Exrtra Credit - 4 Hour Work Week

The 4 hour work week by Timothy Ferriss was a great read.  It helped to define trends in society of how people actually utilize their time for work.  The book starts off speaking of the 80% to 20% rule (Pareto Rule) that people tend to live by when it comes to their work standards.  Mr. Ferris states that 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your time, and the other 20% of your productivity utilizes 80% of your time.  This was an interesting concept to me, and I tried to look at my life work trends to see if maybe I to was falling into this trend. 

As I read on, he goes on to say that by eliminating that 20% of productivity that eats up most of your time, you can live in a much more efficient fashion, and the entire book revolves around that concept in various ways.  Ferriss streamlined his business, eliminating distractions and automating systems until it was not only more profitable, but also took less of his time. The concepts of how to change your life are stated in this way:

 Define your Objectives: Set goals for yourself and decide what is important to you

Eliminate distractions that eat up your time: Focusing on 20% of what is important and getting rid of the 80% that is not.  Be strict with yourself!

Automate Cash Flow: Develop a business that can bring in residual income, Or as Ferriss calls it "running on auto-pilot"

Liberate yourself from traditional expectations:  This can be done by redesigning your work to increase mobility or taking trips where the exchange rate is better. (This sounded a little funny to me considering most people dont have that luxury in THIS economy)

There is a 4 Step Process called D.E.A.L by the  initials above!

The first is Definition, and spoke of detaching yourself from the thought of retirement and the thought of being on a beach someday with a wrinkly old tan.  Absolute income is the goal!  I liked this section because he has you do an exercise where you take a few moments to visualize your dream.  Meaning if you didnt have to work and do all the things you didnt want to, what would your dream entail?  Whats the nightmare scenario if that dream didnt come true?  He then goes on to you working towards your dream and visualizing the steps it would take to get there.  This is could really relate to and enjoyed..

The next part of the book dealt with Elimination.  Most of these things I already do today.  Such as make a to-do list the night before for the day after.  I find that I cannot get on with my day without this step.  I make sure to get everything I can off of that list each day and always carry over anything I miss, which he suggested also.  Ferriss also says to focus on yourself to develop yourself, but his suggestions of ending your work week early (on a Thursday) or coming in later to make it up, again seem to be ill-logical in todays work environment, but whatever. lol.  There is a point in this section where he discusses not having meetings without a concise and clear agenda.  This is important as you will never get anything good accomplished without goals planned ahead for meetings.   And he goes on to discuss something I taught my daughter, which was to hang a "Do Not Disturb" sign on your door or cubicle when being disturbed constantly by co-workers inhibiting your work.

Step 3 goes onto the Automation mode.  Again another section of the book that seemed a little detached from reality for me, as he talks about being a middle man for your business to generate revenue and set yourself up as a sales person to do that.  I like my ideas of automation better, which would be realistic to a work environment.  To me that would be setting tasks to automation such as auto respond of emails, or if you work in marketing using tools such as pay per click or google ads.  That to me is automation that would make sense.  So again it wasnt a home run for me in that section, but it was interesting nonetheless.

Step 4, Liberation!    The book encompasses all the models into a stream of an ideal lifestyle here.  Ferriss goes on to state that you could end up working in telecommuting if you set yourself up for it.  The way to do so, would entail you start setting up your work environment to be efficient in your absence.  Once you have taken all the steps to do so, give it a trial run on days off or times of sick absences to showcase it to your superiors as an alternative work model.  This would potentially be something that could be seen as a way to save money by the company, thus freeing you from the shackles of working in a tied down job and working remotely.  The closing of the book talks about the commodity of time and how to allocate more of it for yourself.  After all, if you had more time you could follow the dreams you set out to achieve in Step 1. 

The overall concepts of the book were very well done, and gave some very analytical ways to approach standard work models.  For this I give him a lot of credit, I just wish that some of this concepts were a little more realistic to people that dont have the opportunities to address the time conflicts in jobs as easily as he seemed to be able to do.  I dont know that most people would have that kind of say in their occupations, have great sales skills to be a middle man, or to have the financial backing to save themselves if they failed and ended up on skid row in a cardboard box.  But hey, you got to take chances in life.  And for that I give this book a B+!

Thanks Mr. Ferriss for enlightening me on how to get that valuable time back so I can follow my dreams.