Recently, Sid Savara made a surprising discovery for a thirty-year-old single man: “I was spending a lot of time cooking,” he says.
He didn’t mean to be spending a lot of time cooking; he wasn’t attempting anything as complicated as the End-of-the-Rainbow cake described in Chapter 6, and he wasn’t getting many gourmet meals from his efforts. But this Honolulu-based software developer was feeling burned out from trying to combine his job with regular exercise and launching a rock band. So he studied his time and created a spreadsheet to log his 168 hours. He recorded them for the next three weeks.
When he added everything up, he realized that, in an attempt to avoid unhealthy take-out food, he was spending as much as 15 hours per week on food-related tasks. He’d get in the car and battle after-work traffic to go to the grocery store because he didn’t have anything in the house. He’d spend half an hour picking out items for the next day and waiting in line. At home, his failure to plan ahead meant he’d find himself waiting for the chicken to defrost or discovering midway through a recipe that he was missing a key ingredient. Then there was the active cooking time: chopping veggies, tending the stove, doing the dishes.
If he enjoyed shopping and chopping, this would be one thing. But he didn’t. The lost hours were also particularly galling because they fell during that valuable postwork window when he could have been relaxing or doing something fun with family and friends. The only chunk of his food-chore time that he enjoyed was the eating.
So Savara did what any modern man would do: he went on Craig’s List.
This Web portal, founded by the San Francisco IT guy Craig Newmark in 1995, is famous for many things like murder cases, personal ads, and no-fee apartment rentals. But the site also allows you to advertise gigs, projects, or your own skills for free (or close to it, in the case of employers listing payroll jobs). These low transaction costs result “in more jobs being listed than would be otherwise” in a newspaper that charges per line, the Craig’s List CEO Jim Buckmaster told me in a 2008 interview.
Because there are more jobs listed, there’s more variety, and “when you have a wider variety of different kinds of employment opportunities, it stands to reason that you’re going to fit more people into more different kinds of situations beyond the traditional ‘I’m looking for a forty-hour-a-week job in an office complex somewhere in a cubicle.’ ”
So Savara placed an ad on the site hoping to find someone who would cook for him. “I thought I’d get one response, or two responses, but I was blown away,” he says. Some responses tilted to the sketchy side. One catering company employee wanted to siphon off food from her events and moonlight on her employer’s time (he nixed that one); a retired consultant, worth several million bucks and in Hawaii to surf, was learning to cook and wanted someone to cook for. But “he didn’t need me,” Savara says, and he worried that the millionaire would quit when he got bored.
So he finally settled on a mom who’d recently left her day job and was working as a personal chef. He pays her $60 per week plus the cost of groceries, and she makes him enough food for 12-15 basic meals, counting leftovers. (In general, personal chefs either cook in a client’s home or in rented space in commercial kitchens where they cook in bulk for multiple clients). In theory, this is $60 added to Savara’s budget, but in reality it isn’t. His credit card bills have gone down. It turns out that not only is Savara’s personal chef more efficient about buying groceries, “A great side effect is that I spend a lot less money on random things,” Savara says—such as doughnuts that he didn’t come in for, but which look oh-so-
tempting in an end-cap display. All told, he saves about 10 hours per week, time he’s used to practice the guitar and write more for his Web site.
Indeed, the arrangement worked so well that he’s been experimenting with outsourcing his laundry, too.
His current laundry service comes to his apartment and, for $7 per load, picks up his dirty clothes and returns them in 48 hours. This has been helpful to Savara because he has a tiny washing machine and a king-size bed. Washing his comforter was “literally an item on my to-do list for four months,” because he never got around to hitting a commercial Laundromat. The poor dirty comforter sat there moldering in the hamper for an entire season. Then he gave it to the laundry service, and it returned 2 days later, “washed and smelling fresh.”
It may strike you, reading Savara’s story, that he has basically hired himself a wife. Indeed, it begs the question: If he were married, would he still be so gung-ho about outsourcing his chores?
He seemed like a pretty modern guy when I interviewed him, so maybe he would, but our cultural assumptions about which tasks men and women are “supposed” to do run deep. Dads mow the lawn;
moms cook and clean. Around Mother’s Day each year, Salary.com posts calculations on what you’d have to pay a mom on the open market for her domestic services. Based on survey answers, these services include food chores, cleaning, shopping, laundry, and general household management. Many a young groom is still asked, postnuptials, if he’s enjoying his new wife’s cooking. Those assumptions are the reason that the essayist Judy Syfers caused quite a stir in the premiere issue of Ms. (published in the early 1970s), with a piece called “I Want a Wife.” She daydreamed about having a wife to manage dental appointments, “keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be,” plan the menus, “do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up,” take care of the details of her social life, plan parties, and so on.
I wasn’t around in the early 1970s, so I can’t speak to the politics of the time. Certainly the essay has anachronisms. It seems that, back in the day, many husbands expected their wives to type their school papers. Dinner guests expected a hostess to provide ashtrays. But when I picked up the essay in 2007, I was most struck by two things. First, how few of Syfers’s non-child-care chores I actually do, and second, how many of these chores can now be affordably outsourced—often to small businesses or sole proprietors who are better at these individual tasks than any wife could hope to be.
This is the core-competency principle again. Just as you have core competencies at work, you have core competencies in your personal life. Whether it’s playing guitar in a rock band or nurturing your children, or both, you have things that you love and do best and that other people cannot do nearly as well.
For most of us, housework is not one of these core competencies. Chances are, someone else can do at least some of these tasks better than you can, or enjoys them more than you do. Though using a personal chef saves Savara 10 hours per week, it doesn’t take the chef 10 hours to cook for him. Her work time clocks in at closer to 3-4 hours, because she plans meals, shops in bulk, and so forth.
But even if you don’t mind cleaning, cooking, or laundry, or you are efficient at these things, the important point is that household chores have an opportunity cost. While big companies could likely do a fine job booking their own travel, many outsource this to corporate travel agencies in order to keep their employees focused on their core competencies of developing drugs or building airplanes, or whatever they happen to do. Likewise, even if you’re a reasonable housekeeper, such chores take time away from activities that are among your core competencies. This is true even if you’re a full-time parent. If you’re a full-time parent, your job is nurturing your children, not housework.
Unfortunately, this calculation of opportunity cost often gets lost in the debate about outsourcing, or the best ways to pinch pennies in a down economy. On one hand, hauling your own clothes to the Laundromat instead of paying for wash-and-fold, or buying whole frozen chickens instead of the chopped kind, seems like a good way to save cash. Aren’t these optional perks? Savara’s father, who owns a franchise of The
Maids, a cleaning service, once thought that his business was a purely discretionary household expense too. That meant the target market would be well-off people who wanted pristine homes. He later learned that “clients don’t hire [The Maids] because they do a better job,” Savara says. “A normal person with enough time could make the house spotless.” The problem is that “most people do their heavy cleaning on Saturday or Sunday, which is family time. So they’re not buying a clean home, they’re buying their weekend back.” If you spend a lot of hours working from Monday to Friday, that’s worth more than The Maids’ prices. “Almost every month they have someone—let’s say the wife—call and cancel the service.
Then the husband will call and start it up again and say ‘We canceled the cable instead.’ ”
The truth is, money, like time, is a choice—and often a related choice. Just as you need a “work team”
to support your career, you need a “home team” to help you focus on your core competencies and save time in your personal life. If you’re rolling in cash, this may literally be a team. At a party not long ago, I started talking with a mom of several young children who ran a hedge fund in her spare time. Her husband bragged about how involved his wife was in their children’s lives. So I questioned her to the point of social awkwardness on how she’d achieved such domestic and professional bliss. The answer was pretty straightforward: this family had roughly four full-time equivalents on the payroll, including people to run their errands and a full-time male housekeeper who came from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day to clean, do laundry, cook dinner, and clean up afterwards. It was Syfers’s dream come true (minus the ashtray part). Of course, by the time you figure in payroll taxes and such, all this domestic support was probably costing the family about $200,000 a year.
More practically for most of us, having a “home team” will involve creative use of the growing household-services industry and some smart planning—the same minimize/outsource/ignore strategies we talked about in Chapter 4. If vacuuming is not among your core competencies, better to own a smaller house and pay someone who specializes in cleaning to vacuum it than own a bigger house and lose your weekends chasing dust balls. Or you can take the free approach: developing selective vision and looking right past the dust balls until they are big enough to support commercial agriculture.
Fortunately, it is relatively easy to hack the hours devoted to housework, shopping (for all consumer goods), food prep, and other such things well down from the 31 hours the American Time Use Survey finds that dual-income couples with kids devote to them.
The first step is to go back to the time diaries from Chapter 1, and figure out the hours that you and your family devote to household activities. If you’re like most people, you spend the lion’s share of your time on these four chore categories:
Laundry and “wardrobe maintenance”
Food: menu planning, shopping, cooking, cleanup Housekeeping, including lawn and garden care
Household management—a.k.a. “the little things that kill you”
Look at the hours for each. Is one consuming a disproportionate share of time? Maybe they’re even, but one steals more family time than others. After all, you can pay bills after the kids go to bed, but the lawn has to be mowed when it’s light. Or maybe you detest one aspect of housework, and want it off your plate first. The rest of this chapter will look at strategies for dealing with all these things. Building up such a support team in your personal life may be more difficult than doing so at work, but the payoff is high in terms of saved time, hassle, and sometimes cash.