Four Hour Workweek - Book Notes

  • Chapter 1
    • Retirement (those who choose to defer life until the end while filling their days with things they hate) isn’t the goal. Doing what excites you right now, while eliminating what doesn’t, is the goal of the New Rich (NR).
    • The ability to choose what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom is real power.
    • The point is to create those options with the least effort and cost.
  • Chapter 2
    • If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, it is time to ask: what if I did the opposite? To live an uncommon lifestyle you must challenge basic assumptions.
    • Retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance.
    • The NR all live by certain principles:
      • Interest and energy are cyclical. This means you should alternate periods of activity and rest for a thriving life. This manifests in mini-retirements, such as 1 month of ‘vacation’ for every 2 months of work projects.
      • Working less doesn’t mean laziness. On the contrary, filling your hours with meaningless tasks because you can’t prioritize and focus on results is laziness. Focus on being productive instead of busy.
      • The timing is never right. Someday or tomorrow is never, so it is much better to chase your dreams right now, make mistakes, and correct course along the way.
      • Ask for forgiveness, not permission. If what you want to do is in any way reversible, don’t ask permission from family, etc… Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitant to get in your way if you’re moving. Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you screw up.
      • Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. The choice is between multiplication of results with strengths or incremental improvement with weaknesses.
      • Things in excess become their opposite. Too much idle time is bad, so we’re trying to increase positive use of free time.
      • Money alone is not the solution. The quest for more is just an excuse for life postponement.
      • Relative income is more important than absolute income. The goal is to increase relative income ($ per hour, day) above total income.
      • Distress is bad, eustress is good. Distress = harmful stimuli that make you weaker, less confident, less able (destructive criticism, abusive bosses, etc…). Eustress = health stress, like role models who push us, physical training, risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action.
    • Some questions to ask yourself if you want to correct course:
      • How has being ‘realistic’ or ‘responsible’ kept you from the life you want?
      • How has doing what you ‘should’ resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?
      • Look at what you’re currently doing and ask yourself, “What would happen if I did the opposite of the people around me? What will I sacrifice if I continue on this track for 5, 10, or 20 years?
  • Chapter 3
    • Fear is an extremely powerful force that scares people into inaction. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
    • Fear comes in many forms, like optimistic denial.
      • Like people who avoid quitting their jobs because they think their course will improve with time or increased income.
      • Or, those who say “don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway”.
    • The key to conquering fear is to define your nightmare, define the likely impact of it, and think of ways you can get back on track.
    • If you’re nervous about making a jump or putting it off out of fear of the unknown, write down the answers to these questions (don’t edit - go for volume)
      • Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you a are considering. What would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1-10? How likely is it that this will actually happen?
      • What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?
      • What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios? What are the impact of these more-likely outcomes on a scale of 1-10? Have less intelligent people done this before and pulled it off?
      • If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?
      • What are you putting off out of fear? What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.
      • What is it costing you - financially, emotionally, and physically - to postpone action? Evaluate the potential downsides of both action and inaction. If you don’t pursue the things that excite you, where will you be in one, five, or ten years? How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed ten more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you?
      • What are you waiting for? Good timing is no excuse, that just means you’re afraid.
    • The most important habit of those who excel (and likewise, the habit that those who don’t excel haven’t grasped): action.
  • Chapter 4
    • Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic. This is simply because 99% of people are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre, making competition for ‘realistic’ goals fiercest (and the most time- and energy-consuming). This is also because large goals are more motivating and inspiring, which means you are more likely to stick with them in rough periods.
    • The BIG question to ask yourself is: what excites me? Conventional wisdom questions like: what is your passion? what do you want? what are your goals? what makes your happy? are too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer. Figuring out what excites you is a catch-all that covers everything.
    • Defining what excites you is extremely important to avoid work for work’s sake. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea what you’re working towards, leading to the fat man in red BMW syndrome (i.e. making and spending money on a midlife crisis BWM because you don’t know what else to do).
    • Sidenote: how to contact seemingly hard to reach people?
      • Find a personal email if possible (through little-known personal blogs) and send a two to three paragraph email explaining how you are familiar with their work, and ask one simple-to-answer but thought-provoking question related to their work or life philosophies. The goal is to start a dialogue so they take the time to answer future emails (not to ask for help)
      • As in all things, the maxim is: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’
    • To put ourselves on the correct course, we use “dreamlining”. It is like goal setting, but outlines defined steps, deals with unrealistic goals, and focuses on filling the vacuum created when work is removed. Write down the answers to these questions (again, go for volume, don’t edit) :
      • What would you do if there were no way you could fail?
        • Create 2 timelines - 6 months and 12 months, listing up to five things you dream of having, being, and doing. Don’t limit yourself.
      • What does ‘being’ entail doing? Convert your ‘being’ dreams into actionable milestones.
      • What are the four dreams that would change it all? Choose 4 from your list.
      • Determine the cost of these dreams and calculate your Target Monthly Income to realize these dreams. Add your total monthly expenses x 1.3 to get your total TMI. Feel free to divide this by 30 to get the Target Daily Income.
      • Determine three steps for each of the four dreams and take the first step NOW. The three steps should be one for today, one for tomorrow, and one for the day after (all completed by 11am). Each should be simply enough to do in five minutes or less (if not, ratchet it down).
    • The important actions are never comfortable, but you can condition yourself to discomfort and overcome it. We do this with so-called ‘Comfort Challenges’, the first of which is in this chapter.
      • Learn to eye gaze (2 days). For 2 days, practice gazing into the eyes of others (conversational partners or people you pass in the street), until they break contact.
  • Chapter 5
    • Forget all you know about ‘time management’. Trying to fill every second of the day with a work fidget of some type is just a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. In order to cut out unnecessary work and increase your results, you have to simply do less.
    • To join the New Rich, you must accomplish four things, represented by the acronym D-E-A-L. This is Define, Eliminate, Automate, Liberate. Employees who wish to stay in their jobs implement these steps as D-E-L-A, while entrepreneurs implement them as D-E-A-L.
    • To eliminate, we have to focus on being effective vs. efficient. What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. This is based on 2 truisms:
      • Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
      • Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
    • The 80/20 principle is an almost universally applicable law used to demonstrate a grossly uneven but predictable distribution of massive output from relatively minuscule input (80% of results come from 20% of inputs). 80% of consequences from 20% of causes, 80% of results from 20% of effort and time, etc… This is the MINIMUM ratio, the skew is often more severe like 90/10, 95/5, or 99/1.
    • When it comes to eliminating and being more effective, there are 2 important questions to ask yourself:
      • Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness.
      • Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness.
    • The 80/20 principle can (and should be) applied to every area of your personal life and business. Realize that most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
    • To focus on the important few, try a lot of things to identify what pulls the most weight - throw it all up on the wall and see what sticks. This shouldn’t take more than a month or two.
    • With 80/20, Parkinson’s Law is the other principle to be followed in order to eliminate the unimportant. It dictates that a task will swell in perceived importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. This means that short deadlines necessitate focus that gets lost with longer allotted times.
    • To eliminate, we therefore have to use 80/20 and Parkinson’s Law together:
      • Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).
      • Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).
      • This means our entire approach to time management should be to identify few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with VERY SHORT and clear deadlines.
    • In practical terms, we can start eliminating by defining 2 lists: a to-do list and not-to-do list. These can be generated by answering these questions:
      • If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do?
      • If you had a second heart attack and had to work two hours per week, what would you do?
      • If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing 4/5 of different time-consuming activities, what would you remove?
      • What are the top-three activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I’ve been productive?
      • Who are the 20% of people who produce 80% of your enjoyment and propel you forward, and which 20% cause 80% of your depression, anger, and second-guessing?
      • Continually ask yourself this question: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?
    • We can continue to ensure we follow these principles by doing these things:
      • Don’t multitask. If you prioritize correctly, there is no need to multitask.
      • Identify 2 primary goals/tasks for the day AT MOST. Do these separately from start to finish without distraction.
      • Take Monday and/or Friday off, and leave work/stop working at 4pm. This will force you to prioritize more effectively.
      • Limit the number of items on your to-do list and use impossibly short deadlines to force immediate action while ignoring minutiae.
    • Comfort challenge #2: Learn to Propose (2 days). Stop asking for opinions and start proposing solutions.
      • When someone asks things like: Where should we eat? Or “What move do we watch?”. DO NOT reflect it back to them - offer a solution. Do this in both personal and professional environments.
  • Chapter 6
    • The vast majority of interruptions and information are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. The successful NR maintain a low information diet based on selective ignorance of this type of information.
    • Lifestyle design is based on massive action, which necessitates decreased input. You should only consume actionable information, for example:
      • Maximum of 1/3rd of an industry magazine per month
      • Maximum of 1/3rd of a business magazine per month
      • Total: four hours of results-oriented reading per month
    • The low information diet means we have to change our approach to how we make decisions and how we learn new things. So to learn something new, instead of doing hours of online research, we could do it like this:
      • Pick one topical book based on reader reviews and the fact that the authors actually did what we are wanting to do. Only read ‘how I did it’ and autobiographical
      • Only read sections of the book that are relevant to next steps
      • Using the book, generate intelligent questions and contact 10 of the top individuals in that field via email and phone to get the information you want
    • If you have to read, you can greatly increase your reading speed with a simple exercise:
      • Two minutes: use a pen or finger to trace under each line as you read as fast as possible
      • Three minutes: begin each line focusing on the third word in from the first word, and end each line focusing on the third word in from the last word
      • Two minutes: once comfortable indenting three or four words from both sides, attempt to take only two snapshots (fixations) per line on the first and last indented words
      • Three minutes: practice reading too fast for comprehension but with good technique for five pages prior to reading at a comfortable speed
      • Calculate words per minute: add up the number of words in 10 lines, divide by 10, multiply by the number of lines per page for average words per page. Then read for a minute to see how many pages you got through.
    • Here are the steps to go on your low information diet:
      • Do an immediate one-week media fast. No magazines, newspapers, audiobooks, new websites, television (except one hour of pleasure viewing each evening), no non-fiction, no web surfing unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day.
      • Develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” If no on either count, don’t consume the information. It is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.
      • Develop the art of non finishing. Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it - if an article sucks, put it down. If a movie sucks, don’t finish it. Develop the habit of non finishing that which is boring or unproductive (unless a boss is demanding it).
    • Comfort Challenge (2 Days) - Get phone numbers
      • Maintaining eye contact, ask for the phone numbers of at least 2 attractive members of the opposite sex each day (minimum of 4). Go to a mall to get some rapid fire experience.
  • Chapter 7
    • Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
    • Doing the important and ignoring the trivial is hard, especially because the rest of the world seems intent on shoveling the trivial on you. You have to make bothering you much more painful than leaving you in peace.
    • There are 3 types of interruptions: time wasters (things that can be ignored with little or no consequence), time consumers (repetitive tasks that need to be completed but often interrupt high level work), and empowerment failures (instances where someone needs approval to make something small happen). Each of these need to be mitigated with some simple strategies:
      • Time wasters: limit access and funnel all communication toward immediate action. This means limiting email consumption and production - check twice per day (around lunch and before stopping work).
        • Create an email auto response that trains people to expect this.
        • Move to once per day as quickly as possible.
        • Screen incoming phone calls and limit outgoing phone calls. Publish an office phone in your auto responder that goes immediately to voicemail, and publish an emergency number that should only be used for emergencies that you answer always (unless it is an unknown number).
        • If someone calls on your emergency line, treat it as such. Use your greeting to get the caller to the point (by saying you’re in the middle of something), and don’t let them postpone for a later undefined date. If they go into a long description, cut them off and ask what you can do to help, or ask them to send you an email.
        • Master the art of refusal and avoid meetings.
          • Avoid all meetings that do not have clear objectives.
          • Steer people toward these means of communication, in order of preference: email, phone, in person meetings.
          • Respond to voicemail via e-mail whenever possible.
          • Structure emails in an ‘if/then’ structure to avoid back and forth.
          • If someone asks for a meeting, ask them to send you an email with an agenda to define the purpose.
      • Time consumers: batch them all, or wait until you have a large amount of them to do.
        • When/how often to batch? Calculate your hourly rate, then estimate the amount of time you will save by batching. Multiply your hourly rate by that estimated time saved, then test different batching frequencies. As long as your hourly rate saved is less than lost revenue by not batching sooner, you’ve come out ahead. Keep doing this with less frequent batching until you find a good end point.
      • Empowerment failures: empower those around you to have full access to necessary information and as much independent decision making ability as possible.
    • The full system is as follows:
      • Create systems to limit your availability via email and phone and deflect inappropriate contact.
      • Batch activities to limit setup cost and provide more time for dreamline milestones.
        • Brainstorm: what can I routinize by batching? Or, what tasks can I allot to a specific time each day, week, month, quarter, or year so I don’t squander time repeating them more often than is necessary?
      • Set or request autonomous rules and guidelines with occasional review of results.
    • Comfort challenge: Revisit the Terrible Twos (2 days)
      • For two days, say no to all requests. Don’t be selective. Refuse to do all things that won’t get you immediately fired.
  • Chapter 8
    • Along with working smarter, a key feature of the NR is that they build a system to replace themselves. This will cut remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule - lingering unimportant tasks disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
    • Eliminate before delegating. Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Refine your rules and processes first before adding people.
    • What should you delegate? Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined.
    • How to choose a virtual assistant?
      • Based on one metric: cost per completed task (not cost per hour). Incorporate your hourly rate cost of communication, which can be significant with non-native speakers.
      • Test a few assistants and calculate the cost per completed task for each. Refine based on these results.
      • Choose a firm, not a solo operator. This ensures redundancy and provides a pool of talent that allows you to assign multiple, varied tasks.
      • Never use a new hire.
      • Prohibit VAs from subcontracting work to untested freelancers without your written permission.
      • Request someone who has “excellent” English and indicate that phone calls will be required. Request a replacement if there are repeated communication issues.
    • How to ensure against digital information theft?
      • Use an established firm with written security measures
      • Never use debit cards for online transactions or with remote assistants
      • If a VA is accessing websites, create a new unique login and password for those sites
    • How to make requests of a VA?
      • Give very precise directions. All sentences should have one possible interpretation and be suitable for a 2nd-grade reading level.
      • Ask VAs to rephrase tasks to confirm understanding before getting started.
      • Request a status update after a few hours of work on a task to ensure that the task is both understood and achievable.
      • Assign tasks that are to be completed within no more than 72 hours (aim for 48 and 24 hours).
      • Send one task at a time, and no more than two.
    • How to learn the art of managing and delegating?
      • Get an assistant, even if you don’t need one. Begin with a one-time test project or small repetitive task.
      • Start small but think big.
        • Look at your to-do list - what has been sitting on it the longest? Could a VA do it?
        • Each time you are interrupted or change tasks, ask: could a VA do this?
        • Examine pain points - what causes you the most frustration and boredom?
Written on November 2, 2015