Last year a blog commenter made a wonderful suggestion to help me get more work done. Today, I am a happy man for taking the advice.

In a blog last May I whined about how household chores, specifically yard work and landscaping tasks, really cut into my productivity. The advice was to just pony up a bit of cash and hire someone to do it, while I continue working in the shop or office to earn my living.

On the face of it that’s good advice, but I’m one of those people who abhors paying someone else to do something – especially around my own home – that I’m perfectly capable of doing myself. Well, I have a yard task I’ve been putting off for a couple years, but finally had to face. The two evergreens flanking our front door and the two flanking our garage are now over 10' tall and completely out of hand. Those spaces can handle bushes up to maybe 8'; anything higher than that crosses the line from “landscaping” to “jungle.” These four evergreens are also now way, way too wide for their spaces. Worse, at their age they look horrible with gaping holes in the foliage, and past damage from weather and insects. They gotta go.

Now, I could do that. But the thing of it is, is that taking those trees out, cutting them up, disposing of them somewhere, repairing the spots where they were, and planting new evergreens would probably take me the better part of two days to accomplish. Add a minimum of another day to take care of several other trimming and pruning chores.

So I took the advice to heart and hired a landscaper to do it. They’re out there now and managed to remove all four trees in under a half hour. They’re doing other planting and trimming, plus everything else on my list of things that need done. For me, that’d be four days work. They’ll be done sometime after lunch.

And me? I’ll be down in the shop rubbing out the oil finish on a new desk project.

A.J.