Summary
Probably one of the best books out there on finding your priorities and focusing on what matters.
If you haven’t heard of this book by now, what sites have you been visiting? This is THE book you need to read to be able to do things in less time and with less effort. This book covers effective time management, creating passive income, prioritizing, outsourcing, traveling the world and much much more.
The book starts off by giving Tim’s story and how he learned the hard way the need to not invest so much time and energy in his work. He was overworked, over-communicated and generally overwhelmed with what he was doing and that’s when he decided he had to do something and found all the grate techniques described in this book and how thanks to them he was able to travel the world and do all the amazing things he does now.
The book itself covers a wide variety of topics on how to effectively do more with the time you have and how to recover the time you don’t have due to other activities.
You can basically take the books title verbatim and create a 4-hour workweek, if you so desire. When I first finished reading it I know I thought that, but I think like most people, you’ll eventually just take the parts from this the book that speak to you, try them out, and immediately discover a new way of seeing how you can cut your effort in half while at the same time improving your results. Then go and try something else until you eventually create the lifestyle describe in the 4-Hour Workweek. I personally think it’s not fulfilling enough to go full out on this, Tim himself has not continued with it.
This is the grate thing about this book. If you don’t agree with Tim’s choice of lifestyle you get the necessary tools to create your very own, just the way you want it. Unless your dream lifestyle is to be the Pope, then, no it can’t help you with that…sorry.
The one thing that Tim Ferris covers extensively in all of his books is the concept of “the minimal effective doses“, often called the Pareto principle or the 80/20 Rule elsewhere. Tim takes the 80/20 Rule to an entire new dimension, he tests every approach to a problem until he finds the least he has to do to solve the greatest part of the problem. He effectively looks for that 5 to 20% that solves 80 to 95% of the problem. Everything more than this is basically just waisted time and busy work that can very often be delegated or outsourced.
If you are a perfectionist, then obviously, at this point you won’t agree with the book. But if you think about it for a moment, if your goal is efficiency, then this is perfect efficiency. The minimal effective doses is the search for perfect efficiency and that’s why you shouldn’t just ignore the information in this book.
Tim dedicates an entire chapter of this book on outsourcing busy work, how to find and choose a virtual assistant and how to best use their abilities to get more done in your own life. If you are slumped with menial tasks just this chapter alone makes the book worthwhile.
The best know advice in the 4-Hour Workweek is stopping checking your e-mail so often and only checking it once a day or even less often. I know I was one of those people stuck in that loop and was very skeptical at first. You check your e-mail, go on Facebook, read 1 article or 2, start doing something, then check the email again, then back to Facebook and so on. I would eventually end up looking at my email screen automatically. How did I get here? Wasn’t I just doing something else? I guess if I were to count how often I checked my email on a daily basis it would probably have been in excess of twice an hour. Now I only check my e-mail after I actually start my morning routine and get something done, usually after 10-11 AM, and in the evenings around 6-7 PM after dinner. Sometimes I don’t check my email for a couple of days. Up to this point, the world has not yet ended from me not reading my e-mail every hour. Anything can wait 1-2 hours. I am currently extending this to Facebook with very similar results.
To do this at your workplace, usually with very positive feedback, you need to setup an autoresponse that says something in the direction:”To improve my productivity I only check e-mail at 10 AM and 4 PM, if it’s something urgent please call me at this number: 1234″. You can detail it out as much as you like.
I have been able to take more useful techniques out of this book than any other I have read before it. It has made me value my time more than ever before and helped me focus on the more important things in life. This is why I decided that this book review is the perfect place to start as the first post.
As a first step I think you should read this book and try some of the techniques out.
