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Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

tim_ferrissI started reading Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4-hour Workweek” based on Pat’s (from Smart Passive Income) recommendation. I picked up a copy from my local library and read the back to find out what it was about. Here’s what the back of the book had to say:

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan — there is no need to wait and every reason not to. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint.

Sign me up! I would be happy with every single one of those dreams. A lot of the concepts are very intriguing and helpful, but some of the concepts are just not possible in my situation and Ferriss tends to oversimplify many situations.

80/20 Principle

The 80/20 principle states that 80% of the benefit will come from 20% of your work. Ferriss gives a few examples where a large portion of his revenue was coming from a small portion of his clients. He also provides an example where a large portion of happiness will come from a small portion of your tasks. Ferriss recommends focusing on the small number of tasks that produce the largest income and happiness. This is a very interesting concept, but in some instances you can’t produce 80% of your results with 20% of your time. In the real world some tasks just take too much time to complete. Everything can’t be automated and condensed.

Parkinson’s Law

Ferriss defines Parkinson’s law in the following way: “Tasks will swell in importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.” This law basically states that as the allotted time for a project decreases, the focus and productivity increases. Ferriss provides a great example. 9 to 5 is the standard work shift in America. Even if you don’t have 8 hours of work a day, you somehow find some way to fill up that time. If for some reason there is an emergency and you have to leave work 3 hours early, you can still manage to complete your work.

In my experiences, Parkinson’s law proves to be very true. If I set aside a large amount of time to complete a task, I use the full allotted amount of time. If I procrastinate and give myself a shorter amount of time to complete a task, I accomplish the task in that shorter amount of time. I am most productive when I assign deadlines to tasks, even if the deadline is prior to when it’s actually due. I highly recommend setting deadlines to be more productive with your time.

Eliminate Time Wasters

Time wasters are the reason we are able to fill up an 8 hour work day, even if we don’t actually have 8 hours of work. My time wasters are checking email, espn.com and reading blogs. Now, I don’t think these are a waste of time and they are things I enjoy doing, however, they can kill my productivity. There’s a better way to stay up to date on email, espn and reading blogs and it’s done by batching. Batching is done by setting aside a specific amount of time, at a specific point of the day, to indulge in your time wasting activities. Time is definitely saved at the beginning and the end with regards to start-up and shut down time.

Automation

I found the automation information to be very interesting. There is a whole section on outsourcing. One of Ferriss’ ways to reduce your hands on time is to outsource everything. To prove his point, he provides an example about outsourcing your personal life. Apparently, you can hire a personal assistant who will write apology letters to your significant other.

Also, Ferriss does a great job explaining a process for making money through a product. If you’re the entrepreneurial type, this book is worth reading and owning just for this section. He goes through the steps for finding a product, testing the market for the product, driving traffic through ads, taking orders online and via phone and processing the orders. The best part is once you have the product and tested the market, the rest can be automated. This section is jam packed with resources to help you through the whole process.

Work From Home

This is the one step that is so completely over simplified in this book. He makes it sound like it’s the easiest thing in the world to gain the ability to work from home. I personally can’t work from home with my job. I’m hands on developing our second generation instrument. I’m not allowed to bring the instruments home and extract blood! I would have to completely switch careers to make this work, which is something Ferriss recommends doing if it’s necessary to work from home. It’s just not that easy in this economy.

Mini-Retirement

I would definitely read an entire book just devoted to planning what Ferriss defines as mini-retirements. The concept behind mini-retirements is split up your retirement into mini trips or adventures throughout the course of your life. Why wait until you’re older to start doing what you’ve always wanted to do? Most people don’t accumulate enough vacation to go on the types of adventures or vacations that constitute a mini-retirement, which is why the work from home and automation ideas were developed in the first place.

As great as Ferriss’ mini-retirements sound, I think I would rather find a job that I truly enjoy and raise a family. Some of the stories in this book involve taking kids with you on round the world trips, but I don’t find that very plausible. Additionally, as much as I’d like to automate a business idea to the point of working four hours a week while generating a large income, I would like my children to see me hard at work. I’m a hard worker because I watched my Dad work hard. I want to instill the same values in my children. That definitely won’t stop me from trying to develop large amounts of passive income. If I generated large amounts of passive income from different products, I would then be free to pursue further education, or find a job that I am 100% passionate about and work hard at that job. Ferriss’ lifestyle is not my dream.

Final Thoughts

I found a lot of concepts from this book to be very informative and helpful. I learned a lot from reading this book. I do not, however, believe that everything is as simple as Ferriss leads you to believe. Despite the over simplified approach, I highly recommend reading and buying this book. Usually I don’t recommend buying books, especially if you can find it at your local library. Buying “The 4-Hour Workweek” is definitely worthwhile as it is full of amazing references and links.

Random Thought

I saw Watchmen this weekend. There were some very awesome (and gruesome) fight scenes. In general, the movie was way too long. It approached 3 hours and about 50 minutes of it was completely unnecessary. Usually when comparing a movie to the written work, the sentiment is that the movie was lacking key scenes. In this instance, the movie kept too much from the book. If you enjoy superhero movies, with violence I do recommend watching it. Also, I saw the new Terminator trailer. WOW!

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2 Responses

  1. Betty says

    I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

    Betty

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  2. Steve says

    I appreciate the kind words. Thanks for stopping by.