| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Aeolienne |
A four-hour week?Former desk slave Tim Ferriss on why you only need to work a four-hour weekTim Ferriss used to be a 12-hour-a-day desk-slave. Then he figured out how to be just as successful (and 10 times happier) working a four-hour week. So what's his secret? Ferriss says you should look after number one and not worry about other people's 'manufactured emergencies' Independent on Sunday, 6 April 2008 Timothy Ferriss realised his life had reached a critical point when a departing girlfriend presented him with a plaque saying "Work hours end at 5pm". Ferriss, who had been running his own online business selling diet supplements, had been working 12-hour days (at a minimum), taking no holidays and, when the occasion demanded it, sleeping under his desk. "I realised," he says "that even if it meant losing my business, I needed to escape before I went all Howard Hughes." So Ferriss set about making a series of radical changes to his life, which he details in a book entitled The 4-Hour Workweek. For those of us chained to our desks for 40-plus hours a week, this doesn't sound just faintly ridiculous, but completely implausible. Yet Ferriss's book has struck a chord. It went to the number-one spot on The New York Times bestseller list and the accompanying blog, www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog, which he started just a year ago, has more than 20 million hits a month and is now one of the top 1,000 blogs in the world. This week, Ferriss's book is published in the UK. "It just goes to show," he says "that people are hungry for alternatives. We don't want to have to choose between high-stress, high-reward and low-stress, low-reward. We want to find a third option." Ferriss describes himself as a "lifestyle designer". Which basically means that when his girlfriend dumped him, he took a long, hard look at his life and tried to sort things out. He came across the work of an obscure Italian economist called Vilfredo Pareto, who came up with the "80/20 principle", which stipulates that just 20 per cent of our activities take up 80 per cent of our time. So Ferriss did a stringent "80/20" audit of his own life and realised that a large group of pernickety, high-maintenance customers were taking up most of his time, and that, in fact, 90 per cent of his profit was derived from just 10 per cent of his customers. So he simply focused his energies on this small group and left the rest to shop elsewhere. "I started treating time as a currency," he says, "and began to look on it as the most valuable asset I had." He booked himself on a flight to London for a four-week, self-imposed exile. "I needed to detox from my business and being tied to my email," he says. "I allowed myself to check my messages once a week and that was it. I nearly had a breakdown on the first day but I soon realised that the world wouldn't implode if I didn't check them obsessively." He has now found the perfect work/life balance. To prove his point he runs me through his diary for the week. On Monday, he had a 30-minute call with a financial planner followed by 15 minutes spent analysing the statistics for his blog. On Tuesday, he gave a 40-minute lecture to a group of businessmen about his techniques. Less than an hour of Wednesday was spent meeting the chief executive of an environmental group and, on Thursday, he spoke to me for no more than 30 minutes. "I have a few things that fill the void," he says. "I like to exercise prior to lunch and again in the evenings. I'm trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and also do road-biking, kettlebell training and tango. Oh yes, and I've travelled the world." While Ferriss had the clear advantage of running his own business, The 4-Hour Workweek is also designed to help people who aren't their own boss. "The principles of the book are universal," he says. "Sixty per cent of the case studies in it are employees with families. Obviously, I don't expect anyone to go from an 80-hour week to a four-hour week overnight," he says. "It's a very methodical, step-by-step process. Most people begin by eliminating unpaid overtime, then cut back on, say, five or 10 hours per week, then they might negotiate working from home and then move into more uncommon territory from there." The big difference between Ferriss's book and other time-management books is that his isn't about how to consume more information at a faster rate . "You shouldn't be trying to do more each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type," he writes. "Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important actions." In other words, his ethos is to aim low. Put yourself on a low-information diet – don't read the papers (try just scanning the headlines on your way out to lunch, as Ferriss does). Opt, in other words, for selective ignorance. Ignore phonecalls, perfect the art of non-finishing and don't be a slave to your email. "What if it's an emergency?" is often the stock response to this advice, but, asks Ferriss, how often is it actually one? Don't multi-task, he continues, and never, ever have a long to-do list. "I use a standard piece of paper folded three times to about two by three-and-a-half inches, which fits perfectly in the pocket and limits me to noting only a few items," he writes in the book. And best of all, he suggests, is to revisit our terrible twos. "Just try for two days to do as all good two-year-olds do and say no to all requests. Don't be selective. Refuse to do all things that won't get you immediately fired." A technology junkie, Ferriss draws on his lifelong online experience to offer illuminating advice on how the internet can be used to cut corners and save time. He even recommends outsourcing some work to specialised companies in India and China, that will do various tasks for a small hourly rate. This is something an editor-at-large of American Esquire did to great effect when he found someone on the other side of the world to help him with research, pay his bills and even track down and purchase a Tickle Me Elmo toy for his young son. Ferriss now describes himself as one of the "New Rich" – not financially, but in terms of time and mobility. And at the ripe old age of 30, he shuns the idea of working hard now so he can just sit out his twilight years in retirement, and instead lives his life as a series of short work bursts punctuated by frequent "mini-retirements". "It was all down to strategic elimination," he concludes. "It's not possible to consume everything that is thrown at you. Plus, the tools that are now available to us to magnify procrastination and self-interruption are everywhere. You have to re-establish what is important and what is not. It's the only way to reclaim time." 'The 4-Hour Workweek' (£10.99, Vermillion) is out now. Go to www.fourhourworkweek.com for further information The Timothy Ferriss 'not-to-do' list 1. Do not answer calls from unrecognised phone numbers To do so would just results in unwanted interruption. Let it go to voicemail instead 2. Do not email first thing in the morning or last thing at night The former scrambles your priorities and plans for the day; the latter gives you insomnia 3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time 4. Do not let people ramble Forget "How's it going?" when someone calls. Stick with "I'm in the middle of getting something done, but what's going on?" 5. Do not check email constantly — check at set times only Focus on the execution of your top to-do's, instead of responding to others' manufactured emergencies. Set up an auto-responder and check just twice or thrice daily 6. Do not bother fixing small things If you don't prioritise, everything seems urgent. Define one single, most-important task for each day. Often, it's just a matter of letting little bad things happen (return a phone call late, pay a small late fee, lose an unreasonable customer) 7. Do not carry a mobile phone Take at least one day a week off of your digital leash. Turn it off or leave it at home. So what if you return a phone call an hour later or the next morning? 8. Do not expect work to fill a void Work is not all of life. Force yourself to work within tight hours. Focus, get the critical few priorities done, and get out |
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| jema |
Eh, how to work a 4 hour week, if you have loads of minions doing the work for you 
Whilst there is a point to this by way if time management, and I relate to:
In general it seems like a load of tosh for most of us. |
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| orangepippin |
I think the 80/20 principle is a deep insight into something fundamental and universal. Well, it certainly applies to my posts on DS. | ||
| Rob R |
It sounds very much like what Joel Salatin advocates for farmers- knowing when to draw the line & not taking up your time with work that doesn't make or save a significant cost. It's basically just streamlining the working day- my question is, how do you make other people you work with understand that this is a worthwhile/necessary process if you work as part of a team? | ||
| ros |
points 3, 4 and 5 are covered in any "Lean" , "Six Sigma" , time management text/training and are not exactly rocket science. Methinks anyone can work for only 4 hrs if in that time they are arranging a valuable book deal | ||
| gil |
Pareto is hardly obscure. | ||
| Penny |
Love the new picture Gil 
Does all seem a bit STBO, and so totally depends on which area you work in. Think our customers might be a bit peved if we shut down after four hours
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