Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

This is how I feel, and why I'm stuck.

I have a pleasant little workflow maintaining a content-based website. I'd like to hire help, but offloading work to a first employee feels like more effort than just doing the work myself.

How do I transmit 7 years of tacit knowledge, principles and best practices to someone else so that they do good work? How do I teach a writer to use my elaborate static site generator setup that was never designed for other users?

Then comes the paperwork, and the inherent difficulty of working with other people instead of having full control over everything.

So far, I have just accepted that my work has a limited scope, and that as long as I'm satisfied with my income I don't need to change that.

View on HN

> that as long as I'm satisfied with my income I don't need to change that.

That is the key thing. I was a 1 person consulting/contracting shop for years and it 100% put limits on my income. But they were limits I was happy to accept.

If you are interested in trying to grow, I'd think of 1-2 tasks you can cleave off and hire someone to do part time. Have them be:

- not critical path

- async

- checklist oriented

You'd be surprised at the number of folks that would be willing to help you out. And you'd learn something about whether you feel comfortable outsourcing such tasks.

Break it down into manageable chunks. Do you have things documented?

I felt this way at first when I was doing my lead generation. I documented the process and brought on someone from the Philippines. I then ran into a similar situation where there were a lot of questions that I couldn't spend my time on. So, I built a GPT to help answer questions and to build another me to help them. This was simple and saved a ton of time.

Reflect on the tasks you are doing and pass off the work that you don't want to do first. Start small and continue passing off more work. You can hire a virtual assistant for $5-8 an hour, and it's beneficial to have some basic support. I also helped motivate someone who needed work.

It doesn't take much effort, let me know if you have questions on the tools and documents you would need to support something like this. I can share what I used.

Why are your best practices better than whoever you'll hire's?

Just accept another person to be an adult, and help you in increasingly good ways and communicate well. Or fire them if they don't

You will be suprised how quickly people learn and delegation is a forcing function to make things simpler. If they are good they will help you figure out how to make things simpler.

Well, at some point in your personal and professional life, you need to learn to let go, hand over, or pass on your responsibilities to the next person so that you can take on bigger, more critical challenges. Yes, it will take time, and no, they won't be your copycats, but you never know—they will make things easier for you and even better for your business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com