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What The 4-Hour Workweek Is About After college, Ferriss took a soul-sucking sales job at a tech firm. He left to start a soul-sucking business of his own. He went from working 40 hours a week for somebody else to working 80 hours a week for himself. He hated it. The pay was good, but the business left him drained. After learning about the Pareto Principle (more commonly known as the 80-20 Principle), Ferriss had a revelation: he streamlined his business, eliminating distractions and automating systems until it was not only more profitable, but also took less of his time. Much less. He took a mini-retirement, and then decided to write a book about lifestyle design, about creating a life that balances work and play, maximizing the positives of both. The 4-Hour Workweek describes the specific actions Ferriss took to implement these steps. This book actually is the complete embodiment of the 80/20 principle into an individuals professional life. The 80/20 principle is the idea that 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your time, and the other 20% of your productivity eats up 80% of your time. Ferriss argues that by eliminating that 20% of productivity that eats up most of your time, you can live in a much more efficient fashion, and the entire book revolves around that concept in various ways, hence the title The 4-Hour Workweek. In some ways, the book itself reads like a blog, as its broken down into lots of little pieces: some of them step-by-step advice, some of them anecdotal, and some of them philosophical. The 4-Hour Workweek is divided into four sections, each of which explores one of the components to lifestyle design:
Define your objectives. Decide whats important. Set goals. Ask yourself, What do I really want? Eliminate distractions to free up time. Learn to be effective, not efficient. Focus on the 20% of stuff thats important and ignore the 80% that isnt. Put yourself on a low-information diet. Learn to shunt aside interruptions, and learn to say no.
Automate your cash flow to increase income. Outsource your life hire a virtual assistant to handle menial tasks. Develop a business that can run on auto-pilot. (This is the weakest section of the book.)
Liberate yourself from traditional expectations. Design your job to increase mobility. This could mean working from home, or it could mean using geographic arbitrage to take mini-retirements in countries with favorable exchange rates.
Walking Through The 4-Hour Workweek First and Foremost Right off the bat, the book makes it clear that you should pick and choose from the material presented within, and thats a vital caveat for any personal productivity book - but especially this one.
Contents
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1 Step I: D is for Definition 2 Step II: E is for Elimination 3 Step III: A is for Automation 4 Step IV: L is for Liberation 5 Other key concepts 6 Links
Stop all multitasking immediately. This means when youre trying to write, close your email program and your instant messenger program and your web browser and just focus on writing, nothing else. This allows you to churn out the task way faster. Force yourself to end your day at 4 PM or end your week on Thursday. Even if you have to come in on Friday, do nothing (or, even better, focus on something to develop yourself). The goal here is to learn to compress your productive time. Go on a one week media fast. Basically, avoid television (other than one hour a day for enjoyment/relaxation) and nonfiction reading of any kind (including news, newspapers, magazines, the web, etc.). By the end of it, youll discover that the media and information overload was giving you a mild attention deficit. Check email only twice a day. Combining this with the no multitasking principle enables email to only eat up a sliver of my time when it used to seemingly bog down everything. Never, ever have a meeting without a clear agenda. If someone suggests a meeting, request the specific agenda of the meeting. If there isnt one, ask why youre meeting at all. Often, meetings will become more productive or, if they were really time wasters to begin with, theyll vanish into thin air. Dont be afraid to hang up a do not disturb sign. This was something that seemed very natural to me, but for many people its not. If youre being interrupted regularly by people popping in, youre effectively multitasking and multitasking is a time waster, so if you have a task that requires your focus, literally hang up a do not disturb sign. People will get the message.
office as part of your routine, then gradually shifting to an all-remote life. This way, you can tackle the work from anywhere on your own terms. Of course, this may also lead you to quit your job if you are able to build up new opportunities (like those from the third section). What do you do with the free time? Thats the entire point of this book, that time is the really valuable asset we have in our lives, not money. Time allows you to follow your dreams, and this entire books purpose (at least steps two and three) has been about moving more and more time into your own personal life so you can do these things.
How to be more efficient with e-mail. How to reduce clutter from your life. If you cant define it or act upon it, forget it. Life exists to be enjoyed the most important thing is to feel good about yourself. Why geographic arbitrage is a great way to enhance your relative income. The value of a virtual assistant.