The parts of this that are about factors that raise the financial cost of delegation seem less relevant than the parts about quality, personalization, learning, etc.
I’d break down the decision of whether to delegate into three levels of model simplicity:
1. Abstraction. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation on the biggest costs & benefits. Usually just money vs. time, leading to an estimate that delegating will cost $X for each hour freed up.
2. Concreteness. Look at the world, and at what will be different if you delegate or not. This can include more accurate estimates of time & money (maybe actually doing the delegation uses a bunch of time), or maybe the particular minutes you’re freeing up are more or less valuable than your typical neutral minute. And a lot of it is looking at other costs or benefits of delegation that didn’t make it into your simple model but are obvious once you look at them, involving things like quality, delay, distraction, reliability, and so on.
3. Subtlety. These are things that aren’t necessarily obvious when you look at them, like the value of learning, or the sense of self-sufficiency that comes from being able to do things yourself, or the sense of capability & possibility that comes from being able to find ways to get other people to do things that you want. Or maybe it turns out that you’re in a better mood & more engaged with the world on evenings when you’ve cooked your own dinner, or you’re in a worse mood & more withdrawn on days when you had to do a bunch of vacuuming.
A nice thing about this breakdown is that you don’t have to figure out a thing at a higher level if it has already been accounted for at an earlier level. So the specifics of what goes into the price of laundry delivery don’t really matter once you know the price—regardless of whether the price is influenced by overqualified workers, perks you don’t care about, or whatever, the deal is that you either do your own laundry or you pay $Y for these guys to do it. (Unless you think you can find another laundry service that’s better or cheaper.)
This simplifies things. It reduces the number of questions you need to ask yourself, so you can focus on the harder to track things.
The parts of this that are about factors that raise the financial cost of delegation seem less relevant than the parts about quality, personalization, learning, etc.
I’d break down the decision of whether to delegate into three levels of model simplicity:
1. Abstraction. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation on the biggest costs & benefits. Usually just money vs. time, leading to an estimate that delegating will cost $X for each hour freed up.
2. Concreteness. Look at the world, and at what will be different if you delegate or not. This can include more accurate estimates of time & money (maybe actually doing the delegation uses a bunch of time), or maybe the particular minutes you’re freeing up are more or less valuable than your typical neutral minute. And a lot of it is looking at other costs or benefits of delegation that didn’t make it into your simple model but are obvious once you look at them, involving things like quality, delay, distraction, reliability, and so on.
3. Subtlety. These are things that aren’t necessarily obvious when you look at them, like the value of learning, or the sense of self-sufficiency that comes from being able to do things yourself, or the sense of capability & possibility that comes from being able to find ways to get other people to do things that you want. Or maybe it turns out that you’re in a better mood & more engaged with the world on evenings when you’ve cooked your own dinner, or you’re in a worse mood & more withdrawn on days when you had to do a bunch of vacuuming.
A nice thing about this breakdown is that you don’t have to figure out a thing at a higher level if it has already been accounted for at an earlier level. So the specifics of what goes into the price of laundry delivery don’t really matter once you know the price—regardless of whether the price is influenced by overqualified workers, perks you don’t care about, or whatever, the deal is that you either do your own laundry or you pay $Y for these guys to do it. (Unless you think you can find another laundry service that’s better or cheaper.)
This simplifies things. It reduces the number of questions you need to ask yourself, so you can focus on the harder to track things.