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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Premise of Time Management

So let’s start questioning some rules of thumb or so called best practices in the more mundane sphere of things. I think the use of a good time management system would be considered by most as a worthwhile practice. Several schools of thought, books, and systems have been developed to address the issue of time management. Some, such as Habit 3: Put First Things First of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and Getting Things Done (GTD), are extremely popular. Getting Things Done in particular has recently developed an almost cult like following. Today I found myself very much inspired by an article at SaneLiving.org about common sense time management. Questioning the value of GTD leads to some interesting conclusions.

Specifically, what I liked about this article was an implied classification of the supposed things we need “to get done”, each of which can be organized into one of the following four categories:

1. Essential and Unforgettable (EU): Items that have to get done and will make an impact on your life. An example of this sort of thing might be a meeting with a new business partner or investor that has the potential to transform your life’s work. These sorts of things are of the highest personal importance and really deserve mind space.
2. Essential but Forgettable (EF): Items that need to get done, but will not really have an impact on your life. Changing the oil in your car probably falls into this category. These items ideally should not, but often do, consume mind space. All you really need for these is a reminder to do them at an appropriate time and place - nothing more, nothing less.
3. Unessential but Unforgettable (UU): Items that don’t need to get done, but which may provide a great deal of fun or lasting memories. These could be a family trip to a decidedly local destination, going out on a date, or playing a sport.
4. Unessential and Forgettable (UF): Items for which no one is depending on you, and that do not impact your health or happiness. This sort of thing could be steam cleaning your carpets or dusting your bookshelves.

When you think about it, only the first two really warrant any attention from a “I need to get this done” perspective. However, it is also worth pointing out that the third category of “unessential but unforgettable” is often the stuff of happiness and deserves special attention - just not necessarily on a to-do list. 

Four Quadrants of Life Management

The idea behind capture in GTD was developed so that items that needed to get done are logged externally so that they do not have to take up mind space. The problem is two-fold:

1. Often, implementing GTD results in everything, from all four of the categories mentioned above, being captured.
2. What do we do when we have freed up all this mind space we were “wasting” on mentally keeping track of our to-do’s? After all, we have to think about something!

Let’s visualize the four categories of things we supposedly need to “get done” as described above:

Why do we categorize our activities this way? Because we can relieve ourselves of the responsibility of capturing and managing anything unessential! That effectively cuts the time management effort in half. That is also why I have called it the four quadrants of life management as opposed to time management - only the “essential” quadrants truly need to be captured and time managed. You don’t need to capture and manage everything. I like to call this the basis for Getting Essential Things Done (GETD), a sort of GTD “lite” if you will. It also suggests that we spend the freed up mind space on the essential.

The astute will notice that this looks a lot like the Time Management Matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but it is different in one key aspect: urgency is not one of the coordinates. Only the essential could potentially be an urgent matter in the Seven Habits sense, and that is why you are capturing and managing them. The urgency is more a matter of where they end up on your calendar!

Eliminate & Automate

The above classification system is also crucial to followers of The 4-Hour Workweek. Specifically, you can start looking at things this way:

• Anything unessential and forgettable presents a pretty good opportunity for elimination. If no one is counting on you for it, and it doesn’t mean anything to you, why are you doing it in the first place?
• Anything essential but forgettable should be automated as much as possible. These are the things, for example, that we want to outsource, delegate, or deal with using the least amount of time and effort, usually via a reminder to act immediately at the right time and place.
• Anything unforgettable deserves some attention and mind space. But unless it is essential, we don’t have to capture it in our time management system (maybe you want to - hey it’s a free country, and that’s certainly ok! - all I’m suggesting is you don’t have to time manage these).

Hopefully, this frees up a lot of time to have fun and basically do a lot more of the unessential yet unforgettable. As I proposed: we probably shouldn’t bother spending a lot of time planning these sorts of things - it is almost the definition of spontaneity!

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Where do we keep photographs these days? If you are like me, they are all stored digitally. In fact, I have gone out of my way to scan old photos so that they can be stored centrally and digitally with the rest of my photo collection. In a moment of epiphany, it occurred to me that I could simply scan my ticket stubs just like I have scanned old photos! Best of all, these images can be organized with the rest of me photo collection in a single place!

As I further processed my pile of papers in my office I came across magazines I had been keeping because of one particular article, or perhaps a specific picture (for example pictures from house & home style magazines that serve as inspiration for an imagined home renovation). I already knew what to do: scan and toss!

On your mission to de-clutter, keep in mind that if you cannot throw stuff out, some things can be stored or organized digitally instead of physically. I know for me, the scan & toss option has been completely overlooked in the past. What do you do to organize your old ticket stubs, magazine articles and similar keepsakes?

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The World Isn’t Flat

Here are the results of this first foray into outsourcing:

• Elance: I received a single bid at over double the quoted budget.
• Ajay: By way of background, Ajay was the programmer I found myself through Planet Source Code. After sending the proposed job description and requesting a quote, he disappeared for over a week. After a week he communicated that he was on a vacation in his village and would get back to me when he returned to the city. After another week he did get back to me asking for more details on the job and timing (which was, in my opinion, quite clearly indicated in the original job description I sent).

Hardly inspiring! I was looking forward to comparing Ajay’s quote against a myriad of bids on Elance. So this was a bit of a set back. Without at least two competing bids, I had decided beforehand not to outsource this work because, as a rule of thumb, I think you need at least two options before you making any spending decision. What did I learn from this exercise?

1. I think the task, while described quite well and at a great deal of detail (as per best practices), was too complicated. It involved some binary file formats, and while an intermediate to advanced programmer in North America would have easily been able to complete this work, I wonder if most freelance programmers (or the owners of the companies bidding on Elance) are more interested in mundane, brainless work.
2. There is a definite risk depending on a single resource versus a company. As the proposal exercise aptly illustrates, Ajay represents a “single point of failure”. Without a firm or backup team behind Ajay, there is no fallback support. This was only the proposal, one can easily imagine the risk when depending on a sole operator to actually get the work done.
3. Another issue with going to someone directly is that you have to be prepared for the fact that they may not actually be interested in doing certain work. This is what I think happened with Ajay. Since I had worked with him on a project before, I think he was afraid to simply decline the work, and so delayed his response and asked for information already provided to further delay having to respond.

Plan B

Despite the lack of success with outsourcing this particular project, this story does have a happy ending: I was able to find a company that provides a ready made component that does what I was looking for, and in fact, provides even more functionality than I currently require. The cost of a royalty free developers license was within my budget. So for this job, the classic buy versus build was perhaps more relevant than outsourcing in the first place! I was therefore able to eliminate the need to perform this task. As I have mentioned before: favour elimination over automation.

Segue To Product Endorsement

How has this experience helped me? In my day job, I meet a lot of people, and over time I end up with a massive pile of business cards. When the pile reaches a critical height, I start to enter them into my contact manager/database. This, to say the least, is a tedious data entry exercise. I know what you’re thinking - I could outsource this work! However, based on the experience above, I wondered: is there a way to simply eliminate the data entry? Of course there is a way! I purchased a CardScan Personal v8. Within minutes I was able to scan a large pile of cards. The accuracy of the character recognition is excellent. Besides automatically populating my contact database, the contact management software that comes with the unit is pretty good in its own right - with the added bonus of retaining an image of the scanned business card. So in the end I would say, before outsourcing anything, look to see if any technology already exists that can equally get the job done.

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Let’s think about money for a moment. What do you do when you are perpetually in debt, or living dangerously above your means? Usually the very first order of business is to find out where you are spending your money. To manage your money you have to be able to account for it.  The same goes for your time. To drag yourself out of the misery of time poverty, you need to understand where you are spending your time.

Step 1: Track

Here is what I suggest: for a week, make a conscious effort to track everything you do, and I mean everything. Since I am usually at or near a computer, I created a calendar in Google to track all the various things I did during my waking hours. Excel, a notebook or a simple pad of paper would work equally well. Activities you track will most likely include meetings, checking email, processing whatever kind of “widget” you work on (for me it is writing software code), telephone calls, lunch, coffee breaks and water cooler socials. It should also include what you do when you are not at work: taking out the garbage, preparing meals, taking the kids to school, reading, watching television, etc. Call this the Things I Do list.

Step 2: Evaluate

Once that exercise is complete, the next step is to determine which, of all the things you do, add the most value to your life or make you the most happy. What is left are the things that add little, or no value - things that really don’t provide any real satisfaction.

Step 3: Consider Your Options

Now that you have identified these limiting activities, you should consider three options for each:

• Eliminate: Can you simply stop doing it? Usually you cannot, but sometimes this may be the case. If it must be done, can someone else do it without you being accountable for it anymore? This is what I will call abdication. If you can simply abdicate responsibility for something that must be done, that’s great. Maybe there is a report that must be prepared daily for your manager. You know it must be done, but perhaps your manager’s administrative assistant, or a junior peer can take ownership of preparing that report. You may find that people actually want to take ownership of a task.
• Outsource: It has to be done, and you have to be responsible for it (example: feeding your kids!). Can someone else do it for you? This is what I will call delegation. Sometimes you can delegate things at little or no cost (example: your eldest child will help prepare lunch for everyone as part of their chores). Sometimes it may cost you something (example: hiring an assistant to put together sales presentation materials). In the end, it is still your responsibility to get it done, but you do so by getting someone else to do it for you.
• Automate: Is there a better way of doing something? Can a system or technology be used that gets the task done with less time and effort required on your part? A simple example might be using filters or rules in your email client to automatically file or forward certain email messages.

Step 4: Work & Live Smarter

Always prefer elimination. For each thing you do ask: can this be eliminated? There are three possible answers:

• Yes
• Partly (or Maybe)
• No

If the answer for a given task is yes, take whatever steps are required to eliminate that task. If the answer is “partly” (or maybe) you probably need to break down the task into smaller components. After breaking it down, go back and ask your self whether each one can be eliminated and repeat the process. If the answer is no, you have to move on to the next question: can I outsource or automate this task? You will have the same three possible answers for each one. If the answer is yes, you may have to consider several options and you will have to analyze each one to determine which is the best way to outsource or automate it. If the answer is “partly” (or maybe) you need to break the task down a little more. If the answer is no, well, you might have to accept that you are stuck with doing that thing for the time being. At least you know you don’t have a choice at this time, and we all have to do some things we don’t like! My advice: meditate on these tasks and ask yourself, is there any possible way to make doing this a little more fun?

Conclusion

Since starting my quest for the 4-hour workweek, I have followed this procedure in trying to account for, and manage, the things I do. I feel I can improve on my abilities when performing steps 3 and 4, as the idea behind those steps often require a change of mindset. Some things that I initially thought I could not even outsource, I have come to consider as candidates for elimination! As I become more comfortable with the idea of abdicating, delegating and automating the things I do, I find this procedure can be repeated, and the results refined over time.

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There is another dimension to elimination, and that is reducing real, physical clutter. This is all the stuff in our homes and workplaces that we don’t really use, at best taking up space, at worse requiring maintenance and attention (leading to more task and mental clutter). A number of years ago, my wife and I moved into a new, larger house. For some reason, as a society, it seems our houses get bigger and bigger, but I digress… The interesting thing about larger spaces: you find a way to fill them up, and that’s exactly what we proceeded to do: our new house just gave us an excuse to buy, collect and store more stuff.

Last summer we realized that our house was actually filling up with junk.  What we were accumulating was often not being used at all. In a stroke of brilliance, we decided we needed to have a garage sale and clear it out. We started going through our house, first in our “storage” areas and then our closets. At first when you are going through your stuff you usually come up with some reason to hold onto it. To get by this roadblock we developed a one year rule: if we have not used something in over one year it was a candidate for our garage sale. As we identified stuff that met this criteria, we staged it inside our garage where we would perform a final decision on whether something stayed or went. The funny thing was just getting things into this staging area ended up being 90% of the battle. Nothing we staged came back inside, and in fact inspired us to identify more items we did not need.

At the end of the day, I spent perhaps a full day of effort between setting up and holding the actual garage sale. I made about $200. It was a great way to meet people in the area and also nice to know that some of our stuff might find use with someone else. Beyond this, there were so many benefits to this exercise:

• There was a lot of stuff that did not even make it into our garage sale and went directly in the trash. The whole thing doubled as a spring cleaning exercise!
• Seeing the sheer volume of stuff that we were willing to part with, all in one spot, made us realize that a lot of things we had bought over the years were really quite unnecessary. We now have a garage sale rule when we are shopping: if there is a chance that at item we are considering might end up in a garage sale, we put it down.
• Freeing up space was actually mentally liberating. We have found that less clutter in our space eliminates a lot of mental distraction.

In the end, the garage sale itself was probably not worth my effort, but the exercise of preparing for it was priceless.  In the future I would either simply donate any items of value to charity, or put it on the curb with a big “Free” sign (a friend tells me he had a big piece of plywood with “Free” spray painted on it that he would regularly use for just such a purpose - ironically the sign itself was also taken by someone!).

This is just a story about a single battle, but the war against clutter still rages with me and others. Resources and tactics:

• Lifehacker (tagged as Clutter)
• Unclutterer
• zenhabits (tagged as Simplicity)

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We love cooking (and eating!) so what was the problem? The problem was the deciding what to eat part, and the fact that this decision process was occurring every day, often after long and stressful days at the office.  Worse, this was often constrained by what was in the refrigerator causing us to repeat the decision process yet again or requiring an unplanned trip to the grocery store. Although we solved this problem before I read The 4-Hour Workweek, in the spirit of the book, I will say that this is a classic example of failing to batch. The inescapable time and effort of deciding what to eat was being repeated seven or more times a week. What we needed to do was get some economy of scale from this decision exercise by doing it only once a week.

Here is what we do: every Saturday morning we sit down and devise the following week’s menu.  Since it is the weekend, there is less time pressure and we often pull out some cookbooks or have fun recalling a good meal. By the end of it, we have come up with a menu for the week, everyday from Sunday to the next Saturday like the one below:

I cannot tell you how much stress this approach has reduced! Since the menu is on autopilot for the week, we also don’t suffer the psychological effort of task switching and can simply cook our meal while our minds may still be on our work or our kids (hopefully the latter!).

Perhaps a bigger benefit has been on our grocery bills. After we devise the menu for the week, we go through it and determine which ingredients are already in the refrigerator or pantry, and we put anything missing onto our weekly grocery list. As a result we only buy what we need (previously, we would over-buy not knowing exactly what we might be eating), and we batch our trips to the grocery store to basically one trip per week! When you think about it, that’s even good for the environment - who needs to buy some carbon credits from me?

Feel free to download my Weekly Menu Template (MS Excel file) now!

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Ok, Sandy isn’t a real person. She is your free virtual personal assistant, and by virtual I really mean virtual! In Sandy’s own words:

Hi! I’m Sandy, your new assistant. I’ll remember the details so you can focus on what’s important.

From managing appointments and to-do lists to taking, filing and looking up notes, Sandy does handle a lot of the details for you. I found Sandy when I was looking around the web for a software tool to help me capture all of my thoughts digitally (if you don’t write things down or capture it somewhere else, your thoughts tend to float around in your head, where they often surface at the wrong times, stress you out and are usually forgotten when they are actually needed). In a way, handling such details is exactly one of the reasons we want and need a VA.

Sandy is web based, so she is accessible from almost anywhere.  You communicate with Sandy via email, sms and IM via twitter (hmmm, sounds a lot like how you would communicate with a real VA…). I have access to Sandy 24/7 from my inbox, Blackberry and cell phone. You also use natural language to communicate with Sandy, and honestly, after a while, it almost seems like you are emailing a real person. It is actually very cool.

All that being said, Sandy is not going to find you the best deal on an apartment in Buenos Aires or research the Ice Cream industry and establish contact with diary product experts (well not yet anyway - it is amazing what these techno whizzes are capable of these days…). So you will still need a real VA in your quest to cut out 80% of your day to day work, however, Sandy might help you outsource the management of some of the small stuff. So far, Sandy has fit very nicely into the workflow of my current organization system. Check her out!

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Hi, you have reached the desk of Brick Andrews. I am currently checking and responding to voicemail at noon and 4:00 pm. If you require assistance with a truly urgent matter, please contact me on my cell phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Otherwise, please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can. You can also leave your email address as I am often able to respond faster that way.  Thanks and have a great day.

Source: Inspired by the 4-Hour Workweek.

You will notice that it is a slightly more compact version than the sample given in the book - it turns out the amount of recording time on my voicemail service is quite limited. By the way, having a script seems to be a best practice when recording messages, otherwise you are forever pausing in the wrong spots, saying “um” a lot, or just generally screwing up the message you are trying to record. I had a script and it still took me three takes to get it right!

Seriously, changing the voicemail recording was rather simple. The hard part is not automatically answering the phone when it rings. For some reason, most humans are hard wired to drop everything and pick up the phone when it rings, often with the urgency of an emergency response team. It is an unconscious reaction and quite Pavlovian. It was actually quite refreshing today to not pick up the phone when it was ringing and batch the handling of calls into a single period at noon.  Since it was my first day on this, I have been quite militant in not answering the phone. I suppose if you were really doing nothing you might enjoy taking a call - all things in moderation.

In general, we should take and make telephone calls when it is convenient for us, not necessarily the caller. The same holds true for home as well as the office. I have a voicemail service on my home line, and I recommend you get one too. Why should I answer the phone if I am in the middle of watching a movie, or playing a game with my kids???

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