Buy Back Your Life: The High Earner’s Guide to Outsourcing for Time and ROI

☕ Good morning SenseMakers!

If you have built a successful business or thriving career, you already know how precious your time is. Yet too many high earners still treat time like an unlimited resource while guarding money like it is scarce.

The truth is that once you reach a certain level of income, the next stage of growth comes not from doing more but from doing less.

It comes from buying back your life.

The Buy Back Principle

Every hour you spend has two currencies: money or meaning.

If something can be outsourced for less than your hourly rate, or it does not bring you genuine joy, it is time to delegate it.

This simple framework can transform your days:

1. If it can be outsourced for less than your hourly rate, delegate it.
   

2. If it does not bring you joy, delete it.
   

3. If it increases your income, energy, or fulfillment, keep it.
   

When you apply this lens across your personal and professional life, you start reclaiming hours every week that can be reinvested into what truly matters: growing your business, deepening relationships, or simply breathing again.

The Hidden Cost of Doing It All

Many high earners fall into what I call productive suffering. You convince yourself that doing it all builds discipline, but what it actually builds is fatigue.

Research shows that leaders make over one hundred meaningful decisions each day. Every small task you take on, whether it is laundry, scheduling, or errands, erodes the mental bandwidth needed for strategic thinking.

Outsourcing is not indulgence. It is energy management.

Buying back your time is how you protect your focus for the decisions only you can make.

How to Decide What to Outsource

Run every task through three simple lenses.

1. The Time Value Lens
   Ask yourself: What is my effective hourly rate? If your time is worth five hundred dollars an hour, any task that costs less to delegate is a direct return on investment.

2. The Joy Lens
   Not every decision should be financial. If cooking dinner or coaching your child’s team fills your tank, keep doing it. Joy is a form of wealth.

3. The Investment Lens
   Some professionals do not just save you time; they make you money. A skilled wealth advisor, tax strategist, or business consultant can add six figures to your bottom line.

In these cases, the question is not whether outsourcing is cheaper than your hourly rate. It is whether it creates greater long-term returns.

Why Letting Go Is Hard

Most high performers built their success on control, competence, and grit. Those traits got you here, but they can also keep you stuck.

At a certain level, doing more no longer scales. The leaders who continue to grow are the ones who build systems of support around them.

Start small. Choose one task this week to delegate, something that drains your energy and does not align with your value or joy. Use the time you reclaim to work on a project that expands revenue or reconnect with family.

You will quickly see that the highest leverage investment you can make is in time, not tools.

Learning from Those Who Have Mastered It

Two recent pieces of content helped shape this idea for me.

My friend Jacob Warwick recently wrote an incredible post about the hidden support systems behind top leaders and how the best invest in infrastructure that protects their energy and focus. It is a must-read for anyone building a high-performing life and business.

And if you want to take this concept further, listen to Alex Hormozi’s podcast episode titled “Give Me 20 Minutes and I’ll Give You Back 20 Years of Your Life.” Alex shares a powerful breakdown of how to trade money for time, step by step, in a way that compounds your productivity and peace of mind.

Both perspectives helped me think deeply about how high earners can stop doing it all themselves and start building the right support to move faster and live better.

Your Next Step

Take ten minutes today and write down everything you did outside of your business last week. 

Next to each item, mark it with one of three letters:

• D for Delegate (someone else can do it cheaper)
  

• J for Joy (you genuinely enjoy it, so keep it)
  

• I for Invest (a professional here could create measurable returns)

Then choose one D and one I to act on this week.

It is not about luxury; it is about leverage. The most successful people are not doing more. They are doing less of what does not matter.

When you stop trading time for tasks and start investing it in outcomes, you do not just buy back your hours. You buy back your life.

Making Sense of Buying Back Your Time

We often talk about financial return on investment, but time ROI is just as powerful. Every hour you buy back can compound through clarity, creativity, and connection.

Here is the takeaway. Money is a renewable resource. Time is not. Spend your money where it earns you back your most valuable asset, your time.

If you would like to explore this further, check out Jacob Warwick’s article on building invisible support systems for leaders and Alex Hormozi’s podcast episode on buying time. Both are excellent resources that expand on what we discussed here.

As always, I hope this helps you to Prioritize Your Version of a Rich Life.

Until next week!

This information is not intended to be a substitute for specific individualized tax advice. We suggest that you discuss your specific tax issues with a qualified tax advisor.

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