Review: The 4-Hour Workweek (Part 3)
Time to continue my review of The 4-Hour Workweek. Please refer to Part 1 and Part 2 before continuing. I’m sorry it’s taking such a long time, but I’ve got something big in the works coming out next Sunday… stay tuned.
E Is For Elimination
Since we already covered the “Definition” part of the “DEAL” acronym, it’s time to move to the second letter, which stands for “Elimination”.
The second step in becoming one of the “New Rich” is all about becoming truly productive by eliminating all the things that make you unproductive. Ferriss asserts that you don’t need to worry about time management (this must rile fans of Getting Things Done) because you shouldn’t have to worry about the “results-by-volume” approach:
“Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.”
If you follow his advice, he claims you will see “an increase in personal productivity between 100 and 500%”, whether you’re an employee or an entrepreneur. (Aside: one of the nice things about this book is that its principles can be used by both types — employees and entrepreneurs — which means you don’t have to become an entrepreneur first as in some other systems.)
The first thing he recommends is to apply the 80/20 rule to all aspects of your work and life using two questions:
- Which 20% of things are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
- Which 20% of things are resulting in 80% of my solutions and happiness?
Once you identify these things, do what you can to eliminate the 20% of things that are causing you grief and spend essentially all of your time working on the 20% of things that make you happy. Minimize your interaction with the other 60%.
Then Ferriss discusses his approach to time management, which is very simple:
- Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (the 80/20 rule)
- Short work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law)
In other words, identify “mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion”, because if you don’t do this then you’ll be overwhelmed by the unimportant things that suddenly become seemingly important.
So how do you do all of this? Here are Tim’s key suggestions:
- The Low-Information Diet. The subtitle for this chapter is “Cultivating Selective Ignorance”. It’s all about eliminating unnecessary sources of information. Stop watching the news. Stop reading the newspaper. Be very, very selective of what you read in general. Learn to read more quickly.
- Interrupt Interruption and the Art of Refusal. Do everything you can to ignore time wasters. The biggest thing here is to only check email twice a day and to tell everyone that’s what you’re doing and if they really need to talk to you they can phone you — then after a while move to once-a-day and eventually to once-a-week. Avoid meetings whenever possible, and if you can’t stop a meeting from happening then make sure it has a clearly defined purpose and end time. Get people out of your office/cubicle as quickly as possible so you can focus on the important things. Learn how to say no and how to get quickly to the point.
That, in a nutshell, is what Elimination is all about.
How Much Can YOU Eliminate?
Following through with everything that Tim Ferriss advocates is not easy, although I do think following his advice in your work life is easier than in your personal life. Remember that Ferriss has no children and is essentially single (at least as far as I can tell), which makes many of these things he advocates much simpler to do.
That said, there’s something to be said about eliminating or reducing unnecessary or unimportant tasks. I recently moved from daily to less-frequent posts on this blog, for example, as a way to free up some time for other things — such as building up my network of AdSense sites. (Hence the creation of PLRSiteBuilder and the product coming out next Sunday.) I’ve also started to unsubscribe to certain email lists that weren’t benefiting me. I haven’t gone whole hog, though, because I still read the newspaper most days. It’s true that it’s hard to go from being an information junkie to a dedicated ignoramus.
In fact, one of the many criticisms of the book is that if everyone did what Tim advocates that we’d have no intelligent discourse, no communication between groups of people. One of the examples he gives is how he decided who to vote for in the last presidential election: he asked friends who’ve educated themselves on the matter for their opinions and watched the debates. In other words, “I let other dependable people synthesize hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of media for me.” This theme of pushing things off for others to do is a big part of the next section of the book, the one that deal with “Automation”.
The truth, of course, is that only a small percentage (or micropercentage) of the people who read The 4-Hour Workweek will actually become like Tim Ferriss, so society won’t actually collapse overnight. But the next section on Automation is decidedly more controversial…. and also of real interest to AdSense publishers and others reading this blog. We’ll leave that for next time, though.
Sponsored Link: Looking to quickly build good-looking, well-linked, AdSense-ready sites? Check out my PLRSiteBuilder tool.
Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
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One Response to “Review: The 4-Hour Workweek (Part 3)”
I’ve really enjoyed the book and got a lot out of it. Your observations are in line with mine: what he does only works because so few are doing it. If everybody did what Tim Ferriss does, nobody could do what Tim Ferriss does! Still, easily one of the best books I’ve read in a while on this stuff. He does a masterful job of portraying himself as a master lifehacker.