5 Minute Book Review - The Four Hour Work Week

Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Five Minute Book Saturday Jun 28, 2008

This is the book that’s changing the way people view productivity. It has been a big hit, making the New York Times’ best seller list and launching its author, Tim Ferriss, into the media spotlight. The Four Hour Work Week’s (T4HWW) success is attributable to two main things: 1) It offers a refreshingly new approach to productivity, and explores some key new developments that can help a person spend less time at work, and 2) Tim Ferriss’ tireless (shameless?) self publicity that has gotten him on the front pages of many newspapers, magazines and on the couches of many chat shows. What follows is a brief surgical strike summary of the book so you can get a feel of what it’s all about and make your decision about purchasing it (or not!). If you do want to buy the book, there is a link to it on my recommended reading section in the sidebar to the right of this post.

The book is split into (appropriately enough) four main chapters, Definition, Elimination, Automation and Liberation, giving the nice acronym DEAL. I’ll go through each of the sections in turn.

Definition

The key first step in approaching productivity is to define first what you really want to do with your time. Only then does it make sense to bother to optimise time spent at work, allowing you to escape from it to do those things you have defined. Without this step it is easy to become lost. Indeed, many of us discover this at the weekend, on holiday or at the point of retirement - we get bored and don’t know what to do with ourselves. The book terms this feeling The Void, and Tim Ferris goes to some length telling us that we need to learn how to fill the void now to avert the, often too late, realisation that we have become defined by our work and are lost without it.

The chapters in this section cover overcoming the fear of failure in order to take more risks in your life. It examines at what happiness is (it’s excitement apparently), and explains what Dreamlining is (which I have covered before in this post).

Elimination

Once you have dared to dream a new life for yourself, and have defined some key things you would like to do with your new found time, the book then get’s down to explaining several techniques for eliminating time spent at work. Key ideas here are the 80/20 rule - focusing only on those key, high return tasks; managing information intake with media diets, strict email management and interruption avoidance tactics; and timeboxing (setting aggressive deadlines for work tasks). These techniques can be found in many other productivity methods. However, their presentation in T4HWW is refreshing because they sit within the book’s philosophy of figuring out ways of doing less, not more. The focus is on increasing meaningful productivity (as apposed to simply doing more to look busy - see my post on the Slacktivity Manifesto for more on this).

Automation

Having eliminated all that is not valuable from your work load, the next step is to automate as much as you can of the remainder. The section of the book that examines this, focuses on two main themes: Personal outsourcing and building an online business. Much has been written about personal outsourcing (for example here, here and here), and many take it as the key point of the book, which it isn’t. Much has also been said about its suitability for certain work environments/jobs. I met Tim while he was in London for a book signing and he was asked the question about confidentiality concerns with outsourcing work assigned by your company to yourself and he flatly said in such situations it shouldn’t be used - fair enough. The outsourcing aspects do exploit what is a fast growing market, and is perhaps rightly why the book has received such high amounts of press (see such companies as GetFriday, AskSunday and DoMyStuff for examples of this burgeoning market place).

The second theme in this section describes Tim Ferriss’ own approach to online business creation and is, for me, the least enjoyable part of the book. Ferriss built an online business selling supplements for students that are claimed to boost mental performance. The book outlines a model of automating income streams in such a business, and contains some fairly interesting techniques for dry running your business ideas using google adwords and dummy website creation for judging customer interest. The book also surveys possible online business areas that may be amenable to this kind of approach.

As I mentioned, this part of the book is my least favourite and is, I believe, the weakest section. Other books that discuss building automated businesses - or turnkey businesses - do a much better job. The best of which is the E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber (a link to the book can be found in the sidebar in recommended reading).

Liberation

This final section of the book looks at two areas: 1) Escaping the office, and 2) Mini Retirements. The sections on escaping the office describe ways in which you can negotiate a work from home agreement with your employer. The motive behind this is that once you are freed from the need to be seen working from 9-5, you can focus on results instead of hours put in. Away from the office, your boss no longer knows how many hours you put into your job or when you do them; all they see are your results. If you can maintain, or even increase, your result output (for example, by employing the techniques described in the sections on Elimination and Automation), you can start to negotiate even more time away from the office until, conceivably, you could be doing your work from anywhere in the world (a beach perhaps!). The book offers many different ways of staying in touch with work from anywhere in the world that hide your location (such as using Skype or Grand Central). This leads on nicely to the last section on mini-retirements.

Mini-retirements are extended stays abroad where you live the life you would lead were you able to retire right now. They can be achieved because you have been able to succeed in a) defining what it is you would like to do if you did not have to work (see the section of Definition), b) have eliminated all non-essential tasks from your work (Section on Elimination), c) Have automated as much as you can of the rest (Section on Automation) and d) have escaped from the need to be physically located in any one place (Section on Liberation).

Conclusions

And that’s pretty much it! The book is exciting in that it offers a daring new view on what productivity should be used for - a way to escape from work to do more important things with your life - but that is also its main problem. Not everyone dreams about escaping work in order to live on a beach somewhere, or travel incessantly around the world. The book’s ethos is very anti-corporate, and its worldview cannot entertain the concept of a life lived working for a large company that is both challenging and rewarding. It offers a kind of polemic against such a culture, and gives many practical (and not so practical) tips on how to escape from it. The topics in the book have caught a wave in the productivity community; a wave that rejects many of the unspoken tenets of traditional productivity sites and methods. Its promise of a care-free existence supported by automated income streams and minimal ‘work’ is seductive, but I’d be interested in seeing just how realistic/practical it’s vision of work and life really is. That said, there are many things in the book that can help to reduce workload, and its focus on elimination before optimisation is something that all of us could use to greater effect. In addition, personal outsourcing is a fascinating idea and something that we are all likely to see a lot more of in the coming years, and the book is timely in popularising this new trend.

In Summary, I liked the book and believe many of the ideas it contains will have an increasing impact on our lives in the next few years. If you are interested in thinking about what work means for you and what its place should be in your life, then I recommend taking a look at this book. Buy it and read it on a beach somewhere!