My maid does the dishes, I thankfully don't have a lawn, and I find skilled people on Craigslist to assemble furniture and drive me around. The productivity gains I've experienced are mind boggling.

In order to decide what to outsource, I have to determine the value of my time. At JangoMail, I know that I can spend 3 hours building a new feature, and that new feature will attract X new customers.  Let's say I estimate conservatively and that all I will gain is one new client paying $10/month (even though in reality I’d never build a new feature that I thought wouldn’t attract at least fifty new paying customers). That's $120/year of new profit. At a basic company valuation formula of 5x earnings, that’s $600 in additional value to the company. So my three hours of time equates to $600 in value to the company, which is $200/hour. Sometimes the value of my time isn't as quantifiable, like if I spend the next two hours developing a peer-to-peer performance review system instead of assembling office furniture that just arrived. That may help with overall employee satisfaction and can lead to better hiring decisions, but it's difficult to quantify the value that adds to the company.

I'm often met with shock by my peers when I tell them that I have a driver, whom I found on Craigslist, who drives me back and forth between my hometown of Dayton, Ohio and Chicago. I pay my driver $20 hour plus tolls and gas for each one-way trip between Chicago and Dayton. It comes to about $260 per one-way trip, or $520 per round trip. People gasp at that...how could I possibly spend so much when I could just rent a car and drive myself, or better yet, fly round-trip for about $250? The advantages of paying a driver are many, including door to door service, and avoiding a TSA full-body scan. The biggest benefit, however, is that for those five hours in the car, I sit in the back, plug a mobile-Internet access device into my laptop, and get five hours of uninterrupted work time. Much has been said, even at a recent TED talk, about the value of uninterrupted hours. I get so much productivity out of those five hours in the car that I’m considering hiring a separate driver to just drive me around downtown during regular working hours, rather than parking myself in the living room or Starbucks, my two normal work environments where the opportunities for distractions abound.  Assuming my time is worth $200/hr, it's a no-brainer to pay someone $260 for a five hour trip where I can add $1,000 in value to the company. I used to get similar productivity while flying, using a satellite-based Internet access device I rigged, but there are FAA rules against that now, and the logistics of airport procedures are a productivity killer.

The next two tasks I plan on outsourcing are the assembly of four lamps which I just purchased and are sitting unassembled in boxes in my foyer and the management of my email Inbox. I spend far too much time turning what would otherwise be a simple “Yes” or “No” answer in response to an email, into an elaborate paragraph-style email for the sake of business professionalism. Once I find a person who can answer my emails professionally and mimic my writing style, I’ll have someone saving me several hours a day of grunt work that I can use instead to add value to the company. I might even have someone who can write future blog posts!

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Ajay Goel is the Founder and CEO of JangoMail, a platform for sending and tracking email messages. He lives in downtown Chicago, where he spends time running JangoMail, playing tennis, writing, watching indie films, and playing the didgeridoo. Prior to JangoMail, he launched several businesses, including a web development firm, an online jewelry store, and an ezine reviewing television episodes. He hopes to someday be written about in TechCrunch.