The 4-Hour Work Week

I am reading ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ by Timothy Ferris.  I guess that you could put this into the ‘time management’ category but its about much more than that.

He challenges conventional behaviour and activity at every level by pointing out how so much of our time is wasted in fruitless labour.  We get lost in ‘busyness’ rather than taking the few actions that yield the greatest results.

He gives this example, where he had a lot of stress working with 120 wholesale customers, with just 5 customers producing 95% of the revenue but the other 115 taking up 98% of his time.  The 5 good customers ordered regularly without any follow-up, cajoling or trouble shooting.

He decided that he would spend no further time on the 115 customers that produced so little revenue – if they continued to order that was fine but he was not going to give them his time.

He realised that 100% of his problems emanated from these non-productive customers and there were 2 customers in particular that were the cause of much stress.  After a little straight-talking with them, one left and the other kept ordering by fax with no further communication.

By profiling the 5 good customers, and with the time saved, he managed to quickly get 3 more good customers.  He said the goal was not ‘more customers’ but ‘ maximum income with the minimum necessary effort’.

The end result was that, within 4 weeks, he went from chasing around 120 customers to receiving large orders from 8, with no hassle.  He doubled his monthly income and his working hours reduced from over 80 to 15 to completely liberate himself.

This is an extreme example of Paretos Law in action i.e. 20% of activities account for 80% of our income.  Ferris took the Law and applied it – in my experience, whilst most people know this Law, they are simply too scared to apply it.  They keep busy, not trusting that their productivity would rise immeasurably if they could just slow down and stop the ‘busyness’ in their lives.

The trick is not to do more but to do only those few things that bring the big results.

Ferris is a truly maverick thinker and he recounts many examples of his maverick thinking.  By the time you put his book down, if you are currently under stress at work (whether a business owner or employee), you will truly think that the 4-hour week is a possibility for you. Here is a link to the book on Amazon – I recommend you read it:

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