Doing it Yourself
I mow my grass and my neighbor thinks I am crazy for it. He hasn’t mown his own grass in several years. He says I should eat charcuterie and have a glass of wine while I watch the lawn getting mowed. He has spoiled the joy of mowing! The reality is, I know that no one will mow the lawn like I do. I have my ways. I can see any weeds and get rid of them. I can make herringbone patterns in the grass if I want to. Or straight lines (those curves are an optical illusion!).
But I understand his point. Everything we do takes time and constitutes a choice. (Is mowing my own lawn selfish? Or cheap?) The one irreplaceable commodity we all have is time. Once it passes, we can never get it back. Everything we do is a choice, but how often do we evaluate whether that choice is the best use of our time? I think we get caught up in weighing everything in dollars and cents but forget about the value of our time. I could spend 90 minutes mowing the yard, or I could pay someone $75 to do it for me. Did I save $75 by mowing it myself? Is the total cost of having someone else do it for me $75? The answer to both of those questions is a resounding “no!”
What if that 90-minute block of time prevented me from taking a day trip to the mountains with my daughter? Or a day at the beach with the family? What would have been the value of those memories to me? To my daughter? Or to the family? What did I miss out on? That value is what we call “opportunity cost,” the value of the things we miss by making the choices we make.
The same is true in business. We have a finite set of resources….are we making the best use of them? Whether it is your people, your time, your cash or whatever you want to use, are you making the most of it? What creates value? And don’t limit your definition of value to money, unless that is your sole source of value (then we should have a chat over dinner).
Every business decision is a choice between at least two options, maybe more. Is there rationale behind the choice? Is it tied to a strategy or a plan? What are your priorities and how does that choice impact your priorities? Are you considering the value of time as you make those decisions?
Back to the lawn. My father cared about the lawn. As a kid, I pretty much did everything to prevent him from having a good lawn…football in the back yard, bicycle paths through the grass, haphazard mowing…you name it. Now I can appreciate the effort dad put into the yard and when I am out there taking care of it, I think of him. I know he’d be proud of it. And as silly as that may seem, I feel closer to dad when I am out there laboring. I derive intrinsic value from mowing my grass. It doesn’t make sense to anyone else, but that’s ok.
You do not have to justify your decisions (well maybe you do if it is at work), but the point is to be conscious of the cost (or benefits) of a different decision. Will the world end if I skip a mow one weekend to do something with the family? No. If you do something at work that doesn’t make sense in a pure economic spreadsheet, that is OK, as long as you are aware of the costs.
You may make the decision to continue to provide diabetic footcare, even though the hassle and reimbursement make you question your sanity, but you know how important it is to the population you serve…so you “give back.” That is awesome. But that can’t be all you do or you go broke.
Take the time to consider your alternatives. Think about the value of your time and balance your inputs with your outputs. Go ahead and mow your own grass. Or don’t. make better use of your time. But whatever you do, do it because it makes sense to you AFTER you have understood the costs.