their skills.

Anyway.

Stuff I don't particularly enjoy doing, but that could help:

• Setting up events, coordinating with people, etc.
• Comparison-shopping
• Data entry
• Organizing

What would “getting the hang of this” look like? Future Sacha would:

• Have these beautifully documented step-by-step processes for consistently getting stuff done, with enough volume and throughput that things happen consistently
• Work with people who are also improving their skills and doing well

Hmm. One of the things I'm looking forward to learning at work is the ability to sketch out a design or give some tips on how to do a report (which tables, what existing report to build on, etc.) and have someone else learn by doing it.

Maybe what I need is something like that for my personal projects, too. If I get better at sketching out what I want, then I or someone else can make it happen. For example, with Emacs Chats and Emacs Hangouts, I'd like to eventually get to the point of:

• Having a list of questions or topics I'm working my through
• Having a page where people can see the things I'm curious about and volunteer to chat with me about them
• Coordinating with those people about when we're both available
• Sharing a calendar and events where people can see upcoming entries
• Getting everything recorded, processed, summarized, transcribed, and blogged about
• Harvesting interesting snippets for a guide

And for Quantified Self Toronto:

• Picture of sign-up whiteboard + copy of videos = processed videos uploaded and blogged about

For Hacklab and cooking:

• Picture of food + links to recipe = blog post draft with recipe ingredients, photo, links to recipes = updated wiki page

And a few experiments with Fiverr and other micro-outsourcing sites, too, just because.

You know, even if I don't end up feeling comfortable with calling those business expenses, I'm fine with it being a personal donation, since the communities are awesome. And it's stuff I would probably end up doing anyway because it's the Right Thing to Do.

Although it might be interesting to someday build a business around helping developers become even better… Hmm.