The 4-Hour Work Week: Chapters 1 through 6

March 29th, 2008

Title: The 4-Hour Work Week
Author: Timothy Ferriss
Area of Study: Personal Management, Time Management

Chapters 1-6 Summary

I'm listening to the audio version of this book. I find downloading books from iTunes directly onto my iPhone allows me to cover much more material when I can listen to books on my daily commute to and from work. Compare this to reading shortly before bed, after all the kids are put to bed, and usually I am tired enough that I'm lucky to get through more than a few pages before drifting to sleep.

Anyway, on to my synopsis of The 4-Hour Work Week. The author is pretty long winded getting to the point of the book - how to use your time more effectively. The first 4 chapters are essentially the author's saga through his life of business ventures and how he came to know the principles he's outlining in the book. In my opinion, the first 4 chapters could have been summarized in one short chapter.

Starting in chapter 5 he gets to some good points. I will simply highlight the ones that stick out to me. If you're interested in more detail, pick up the book or leave a comment to start a discussion.

1. The time it takes to do a task will be the amount of time allocated for the task. If you have 8 hours to complete a task, it will take 8 hours. If you have 2 hours to perform the same task, it will only take 2 hours. Therefore, figure out the minimum amount of time it takes you to do your essential tasks to complete your business tasks.

2. If you become more efficient and can start doing in 4 hours what you previously did in 8, the author suggests NOT to fill up the rest of your time with busy-ness. After all, you're now making the same amount of money working half the time. Use your extra time to ENJOY life, spend time with your family, not to keep slaving away at work.

3. Cut out all non-essential tasks. You sit around an browse the web reading news for 2 hours a day? Is this valuable? Or is does it just waste your time and delay you from completing your essential tasks? Cut it out. Take a trial and see if cutting out non-essential tasks you identify has any impact on your effectiveness in getting things done. If you find they do, stop wasting that time and spend it on more important things.

4. Eliminate your worst customers. If 10% of your customers produce 90% of your revenue and profit, stop doing business with the lower 90%. This frees up your time and your revenue and profit don't drop much. Then refocus on your best customers and chances are their volume will increase with you. Have a customer that never seems satisfied and you spend a tremendous amount of time listening to their constant complaints and trying to keep them happy? Fire them as a customer. Your time is better spent focusing on the customers that take up little of your time and keep ordering from you.

5. While this isn't completely stated in the first 6 chapters, I get the impression it will come up: outsource as much as you can to other people (if you actually had a staff working for you, the same concept works for delegation). You own your own business and still do the accounting? That's not essential so pay an accountant to do it for you. That frees up your own time to focus on essentials. Still doing your own marketing? Outsource it. You get the picture.

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When I came across Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA concept I was itrigued that someone formally put a structure around something many people have been doing for years.
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