That being said, The 4-Hour Workweek offers a lot of tactical and practical advice on how to work less and live more. I still want to work a 4-hour workweek, I still want to dreamline, and I still want to develop new and novel revenue sources to fund my new lifestyle, and so, this blog remains a 4-Hour Workweek Journal. However, in reading my own posts, I sometimes get the feeling I have given an all knowing, all perfect, almost omniscient quality to Mr. Ferriss. I suppose I have become a bit of a disciple, but my initial desire to journal my following his advice was bourne out of both a hope that his methods would prove helpful and a healthy dose of skepticism.

Since I have provided my fair share of glowing praise for The 4-Hour Workweek in my posts, in the spirit of balance I thought I would also share a little more explicitly what makes me a bit of a sceptic:

It’s Easier When You Start Rich

Let’s face it, Ferriss was already making a good chunk of change before preaching his work-less, live-more mantra. Its seems to me that he was somewhat rich the old fashioned way before he reduced his work week down to four hours and joined the newly rich. This suggests that one might be more successful in attaining a 4-hour workweek if one were starting from a position of relative wealth and means.

Easy Money

I think Ferris may recognize this and so to get us into the same position of wealth, he suggests how we might create self running businesses, or muses as he calls them, that will supply us with an endless cashflow to fund our new found desire to trot the globe. All you have to do is market a product on the Internet and outsource the fulfillment of orders and the handling of customer service. Its that easy! Besides giving a few examples of what others have done, he does not really discuss how we comes up with or find these magical products. I don’t mean to sound too harsh, but sometimes it comes off sounding a bit like Don Lapre (this is the guy from the early 90’s with the late night infomercials claiming that by placing “tiny classified ads” in newspapers he was able to make $50,000 per week from his one bedroom apartment). Tiny classified ads… Google Adsense…

What About the Kids?

While he goes to great pains to explain how his method applies equally to salaried employees and people with kids, in the end, he started as a business owner and he does not have kids. I’m just saying.

I Still Hope

I just wanted to share what makes me skeptical. It is nothing more than my opinion - the opinion of a man still living, one could argue, an at least somewhat “socially reinforced illusion”. In fairness, I do want to reiterate my first point: regardless of the meat of the book, Ferriss opens our eyes to our unconscious acceptance of the work-hard-now-enjoy-life-later plan. This, in and of itself, is of immense value. At minimum, this creates an opening, allowing us to have a conscious choice and to consider new options. Lastly, it was the reading of The 4-Hour Workweek that got me started on the idea that things could be different and more fulfilling in my own life. It is still early days for me, and my first steps have been rather timid and safe, but already I feel like things are better. My attitude has improved and things just seem brighter. Can we still be friends Tim?

By the way, this is for those of you who remember the infamous Don Lapre:

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I want an improved and expanded 4HWW to help propel the critical mass needed for large-scale institutional, and even policy-level, change. The book alone won’t do it, obviously, but I believe it can play a small part as instigator.

Source: The Blog of Tim Ferriss.

I think this is an interesting strategy. A lot of people (including myself obviously) have been inspired by the ideas behind the book and have made new innovations in lifestyle design using the book as a starting point. As Ferriss says: “we” is smarter than “me”.

Ferriss goes on to say:

To my knowledge, this is the first time a NY Times bestseller has ever been made open to public editing. In fact, I haven’t seen any traditionally-published book ever crowdsourced on a global scale.

Source: The Blog of Time Ferriss.

Well, I am not so sure about that. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, the authors of the best selling Naked Conversations, put chapters of their book on their blog for review. In essence, that book (or at least a good portion of it) was edited by the blogosphere. I believe there are other examples (as far as I know Producing Open Source Software was - fittingly - reviewed by many online before being published). By the way, I highly recommend both of these books, although the later will probably most interest those who work in the software industry.

Anyway, here is your chance to leave your mark on the book that started it all while Ferriss gets his book updated and fact checked virtually for free - which is cool - after all crowdsouring is just another version of outsourcing!

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In this chapter of the 4HWW, I think Tim is quite clear in sections 2 and 3 regarding batching and empowering. But section 1, about time-wasters, I found somewhat confusing and overwhelming, I think because Tim got a little too specific in his recommendations. Of course, it’s great that he shared what has worked for him - it just may not work exactly the same way for everyone else. So I’d like to boil it down to what I think he’s really getting at.

To take it from the top down, this is in the Elimination section of the book, so we’re trying to eliminate everything that’s unnecessary so as to free up our time for the important. We’ve already weeded out unnecessary information consumption and unnecessary self-imposed tasks; now we need to get rid of those Pesky Other People And we are doing all of this entirely in preparation for Liberation.

We want these Pesky Other People (work-related people - we aren’t eliminating all human contact here ;)) to:

1. Leave us alone whenever possible
2. Engage us only on our own terms the rest of the time

And, just as with raising children, in order to train people to deliver the desired result you’ve got to:

1. Define (and communicate as necessary) appropriate rules
2. Enforce those rules unflinchingly until they get it

What exactly those terms & rules are is up to you, your work, your life, and your preferences. But the key thing to doing the 4HWW is that, in order to Liberate yourself from your day job or business, you’ve got to get them trained to communicate with you on YOUR schedule and at YOUR location, not the other way around. Even if your job is not Liberation-friendly and you’re going to have to create a muse to replace it, you want to go ahead and free up your time as much as you can now so you can work on your muse more.

You simply can’t be available to other people at their whim and on their terms all day long and expect to be able to (a) focus on getting the important things done or (b) ultimately free up your schedule for non-work activities. Like an executive, you have to do the equivalent of telling your secretary to clear your calendar and hold all calls so you can get important things done.

So, which means of communication best allows you to respond at your own schedule and from your own (changing) location? Email does… that’s why Tim prefers it. Phone comes in second. Obviously, in-person is last. That’s why he pushes towards email and harps on getting out of face-to-face meetings.

Of course, if you have no interest in traveling the world, or are happy keeping that down to short non-work vacations, and don’t do business overseas, then you can handle phone calls almost as easily as email, or may not even mind setting up meetings sometimes. The key that remains in this situation is to remember to keep these communications on YOUR terms and on YOUR schedule. Don’t allow yourself to be at other people’s disposal. Telephones and email can’t interrupt you if they’re turned off!

I think that’s it in a nutshell.

Something Tim didn’t talk about very explicitly here, but which I think is relevant, is to look for WHY people want to talk to you, and see if you can address that need through a new process. He did talk about this as it relates to empowering - when he noticed that he was a decision bottle-neck & decided to empower others to handle non-critical decisions. He also mentioned later in the book that if people routinely call with the same product questions, you should set up a FAQ on your website. It just makes sense to do the same thing with all communications. I think this will work better than just trying to “get out of” conversations/meetings.

For example, at my job, people email me or want to set up a meeting to discuss setting up new websites. If I had the authority (which I sadly don’t), I could write up a web form that asks all the common questions and direct them to it. It would then email me their specs and tell them what the turn-around time will be for a response. That would eliminate a lot of communications. Probably I would still have to email them a few specific questions, but that’s still a far better process.

Notice that the line between Automating and Eliminating is getting fuzzy here - they really work together.

Personally, I actually get very few communications and almost no urgent tasks at my day job. I’m also fairly empowered as an employee. And I’m eventually replacing my job with a muse, not becoming a Liberated employee. So I don’t have a lot to do here. I was tempted to think that I did, and got wound up and confused with all of Tim’s suggestions, until I figured out that I was overcomplicating things.

A final thought: If you, like me, found Tim’s obstacle course of auto-responders and voicemail greetings too convoluted or impractical, or didn’t like the idea of boxing yourself into answering your email and voicemail at pre-determined times, here’s my suggestion: Just go offline on your email & turn off your phone except when you have time to run a “batch” process on it. Then, when that first person calls you angrily saying, “Didn’t you get my email?” (or you get the angry email “Didn’t you get my voicemail?”) you can just answer, “No, sorry, I leave my email offline (phone turned off) when I’m trying to complete a major project.” Their irritation will pass and they’ll learn your rule. You will have to repeat this conversation for each unhappy person, but that’s not so bad, all things considered. Follow Tim’s advice on increasing duration between checks until the returns start to diminish.

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By way of some background information, Mike Vardy questions the value of personal productivity and getting anything done and has developed the revolutionary EffTD™ system.

Odds & Ends

The 4-Hour Workweek Journal is now part of the Getting Things Done Feedburner Network - a network of weblogs talking and discussing everything GTD (Getting Things Done), lifehacking and personal productivity. When you thing about it, a four hour workweek is very much about getting things done - so much so that one can be extremely effective while spending a fraction of the time usually spent on work by most.

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How did the book overcome seemingly insurmountable odds: According to Ferriss:

It all came down to learning how to spread a meme, an idea virus that captures imaginations and takes on a life of its own.

Well, that’s great for Tim, but what about us? As we develop our own “muses” - products to sell that are vehicles for generating cash without consuming time - we will almost certainly have to consider some kind of marketing strategy. Given the limited budgets some of us may have in setting up a business, some form of viral marketing may actually be inescapable. Viral marketing is defined as:

…marketing techniques that use preexisting social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.

Source: Wikipedia.

So what are the steps involved in creating a so called idea virus?

Be Remarkable

According to marketing guru Seth Godin and even Tim Ferris himself, it all starts with the product itself. While some clever marketing or publicity stunts may grab some peoples’ attention for a time, it is a remarkable product that will create the word of mouth phenomenon required for an idea to become viral. Notice that the product must be remarkable, not necessarily the best quality, or the greatest number of features, etc. Seth Godin has described this concept in the Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. The gist is this: for the most part, cows are not very exciting. We could drive through the countryside and never really take notice of the cows in the fields as we passed. However, if we drove by a purple cow, we would definitely take notice. We would probably stop the car and tell others about what we saw. Here is Seth discussing how we ignore ordinary stuff:

At the end of the day, an impressive commodity is still just a commodity.

Work The Pond

You have to reach out to people and network. Don’t forget, we are supposedly connected to each other by as few as six handshakes. However, as Malcolm Gladwell points out:

Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Source: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

So we have to network with the right people. In Work The Pond, Darcy Rezac describes these people as the royals of the frog chain where we are all frogs and the world is the pond within which interact. So you have the try and figure out who these ultra-networked people are in the market you want to sell in and then you have to go where they go. Since Ferriss was going to push the ideas behind his book through the blogging community, that meant going where the “A” bloggers go. Before the launch of the book, Ferris attended the likes of the SxSW conference and the Web 2.0 Expo. Rezac also expounds the benefits of positive networking, where we determine what we can do for someone else. For Ferris, that was providing content for these bloggers that appealed to their interests, not his.

One simple technique is to ask the ultra-networked questions about topics in which they are experts and that you are genuinely interested in. It is kind of like the social dynamics of dating: if you go out on a first date and just talk about yourself you are doomed. Expert daters know that the secret is showing genuine interest in the other party, usually by asking a lot of questions and not talking about yourself. Ultimately, this kind of interest in them on your part will cause them to ask about you and you have permission to tell them your great story.

Sell Around The Product

You will notice that when I was discussing Ferris going to where the bloggers go, I said that he was going to push the ideas behind his book - not the book itself. In general, people do not like to be “sold”. Often, one ends up feeling manipulated and therefore consumers often try to avoid the direct pitch. What we want to do is talk about the larger concept, or trend that led to the creation of our product. What is the new or interesting reason our product needs to exist? Of course in the end we can mention our product, but we don’t have to sell it directly.

Polarize

Elicit attacks and polarize people. Say something controversial. While not saying something offensive for the sake of being offensive, we can unapologetically present a legitimate opinion that challenges peoples assumptions. Ferriss recommends questioning one of the three B’s, namely peoples’:

• Behaviour
• Beliefs
• Belongings

Causing people to fight over an idea creates passionate supporters and die-hard attackers - the two necessary ingredients for keeping an emotional debate going at length and therefore creating word of mouth about your idea. Ferris talks about this at a Viral Marketing Conference:

Build A Community

Lastly, you will want to maintain the relationships you build with the so called ultra-networked and at the same time build relationships with your supporters. Ferriss did this through his blog and forums, although these are not the only venues possible for building a community. For example, in the industry I currently work in, community is often built through conferences and trade shows.

Endnotes

You can read about the launch of The 4-Hour Workweek in Tim Ferriss’ own words and also read about it in Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuation blog.

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The entire keynote address can be viewed on the New New Internet Conference site.

Here is a truism: people do not truly multi-task. Multi-tasking, in my opinion, is usually used to describe switching continuously between multiple single tasks over a period of time. So why not just work on one task at a time to completion, one after another? If we really cannot parallel process, the overall duration of completing all of the tasks is the same whether we do one thing at a time or try to “multi-task”. If you believe, as many do, that there is a task-switching cost associated with any switch from one task to another, then multi-tasking actually takes more time than performing single tasks at a time to completion.

One could then say that they must start one task before completing another because of a deadline. I would agree that a deadline is a practical implication, but it suggests prioritizing work by deadline, not the need to multi-task! In fact, task switching costs suggests that by prioritizing work and single tasking, we have the best shot at meeting these deadlines.

By the way, we often think that computers multi-task. Strictly speaking, for single processor machines, that is not technically accurate. CPU’s work on a single task at a time, and multi-tasking is emulated by having some sort of task switching scheme built into hardware or operating system software. Just like humans, there can be a substantial performance penalty for a computer to task switch.

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I’m going to assume you are suffering from time famine, creeping dread, or - worse case - a tolerable and comfortable existence doing something unfulfilling. The last is the most common and  most insidious.

Source: The 4-Hour Workweek.

The web defines insidious as:

Alluring but harmful; intended to entrap; working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way.

Source: Google.

Insidious indeed. Deep down I have always felt this way about employment in general. When performing unfulfilling work, your employers pay you off just enough to make you comfortable. Just enough to make you feel you would miss that compensation if you decided to forgo what is ultimately unrewarding work. By the way, I have never felt any ill will towards an employer because of this. They are intelligent enough to get other people to do the work for them and pay them just enough to do it. That’s just smart. And truthfully, sometimes the work is fulfilling. Therefore, the ultimate goal is simple: to become the employer and do only the work that one finds fulfilling.

Odds & Ends

Rex over at the Diary of a Four-Hour-a-Weeker wrote a post about Beginning the Outsourcing Journey. He references an article on 43 Folders which I think should be required reading by all 4-Hour Workweek initiates:

• Part 1: Enlightened Outsourcing - The Psychology
• Part 2: Enlightened Outsourcing - The Practice

This is a great two part series. The first part steps back and discusses one’s feelings about your work, getting help with your work and having people work for you. These sorts of things are not really discussed in The 4-Hour Workweek or are somewhat glossed over. The second part is more tactical, but examples are always helpful! Thanks for sharing the link Rex!

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• Diary of a Four-Hour-a-Weeker
• The Four Hour Trial

They are also going to try following the principles of the book and see what happens.  So that’s at least three experiments out there in cyber space for everyone to follow, and I am sure there are more.  I have added these to my Blogroll because I can. If you know of others, let me know.  I will also add them to my links as I come across them.  Just think - a whole virtual community of 4-Hour Workweek bloggers.

I just about finished my first quick reading of The 4-Hour Workweek. I read slowly. My intention is to go back and carefully reread the book applying the principles set forth in the book. What I can say is that Tim Ferriss challenges a lot of assumptions and his overall message is worth hearing, regardless of the outcome of my, or any experiment that uses the book as inspiration. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and I very much recommend you get yourself a copy.  You should get that copy by clicking here.

I have already been on fire since I started the book.  In a little over four hours I did the following over the last two days:

• Registered the fourhourworkweekjournal.com domain. I used GoDaddy. They are great for that sort of thing.
• Set up a blog on my web host. I am using Wordpress (see The Famous 5 Minute Install!).
• Tweaked a theme for the site.
• Joined Amazon.com’s affiliate program.
• Enabled site statistics and tracking via Google Analytics.
• Wrote my first post.
• Set up an email host for the journal.
• Set up an RSS feed. 

Obviously I need to outsource this kind of work, but that will have to wait until I have shed the shackles of my 9-5 salaried employee brainwashing and established contact with India. Despite doing everything myself, I still find it amazing what you can accomplish in a short amount of time.  Let’s hope this is just the start!

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So I deftly start picking up some great gifts: Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat for my globally aware sister, Kevin Smith’s My Boring Ass Life for a friend who donated a Saturday to help me drink - I mean build a deck - and has completely memorized the screenplay of Jay and Silent Bob, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma for my wife. I have everything I need but of course I continue to browse, and that’s when it catches my eye: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris.  The cover promises that this book can help me “escape 9-5, live anywhere and join the new rich”.  I don’t know what or who the new rich is, but I know instinctively that I definitely want to be one of them. I am sold. I have always had a soft spot for the self improvement genre, I suppose due to an unconscious acknowledgement that I could do better in life. And it comes with such credibility: “The #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller”! I personally don’t know anyone at the Journal, but I am quite sure they know something about great books.

Alas, I have already overspent on gifts this year and being a member of the aforementioned 9-5 crowd, there are certain financial realities. I add up the price of the three gift books and realize that The 4-Hour Work Week is simply a luxury I cannot afford, despite it’s promise to liberate me from this very financial predicament (what irony!). So with a little sadness, I put the book down and make my way to the checkout.  The line is easily 25 people deep so I settle into a catatonic near sleep state staring blindly forward at nothing, the kind of poor micro rest you wrenchingly take advantage of anyway to get a second’s respite from your hectic life and its endless demands (job, kids, money, etc. etc…)…

Cashier: Next

Me: (delay as I awake from my reverie and walk to the counter) Hi

Cashier: You realize that if you buy three books today, you get a fourth one free.

Me: No I didn’t (to myself: if I did, I would have four books with me, wouldn’t I?)

Cashier: Why don’t you grab another book.  You can come right back to me once you have it and you won’t have to wait in line.

Me: Ok!

Clearly, this is a sign! I was meant to read The 4-Hour Work Week. I am now quite sure that this book will transform my life. However, here’s the thing, I have bought and read quite a few self improvement, business leadership type books, and while they are all usually a pleasure to read, I wonder if they have really changed my life that much.  Maybe, I have been able to take some of that mentoring and have made some incremental improvements to my lifestyle. Maybe. But I am still not rich, am I? I am still working 60+ hours a week, I am still totally stressed out! What makes The 4-Hour Work Week any different?

I have decided to find out. In a fit of creativity, it dawned on me to follow any “instructions” in the book seriously and create a journal documenting my trials and tribulations, my successes and failures, my hopes and dreams as I use The 4-Hour Work Week as my blueprint for lifestyle transformation! This being the 21st century, it is only fitting that such a journal be a blog, a blog you find yourself reading right now! So welcome all, wish me luck, and follow along on my quest to join the new rich!

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