the 4 hour work week book review

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Revisiting “The 4-Hour Workweek”

By Cal Newport

In March, 2007, the attendees of South by Southwest Interactive, a technology conference held in Austin, Texas, had reason to be energized. The Silicon Valley startups celebrated by this gathering were on a roll. In 2004, Google’s twenty-three-billion-dollar I.P.O. had marked the end of the Internet-business malaise brought on by the original dot-com bust. In 2006, Facebook opened its network beyond university students and was closing in on a hundred million active users, while a new, competing service named Twitter went live. And just two months before the conference, Steve Jobs had stood on a stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center to announce Apple’s latest product: the iPhone.

The culture emerging from Silicon Valley during this period celebrated overly caffeinated young hackers who were staying up into the night, moving fast and breaking stuff—all in the service of building companies that could make them sudden millionaires. In this environment, work ethic became as celebrated as vision or innovation. It was a high compliment to be dubbed a “10x engineer,” meaning that you had the kind of brain that could produce computer code ten times faster than the average programmer. At M.I.T., where I was studying for a doctorate in computer science, the undergraduates I knew used “hard-core” as a term of admiration for those able to push through overwhelming loads of school work. (Partly in response to this valorization of overwork, M.I.T. banned triple majors.)

It was against this backdrop that an unlikely speaker, a twenty-nine-year-old Princeton graduate named Tim Ferriss, was preparing to take the stage in Austin to deliver a contrary message. After college, Ferriss had moved West to take a sales job at a Bay Area digital-storage business named TrueSAN. He eventually quit to start his own company, which sold a neurotropic nutritional supplement popular among athletes. Inspired by the Silicon Valley culture that surrounded him, Ferriss worked extremely long hours. At one point, he went on a vacation to Florence with his family and ended up spending ten hours a day working out of an Internet cafe.

Ferriss became dispirited when he realized that his one-man company was never going to be sold for millions: he was stuck with it and the grind that it demanded. In response, he launched a series of nothing-left-to-lose experiments to drastically reduce the time he spent working. He culled his client list: instead of trying to maximize the number of accounts he served, he focussed on the smaller number of customers who generated the bulk of his revenue. He then built elaborate systems that allowed teams of far-flung contractors, coördinated using newly emerged Internet services, to handle most of the details of his company’s operation without his involvement.

Soon, he was checking e-mail only once every ten to fourteen days. With his streamlined schedule, he made extended visits to cities like Buenos Aires, in Argentina, where the American dollar was strong, leveraging the insight that when it comes to maximizing autonomy, it’s often better to live more cheaply than to make more money. He took intensive Spanish classes to learn the language quickly, and began dancing the tango, eventually competing at high-level contests . After delivering a series of guest lectures about these experiments to an entrepreneurship class at Princeton, Ferriss refined the lessons learned into a book titled, “ The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich ,” a book scheduled to be published the same spring that he arrived in Austin to tell a room full of hard-charging, aspiring 10x engineers that their professional lives were unsustainable, and that they should consider doing something more interesting with their time.

I recently called Ferriss to ask him about that speech. His memory was that the event organizer gave him a slot at the last minute after a cancellation. “I did not have a proper room,” he said. “The talk was given in an overflow room, I want to say, that also acted as a mini-cafeteria.” Ferriss says that he was calm about the risk in delivering a message about downshifting at a conference celebrating hard-core culture: “If it works, great; if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.” His calmness was justified: the talk did work. The room filled past capacity, and the audience connected with the young entrepreneur’s call to work less. Almost immediately, Ferriss began to hear from attendees who were putting his advice into practice. Influential tech bloggers who heard about the talk wrote about Ferriss and his boldly titled book, which put it on the radar of bigger media outlets. “The 4-Hour Workweek” made it onto the Times best-seller list, where it stayed, more or less, for the next seven years. The book went on to sell millions of copies, reaching its apex of cultural relevance when it was mentioned by the character of Darryl Philbin in a 2011 episode of “The Office.”

In recent months, as I’ve been writing for this magazine about the impact of the pandemic on our professional lives, I’ve found myself thinking about “The 4-Hour Workweek” and the unlikely speech that helped launch it. In retrospect, an overflow crowd of tech-sector enthusiasts embracing Ferriss’s message was a warning shot—an early indication that the mode of work emerging in a hyperconnected, always-on, hustling modern office had flaws. In his talk, Ferriss described his former self as someone who “checked e-mail one to two hundred times a day—Send, Receive, Send, Receive—like a rat with a cocaine-pellet dispenser.” At the three-minute mark, Ferriss poses a series of what he calls key questions. “How do your decisions and priorities change if retirement will never be an option?,” he asks, before adding, “Is your business scalable, is your career scalable, and, most important, is your life style scalable?” These are the provocations of a radical.

Given the book’s history and reception, you might assume that “The 4-Hour Workweek” would have become a popular guide for our current moment, in which the pandemic-induced Great Resignation is driving knowledge workers to ask themselves similar questions. But although Ferriss’s book never stopped selling strongly, it almost never comes up in my recent reporting on these issues. One explanation for this reality is that, in the years following the book’s publication, Ferriss became associated more with the optimization and productivity hacks he suggested than with the book’s larger message of rethinking the meaning of work. Ferriss told me that his broader interest at that time was seeking “minimum effective doses” of effort required to achieve important goals. When this mind-set was applied to the topic of work and life satisfaction, it led Ferriss to a radical rejection of digital-age office cultures. His subsequent writing, however, went in a more pragmatic direction: he followed his best-seller with “ The 4-Hour Body ,” which was about optimizing health and fitness.

When you read “The 4-Hour Workweek,” there’s no way to avoid the conclusion that it’s all about the unsustainable nature of frenetic knowledge work, but if you knew Ferriss only through his book titles, or his detailed, step-by-step blog posts, or the media coverage that highlighted his often elaborate productivity habits, it was easy to reduce him to the King of Hacks. In “The Office,” Darryl Philbin was using Ferriss’s ideas to help get more work done so that he could get promoted to a gruelling corporate-management position. This is, of course, the opposite of everything that the book was about, but by then Ferriss’s ideas had been thoroughly twisted by popular culture.

There is, however, a deeper explanation for why Ferriss’s radicalism was diluted in the years following his book’s release: perhaps our culture wasn’t ready to hear it. The pre-recession two-thousands were an unusual time in American economic history—a moment in which frenetic but ambiguous activity seemed to alchemize into prosperity. Everyone was busy: acquiring mortgages to be repackaged into debt instruments no one really understood, or typing furiously into suddenly ubiquitous BlackBerrys, sending a volume of messages that no one ever really requested. This energetic hustle seemed to be working—cash was plentiful, stocks were rising, revenue was strong—and life seemed modern and exciting. This was the context in which “The 4-Hour Workweek” pointed out that a lot of this exciting busyness was nonsense. If you concentrated on the efforts that actually mattered, your professional contributions could be compressed into a handful of efficiently planned weekly hours. The rest was just for show. There’s a scene in Mike Judge’s 1999 satire, “Office Space,” where a pair of efficiency consultants are interviewing a cubicle-dweller who struggles to explain the point of his job . “What would you say . . . you do here?,” one of the consultants finally asks in exasperation. Ferriss was asking this question of an entire economic sector, and many were not interested in trying to provide an answer. It was more comfortable to dismiss him as yet another productivity guru.

In this accounting, “The 4-Hour Workweek” delivered a prophecy that many were not yet receptive to. The pandemic has changed this reality. We’re now engaged in a national conversation about many of the same fundamental questions that Ferriss probed fifteen years earlier. Rereading Ferriss’s book today, I find that some of his points are strikingly prescient, such as his identification of remote work as being critical to giving workers more agency and freedom, and his concern that e-mail overload would become a major threat to autonomy. Other parts of the book have become humorously out of date. I joked with Ferriss about how much emphasis he puts on the once popular software program GoToMyPC. It’s also amusing, given the events of the past year and a half, how many pages he dedicates to strategies for explaining the concept of remote work to your manager. (At one point, Ferriss recommends calling in sick for two days but still working while at home, to later prove to your skeptical boss that virtual work is literally feasible. “He . . . leaves an e-mail trail of some sort for his boss to notice,” Ferriss writes, describing an engineer who successfully implemented this strategy, “and keeps quantifiable records of what he accomplished for reference during later negotiations.”)

Fortunately, we no longer need this one book from 2007 to carry the full weight of our current reckoning with work. Many thoughtful commentators have emerged to continue a deep questioning of how we structure our professional lives, introducing into the discussion an intellectual sophistication and diversity of both identity and circumstance that go well beyond what we could expect from the insights of a single twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur, fed up with his grinding routine. Listening to Ferriss’s original talk at South by Southwest, however, I find it’s hard not to wonder that if we had been more willing to recognize the radical nature of his dissent, and the cultural flash point represented by its enthusiastic reception with an unlikely crowd, we might have been caught less off guard by the upheaval we’re experiencing today.

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By Susan B. Glasser

By Anthony Lane

By Amanda Petrusich

By Kyle Chayka

I read 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and it's helping me work less and find more time in my day for living. Here are my 4 biggest takeaways.

• Alli Hoff Kosik is a freelance writer who recently read "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss.
• She said the book recommends mini retirements as opposed to never taking big breaks in your career.
• The author is also a big fan of Parkinson's law — schedule how much time something should take.

I haven't had the opportunity to speak with author Timothy Ferriss one-on-one, but I can only imagine that when he landed on the name for his 2007 book "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich," he suspected that the title alone would be enough to tempt overworked readers to grab a copy. 

It worked on me. As a freelance writer, editor, and podcaster, I often feel as though I'm trying to make time work for me, to create more of it, and to make it make sense. 

When I left my corporate job in 2016 to see if I could make it freelancing full time, I thought it would open up my days. I failed to account for the fact that I would find myself coordinating multiple employers and deadlines. While I love my work most of the time, the magic formula for maximizing my income per hour is still elusive. 

It turns out that Ferriss isn't just trying to sell books with a snappy title: He really does lay out a series of helpful principles and steps that enable readers to cut back their weekly hours to — yes, that's right — four, while still bringing in substantial cash. 

Having read Ferriss' book only recently, I don't feel quite ready to begin cutting my work hours way down. Still, I found the book helped me reframe my own (at times martyr-adjacent) perspective on my work.

Perhaps cutting back on my seemingly boundaryless working hours is not as impossible as it often seems in my most exasperated moments of self-employment. Using the principles from the book, I hope to cut back over the next six months — if not to four hours a week, then at least to four hours a day.

I especially appreciated the following takeaways from "The 4-Hour Workweek."

Periodic 'mini retirements' are a worthwhile alternative to a single retirement later in life 

In his book, Ferriss lays out a bleak reality in plain terms: When you hoard all of your joy for the end of your career, you run the risk of not being able to enjoy the fruits of your labor. In other words, people are often too old or tired to engage in travel and other activities by the time they hit retirement age.

Instead, he recommends taking "mini retirements": short breaks of three to six months throughout your career during which you relocate or otherwise take your pedal off the proverbial gas of the daily grind. By building mini retirements into your schedule, he argues, you eliminate the desperate need for vacations and the depressing longing so many of us feel for a retirement that's decades away. 

While mini retirements aren't practical for everyone — because of financial constraints or caretaking responsibilities, among other things — I think they're more doable for most people than we may think, especially as so many industries are transitioning into remote and hybrid models.

Related stories

This concept was a good reminder for me of the importance of allowing for real breaks, which feels easier to wrap my head around than working just four hours a week. I'm teaching a college course this semester, and I'd like to make it a goal to take a full week or two off when the course is over, even though it will mean stepping away from all of my client work. I wouldn't have had the foresight to prioritize this kind of break so far in advance without Ferriss' advice.

You decide how much time something takes

Ferriss says we're conditioned to pack increasingly more tasks into our days to feel more productive. But this isn't helping us get any closer to the ultimate goal he's set out for us: to work less and live more. 

Alternatively, Ferriss suggests that we build our work time around Parkinson's law : This theory states that a task increases or decreases in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to how long we plan for it to take. To put it simply, a project will require exactly the amount of time you schedule for it. 

Thinking in terms of Parkinson's law forced me to turn what I know about time management completely inside out by letting the number of hours I want to work dictate how things get done — rather than the things I need to accomplish dictating the number of hours I work.

I've started assigning specific time blocks to tasks on my to-do list and giving myself an artificial deadline for each one. This has helped me maintain focus and block out the time wasters that tempt me when my schedule feels more open-ended. When stacked back-to-back, these blocks of time save me cumulative hours.

Notifications aren't the only distractions out there

I know that phone notifications distract me from the (read: any) task at hand. Like everyone else (or so it seems), I've been working hard to recalibrate my relationship with my phone so that it doesn't occupy hours of my time every day. 

"The 4-Hour Workweek" brought to light many other consistent distractions that drain me of valuable time that I hadn't thought of, such as the setup time that's required for most tasks. To that end, Ferris suggests batching similar types of work to limit multiple setup periods. 

For example, since reading "The 4-Hour Workweek," I've observed that calling up and organizing the dozen-or-so tabs I might need to complete any given project can be sneakily time-consuming. As an alternative, I've been making an effort to think through the tabs and screens I'll need for a task, then grouping like tasks to streamline things.

He also argues that our interactions with other people can slow us down. While I'm hesitant to write off the humans in my life as distractions, I did take to heart his recommendations about how to teach others to engage with you in an efficient manner. If a friend or family member — or even a coworker — wants to have a conversation during working hours, Ferriss encourages us to eliminate all nonwork topics. Even the shortest of irrelevant digressions can spiral into something bigger and more time-consuming.

By being clear with the people around us about what we will and won't talk about while we're on the job, we can condition them to curtail distracting interactions on their own.

Add life after subtracting work 

If the primary goal of Ferriss' book is to teach readers to limit the number of hours they spend on work, its secondary goal is to encourage them to increase the number of hours they spend doing things they absolutely love.

This model doesn't suggest that you take all of the time you used to spend in front of your computer and redirect them to the couch: Ferriss prompts his audience to think intentionally about the things that bring them joy — travel, passion projects, exploring new experiences, etc. — and fill the void they experience without work and deadlines with them. 

This is a good-mood and mental-health booster in the short term, but in my personal experience, it has the secondary effect of starting a positive cycle of sorts. The more I feel that bump in my mood and mental health, the more I see the value of cutting back on my work hours to get a little closer to that four-hour benchmark, which creates more free time for energizing, affirming activities like spending quality time with loved ones, restful travel, and bucket-list-caliber experiences.

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All Life is an Experiment

Living the 4 hour work week (how tim ferriss created a monster).

November 2019: I recently found out this review is one of the top-ranking results on Google. At the time I wrote this, I was surrounded by snake-oil types exploiting naive young people for profit. The criticisms I make below are valid, but I feel shitty about the mean-spirited tone. I leave this here as a reminder to myself and others that it’s much easier to snipe from the sidelines than it is to put something out into the world. Tim Ferriss is a cool guy, and I’ve found a lot of his ideas very helpful. He even acknowledged some of the flaws with the 4HWW in a recent episode of his podcast. So, this is my attempt to own my own flaws, and aspire towards more sincerity and less snark.

Tim Ferriss’ The 4 Hour Work Week is a cultural colossus. It’s sold more than 1.3 million copies. It’s been translated into 35 languages. It’s spent more than four years on the New York Times bestseller list.

And it’s a running joke.

That is, to some of the very people living the globetrotting, coconut-sipping lifestyle that Ferriss has marketed so successfully. I found this out after I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok, and found myself part of the tribe of ‘digital nomads’—people who work online from anywhere in the world.

It didn’t take long to notice that lots of veteran nomads had no love for the unofficial Bible of lifestyle design. Any time that palm-tree paradise cover popped up, a merciless roasting was never far behind.

While I’d read the book several years earlier, I couldn’t remember it well, and didn’t give it much more thought.

Then a few months ago, I reached the one year anniversary of my travels. Somehow, I’d pretty much ended up living the real-life ‘four hour workweek’. At the same time, the book had just turned 10 years old. This got me curious: Was it as cringeworthy as the cynics had led me to believe? How well had it stood the test of time?

So I found the nearest palm tree, strung up a hammock, and settled in for round two. Here’s what I realised:

• The 4HWW had a much bigger impact on me than I realised (and probably more than the critics would care to admit).
• The simmering resentment toward Ferriss and his acolytes is somewhat understandable.

Trouble in Paradise

Back in the early days, being a ‘digital nomad’ probably sounded badass—a lean, mean posse of Macbook-slinging bright young things, roaming wherever they could find a WiFi signal. Whatever cultural cachet it had, it’s disappearing fast. Nowadays there’s a fascinating undercurrent of self-loathing in the digital nomad community. Those who possess some shred of self-awareness go to great pains to distance themselves from the label. Now I think I understand why.

If you haven’t read the 4HWW, here’s an uncharitable summary:

Don’t try and look for meaningful work. Find a way to make money as quickly as possible, focus on the 20 per cent that drives most of the results, automate everything possible, and outsource the rest to low-paid Indian assistants. That leaves the rest of your time free for fun stuff, like bragging about cheating in sports tournaments. The meaning of life is to ‘be excited’.

Let’s zero in on the ‘find a way to make money’ bit, which just-so-happens to be the vaguest section of the book. Ferriss calls the desired money-making scheme a ‘muse’, to distinguish it from, you know, a real business:

Can a business be used to change the world? Yes, but that isn’t our goal here. Can a business be used to cash out through an IPO or sale? Yes, but that isn’t our goal either. Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.

Not exactly stirring stuff. Now, imagine what happens when that lacklustre little message gets propagated to tens of millions of people, over the course of a decade, by a best-selling author with an adoring entourage of copycats and acolytes…

The Making of a Monster

The 4HWW has inspired legions of dreamers to try and build passive income empires through the likes of affiliate marketing and drop-shipping, which are two of the main ‘muse’ ideas in the book

There’s a never-ending stream of naïve kids upping sticks to Thailand with no cash, no marketable skills, and nothing but a copy of the 4HWW clutched to their chests.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Wherever you find gullible people desperate to chase a dream, predators are never far behind. An entire cottage industry catering to aspiring nomads has popped up like mushrooms—which is to say, in the dark, and mostly based on bullshit.

This industry sells courses on how to live the nomadic life, make money online, and sip coconuts in sun loungers for the rest of your days. The graduates go on to shill their own e-books and courses to the next influx of wantrepreneurs, in a pyramid scheme so industrious that Ramses II is sitting up in his sarcophagus.

You might think the whole ‘blind leading the blind’ thing provides a bit of harmless schadenfreude. Now, imagine this conga line continuously screaming in your face about their travel vlogs, and trampling on your toes as they flail around the place.

The snake-oil salesmen are loud, visible, and endlessly self-promoting. They attract unwanted attention from authorities. Legit remote workers and entrepreneurs outnumber them, but they’re mostly invisible, leaving the hucksters as the new face of the movement.  No wonder no-one wants to call themselves a digital nomad.

A Missed Opportunity

The dream the 4HWW sells is not just that you can quit being an employee—not just become the boss of a company—but skip straight to becoming the boss of a company that requires little or no time to run.

This might work out for a tiny handful of people, but it’s bad advice in general. Not everyone can magically climb atop a passive money-making machine. Who are the Indian virtual assistants earning $4 an hour going to outsource their dirty work to?

The 4HWW was so caught up in selling a fantasy lifestyle that it missed a big opportunity. What if it had focused on running a location-independent business (as opposed to a ‘muse’), or becoming a freelancer doing something useful— programming, development, writing, design, translation? Sure, it wouldn’t have generated as much sexy marketing sizzle, but there’d be a lot more sausage.

Here’s a matrix of the options, arranged by time and income:

The last thing the world needs is more sugar water salesmen. Going down the entrepreneurship or freelancer path still comes with all the juicy lifestyle benefits of location independence. Most importantly, it’s a much more realistic option.

After all—that’s the pathway Tim Ferriss actually took.

The ‘Four Hour Work Week’ is bullshit

Tim Ferriss busted his ass building a successful supplements company. He spent years testing various entrepreneurial ventures, and working regular jobs. He worked incredibly hard to be able to get to his much-hyped $40,000 a month. The reason he gets to say he works ‘four hours a week’ is that he did the hard work for years, then learnt how to delegate and prioritise tasks better.

Ferriss’ epiphany was that happiness largely comes from time and freedom, which he calls the currency of the ‘new rich’. I couldn’t agree more. But implying that you don’t have to work for it is misleading:

Before you get to the four hour work week, there’s the 40 hour work week of building your skill. Then you cash it in, to get the four hour work week.

That’s Cal Newport—a computer scientist and author, who noticed a distressingly large number of people skip over the part where they build a stable means to support their unconventional lifestyle.

If you want a ton of autonomy and a really interesting life, Newport points out you probably need a ton of career capital to invest in it. How do you get that career capital? By building up unusual and valuable skills.

Traps for Young Players

In a parallel universe, there’s another version of me who skipped journalism school and moved to Thailand at age 18. The other-me had no writing skills, no contacts, and nothing in his portfolio. He scratched around on Upwork, trying to make enough pennies to buy sticky rice. He had a miserable existence, and almost certainly flew home to with his tail between his legs within a matter of months.

This is the number one mistake that aspiring freelancers seem to make.

Compare that to the universe I’m currently inhabiting: I went to school and got the bit of paper I needed to get past the gatekeepers. Then I spent almost five years in a newsroom, working my way up from total know-nothing to a competent business reporter. When I moved to Thailand, I had no debt and six figures in the bank —a big enough slush fund to finance some interesting projects, and remove any pressing need to earn money. I have a weekly columnist gig, and solid contacts. Instead of going out to find work, it comes to me.

Now I get to live the real-life ‘four hour work week’—that is, if you define it the same way as Tim does.

The ‘Four Hour Work Week’ is bullshit; continued

Not only did Tim have to put in years of work in order to get to the fabled four hours, the dude clearly works vastly more than that. Essentially, he’s changed the definition of the word work to mean ‘stuff he doesn’t like doing’.

It’s this sleight-of-hand that most critics obsess over, but I have no problem with it . As Tim constantly has to explain, the 4 hour work week doesn’t mean you jerk off for the remaining 20 hours of the day. Instead, it frees you up to focus on whatever you’re really interested in.

By his definition, I do about four to 10 hours of work per week. Exhausting!

By the rest of the world’s definition, I probably do more like 40 hours, or maybe more.

The difference is that it’s on passion projects of my own choosing—things which I’ve always wanted to do, but didn’t have time for before. For example, I don’t consider this blog ‘work’. It’s entirely voluntary, it’s fun, and it’s useful in all sorts of unexpected ways.

The only reason I’m interested in money is because I can use it to buy back my own freedom and time. Did I subconsciously pick this notion up from the 4HWW? On closer inspection, there are lots of solid ideas in the book that have almost certainly influenced me.

Mini-retirements

Tim recommends taking ‘mini-retirements’ throughout life, rather than spending all your best years grinding away so you can retire when you’re old and decrepit. I’m pretty much doing exactly that, so I obviously think it’s a good idea. I don’t remember if I picked it up from the 4HWW, but it seems highly likely. Thanks, Tim!

Note: This is a similar concept to Nassim Taleb’s serial barbell strategy, in which you alternate between periods of stable work and risky ventures.  (Read more in  How Not to Be a Starving Artist )

Low-information Diet

If you quit watching the news and reading junk online, you’ll pick up the general thrust of current events through osmosis, and stop wasting your time and mental energy on things outside your control. This might sound heretical, but it’s good advice.

Tim suggests an exercise where you don’t even read non-fiction books (except his one, of course). This might be a step too far. Books have a way better signal-to-noise ratio than the ephemeral daily stuff, and I firmly believe it’s impossible to read too many of them.

Geoarbitrage

Earning Western dollars while spending your money in pesos or baht or dong is one hell of a potent combination. For example, I’ve sometimes managed to live on as little as US$500 a month  while in Southeast Asia.

Keeping income high and expenses low means you can either:

• save up way more money than you would at home,
• live a crazy opulent lifestyle,
• do hardly any work, or
• some combination of the above.

Whichever way you look at it, it’s pretty badass. Again, I probably first read about this concept in the 4HWW. Thanks, Tim!

Passive income

I have nothing against passive income, provided it doesn’t cross the line to into scammy shenanigans. In fact, I love the stuff. I just happen to prefer earning mine the old-fashioned way—by living modestly, and then investing my savings so they compound over time.

Productivity

The 4HWW also has a solid section on productivity strategies, which is a great primer for those who haven’t encountered these sort of ideas before:

Pareto Principle: 20 per cent of inputs (time, employees, customers) account for 80 per cent of outputs (results, sales, productivity). Find that core, focus on it, and cull the rest.

Parkinson’s Law: Tasks grow in perceived importance based on the time allotted to do them. Tight deadlines keep them from turning into mental monsters, and help you focus on the 20 per cent that actually matters.

Batching : Save up all your boring stuff to do at once, rather than letting it distract you throughout the day. Constantly switching tasks creates mental residue which takes time to clear.

The 4 Hour Workweek is in the freaking water supply

As far as I know, not all of these ideas are original to Tim. But he did an incredible job in popularising them. If they seem obvious now, that speaks to just how much ‘lifestyle design’ has permeated our cultural consciousness in the last 10 years. At this point, the 4HWW is in the drinking water.

And there’s something to be said for that. Sure, the Tim Ferriss wheel spins like crazy. I mean, the dude lists one of his accomplishments as being named ‘self-promoter of the year’. But I’m deeply fond of him and incredibly appreciative of his work, even if he gets a bit carried away now and again.

I think we have to take the Bruce Lee approach here.

No-one is better at this than Tim himself. He’s a bit of a mad scientist; stitching together bits and pieces from all over the place, combining it with his own experiments, and breathing life into the resulting creation. Sure, the thing that climbed off the operating table 10 years ago had a couple of manky bits. With the benefit of hindsight, maybe Tim would have assembled it a little differently.

The important thing is that the monster is greater than the sum of any of its individual parts.  I, for one, am very glad he created it.

Further Resources

The public library will loan you these books for free. If you’d rather buy them, the referral links on this page send a few pennies to support this site, at no extra cost to you ( read more here ). No, this is not my secret ‘muse’ strategy; just a way to recoup some hosting expenses.

What, the last 3000 words weren’t enough to tell you how I really feel? Don’t take my word for it—give it a read.

The best book on productivity I’ve ever read, and I’m already using lots of the strategies to great effect. Here’s the main premise: “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.” 

A handy primer on entrepreneurship from my favourite libertarian bloodsucker. The founder of PayPal and Palantir is not here to mess around, so you won’t find any dinky ‘muse’ stuff or lifestyle advice. Zero to One is all about coming up with ideas so different and contrarian that you can create a game-changing monopoly.

To me, this is Tim’s greatest legacy. Interviews with big stars normally last a few minutes, and they’re only there to plug their latest movie or book or whatever. The Tim Ferriss Show episodes last for literally hours, are uncut, and get deep into the weeds on what makes successful people successful. I highly recommend the episodes with Arnold Schwarzenegger , Jamie Foxx , Will MacAskill , Derek Sivers , but there are so many great ones covering any domain you might be interested in. (Tim’s recent book, Tools of Titans , is based on the choicest excerpts from these interviews. I took about a million notes from it.)

Another excellent podcast focused on location-independent entrepreneurship, and everything related to it. Features lots of great guests, like Cal Newport (the bit I quoted in this article was from a TMBA episode). They also offer transcripts of most episodes, which is fantastic if you prefer reading to audio.

UPDATE: The TMBA crew just released a new episode (thoughtfully) critiquing the 4HWW , touching on some of the same areas I’ve mentioned here, and some other great points I missed.  

Enjoyed this article? You might also like:

Not sure what the future holds get your copy of optionality now..

The author calls himself a drug dealer in the book. The book is like a drug, it give s you an illusion of successful life convincing you, you can get it easily. It’s never the case unless you’re really lucky or you’re a scam artist like the author of the book. Thank you for your article. I saved my time putting the book away after an hour of reading and reading your article.

“The 4 Hour Work Week” Summary author Tim Ferris book summary with a good example. The book will inspire you to become an entrepreneur. How to have efficiency in your work.

Let become an output focused.

Business Insane -“Read the success”

Hey man, new reader here: great blog, I enjoy your content very much.

With regards to Tim Ferriss, here is what I have to say: anyone building an income selling nutritional supplements is almost definitely a major fraud. Why? I’m sure that you are aware of the Lindy effect as popularized by Taleb. Well, supplements are probably the biggest violation of Lindy I can think of (outside of psychology papers).

Also a major Bob-Rubin type of trade: 1. Visible short-term positive health effects (maybe, although most do nothing for you) 2. God only knows what long-term negative health effects 3. The seller has zero skin in the game – they sell you the drug and pocket the money. If something bad happens to you, you are on your own.

At best, supplements are worthless (and you just waste 50$ on them). At worst, they are harmful to your health.

The one selling the supplements gets all the upside and all the money, the one buying them gets all the potential downsides.

These people lack any conscience. The only thing that Ferriss can teach people is how to be a good bullshit salesman.

Hi Victor, just noticed your comment – glad you’ve been enjoying the posts!

I agree that supplements are almost entirely useless and fail the Lindy test, with a few rare exceptions (e.g. creatine mono). But I think it’s a bit harsh to dismiss TF on that basis. For me, his great strengths are in marketing, and curating interesting ideas for further exploration. I’m not particularly interested in the merits of the supplement business he started way back when, because that’s not what makes him compelling to me.

Even to the extent it was shady, young ambitious men are not exactly renowned for their maturity and moral wisdom. Personally, I’ve done plenty of dumb shit that I wouldn’t want to be judged against for time immemorial – I can only work hard to do less of it as time goes on!

Glad to have another Taleb reader here, hope you stick around. (incidentally, I feel the same way about his body of work as I do about TF – take what is useful, reject what is not, add what is your own.)

Hi Richard, thanks for the answer.

I fully agree that TF is a great marketeer. However, learning marketing from him has to be done by reading between the lines – by studying his technique of what kind of content he puts out and how he engages the audience – rather than from his explicit messages. I strongly disagree that ambition is a good excuse for unethical behavior. That’s probably the worst combination of traits a person can have.

With regards to Taleb – you say you only take what is useful and reject what is not. Honest question: what content from Taleb would you consider NOT useful? I am yet to find something which he wrote which is wrong or negative.

Best, Victor

Hey Victor, the first example that comes to mind is the 85/15 barbell strategy he suggests, which would be disastrously bad for almost any investor (I’ve written about that here ). See also, railing against GMOs, the ‘pseudoscience’ of IQ, etc. I find him highly entertaining but prefer to take everything he says (outside of risk management) with a pinch of salt.

Hey Richard, great post. Here are my thoughts on the book and how it applied to us owning a restaurant here in NZ https://joshfrom.nz/index.php/2019/02/26/fourhourworkweek/

BTW – love the net worth calculator and have started using it 🙂

Hey Josh, nice review! and thrilled to hear you’re using the net worth calculator 🙂

Thats a very accurate and good analysis. But its a hell of a clickbait to call it bullshit first and then apprechiate three quarters of the book

Hey Erik, Perhaps you missed this bit, right up front in the introduction?

1. The 4HWW almost certainly had a much bigger impact on me than I thought (and probably more than some others would care to admit). 2. The simmering resentment toward Ferriss and his acolytes is sort of understandable.

Glad you enjoyed the post anyway! I’ve also added an extra caveat right up top, because I think I was a bit mean-spirited.

Really Really good article! It’s the very first blog I read to be honest, I’m a fairly new reader, I decided to start reading because at the moment I feel like my life is going nowhere and seeking knowledge is a good start, The 4HWW is the first book I’ve read in a long time but a few things got me a bit skeptical (specially since I’ve always been cautious of anything that sounds get rich quick schemey). But your post cleared a lot of my doubts so thanks for that.

Quick question, since you’re an experienced reader. Should/Can I read a couple books at a time? and also do you recommend taking notes when reading? Thanks again! Definitely subscribing to the blog!

Hey Sergio, I’m honoured that this is your first blog experience! You’re bang on the money about seeking knowledge being the most crucial step to improvement (check out my paean to reading for a full justification). You’re also 100% on the right track with your reading strategies. I read two or three books at once, so that I can dip in and out according to how I’m feeling. Usually I have at least one ‘hard’ book and one easy, fun read to choose from. I’ve also found it incredibly useful to take notes. Before, I enjoyed the reading experience but retained almost nothing. Now I have a ‘commonplace book’ in which I record all the most useful insights and facts. There’s a strong retention benefit in repetition and the act of writing something down, and it also allows me to cross-reference notes against other ideas. I’m actually working on a project in this space, so I’ll write a proper post on this soon!

You’re an awesome writer. Thanks for this.

I rarely read blogs anymore and almost never comment, but I had to say this was a great post and spoke directly to my mixed experience after reading the book 6 years ago in high school. Great book recommendations as well. Loved Zero to One. Need to check out Deep Work now. Also your self authorizing review was awesome. You made a loyal subscriber out of me today!

Hey Ryan, glad I could draw you out into the comments section! Deep Work is brilliant, I’d definitely check it out. I’m kind of obsessed with the whole productivity sphere at the moment so I’ll keep sharing my findings and book recommendations. Really glad to have you on board!

This is, hands down, one of the best and most powerful books I’ve ever read in my life. I have recommended it to countless people. The fact that you’re seeking it out says volumes about your level of self-awareness as it is and this book builds on that.

Great post and honest review of the book. When I read the book, I had a similar reaction. I felt that Tim came off as a bit cocky at times and made the 4 hour/week lifestyle seem too simple. When in reality, as you mentioned, it takes years of hard work to reach that level. Passive income doesn’t mean no work and more people need to realize that.

The 4HWW, like many self-help and pop-culture “business” books, are all especially useful for one type of person: the authors of said books.

This is a seriously kickass post. I read 4HWW some years ago, and came away impressed more by his brilliant marketing than recipe for sustainable life style for long term. Advantages are continually arbitraged away in this competitive world and a 4HWW even if real for some, requires monumental effort upfront to get there. It’s easy to sell the sizzle than make a good steak. Thanks for writing with honesty on an oversold topic.

Thanks for the kind words! Tim Ferriss is without doubt one of the best marketers the world has ever seen. I think I saw someone compare him to the modern-day PT Barnum, which is quite apt.

One of the best bog posts I have ever read. Thanks! I’m on a low information diet and deleted news apps from my phone. Best thing I ever did!

Low-information diet has improved my life so much! Being a journalist I’m still attached to the news somewhat, but I don’t follow it with anywhere near the neurotic intensity that I used to.

I’m a fan of the book. It’s good that I didn’t take it literally when I read it. It simply helped open my mind though to the concept that time and money don’t have to be linear. It’s changed the way I look at my day job and I’m happier for it. Great post!

Yep, I think it has some really good messages, like time being the only non-renewable resource. My concern is for people who can’t tell between the good ideas and the marketing hype.

“I have nothing against passive income, provided it doesn’t cross the line to into scammy shenanigans. In fact, I love the stuff. I just happen to prefer to earn mine the old-fashioned way – by living modestly, and then investing my savings so they compound over time”.

So you prefer delegating your “scammy shenanigans” to the professionals, namely the Fortune 500. You don’t like to get your hands dirty.

I own a tiny slice of every major publicly listed business in the world – something like 8000+ companies, which provide an vast and amazing array of products and services that make our lives immeasurably better. Yes, I’m very comfortable outsourcing the ‘dirty work’ to them.

This is the best post I have read in a while. I appreciate the reminder that combining skills and interests / passions is a winning strategy not just for monetary success but also for personal fulfillment. And thank you for noting all the work that really goes into any business up front before success and “passive income” can be achieved. I know a few people who think they may be able to skip that giant step! Thanks for a great read!

Hey Laurie, really glad you enjoyed it. The fulfillment angle is really important, and something that people don’t tend to think about. Quite early in my career, I interviewed a financial adviser who had dealt with several Lotto winners. They were overnight millionaires – the dream – but their lives were more or less ruined. They had no sense of purpose, no community, no direction. He never bought a lottery ticket again!

Home » The Reviews » The 4-Hour Workweek Book Review

The 4-Hour Workweek Book Review

May 26, 2023

The 4-Hour Workweek, written by Timothy Ferriss, has become a groundbreaking bestseller since its publication, offering a new perspective on work-life balance and productivity. The book challenges traditional work models and introduces readers to an unconventional approach, focusing on the idea of working smarter, not harder. Packed with strategies and actionable insights, the book promises to help readers become part of the “New Rich” and gain more control over their time and income.

Ferriss’ concept of the 4-hour workweek revolves around the acronym DEAL, which stands for Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. Each section outlines specific tips and principles for readers to adopt in their pursuit of a more efficient and fulfilling work-life balance. The book encourages readers to reassess their goals and redefine success while providing practical advice on time management, outsourcing, and creating passive income streams.

Reactions to The 4-Hour Workweek have been mixed, with some praising its revolutionary ideas and others questioning its feasibility for the average individual. Nonetheless, it remains an influential work that has sparked a cultural shift in the way people perceive their careers and seek out alternative paths to success. Regardless of personal opinions on the book’s content, Ferriss’ work has undeniably made a significant impact on the world of entrepreneurship and lifestyle design since its debut on the bestseller list.

Table of Contents

Overview of The 4-Hour Workweek

Author tim ferriss.

Tim Ferriss is a renowned author who has written multiple bestsellers, including  The 4-Hour Workweek , The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef. He has also served as a startup advisor, specializing in positioning, PR, and marketing for companies like Uber and Evernote.

New Rich Lifestyle

The 4-Hour Workweek  primarily focuses on enabling readers to achieve a “New Rich” lifestyle. This concept is centered around the idea of abandoning the traditional, deferred-life plan and creating a luxurious lifestyle in the present instead of waiting for retirement. The key to achieving this lifestyle lies in enhancing efficiency, optimizing productivity, and leveraging automation.

The book aims to provide readers with two essential qualities of the New Rich lifestyle:

• More time:  The 4-Hour Workweek introduces techniques that allow individuals to maximize their output and minimize their time input, freeing up extra time for personal goals and pursuits.
• More mobility:  Ferriss encourages remote work and location independence, allowing people to work from anywhere and experience different cultures and environments.

To summarize, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss is a book dedicated to helping people unlock the New Rich lifestyle by optimizing their work style, time management, and embracing the benefits of location independence.

Key Concepts and Strategies

Pareto principle.

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is a key concept in  The 4-Hour Workweek . This principle suggests that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. Author Tim Ferriss encourages readers to focus on identifying and prioritizing the 20% of tasks or activities that generate the most significant outcomes. By doing so, one can achieve higher productivity and better time management.

Outsourcing and Automation

Outsourcing and automation play a crucial role in Ferriss’s strategy. By delegating tasks to virtual assistants, or automating them with technology, individuals can reduce their workload and free up time for more critical tasks. Outsourcing can also help manage mundane or repetitive tasks, thereby improving overall efficiency.

Selective Ignorance

Selective ignorance is another vital concept in  The 4-Hour Workweek . It involves purposely choosing not to engage with certain information or distractions, such as excessive email checking or news consumption. By practicing selective ignorance, readers can carefully allocate their attention towards more important and productive tasks, ultimately saving time and increasing productivity.

Mini-Retirements

Lastly, the book highlights the idea of mini-retirements. Instead of waiting for a traditional retirement at the end of one’s career, Ferriss proposes taking multiple breaks throughout a lifetime. These mini-retirements can be spent traveling, learning new skills, or pursuing passions. Incorporating mini-retirements not only helps to prioritize the value of time over money but also allows individuals to enjoy the rewards of their hard work at various stages in life.

Implementing the 4-Hour Workweek Lifestyle

Setting goals and defining success.

To successfully implement the 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle, it is crucial to set clear and realistic goals. Start by defining what success means to you, both professionally and personally. Establish short-term and long-term goals that align with your definition of success. This will help keep you focused and motivated throughout the process.

Generating Passive Income

The key to achieving a 4-Hour Workweek is generating passive income streams. Passive income refers to earnings generated with minimal or no ongoing effort. Some common ways to generate passive income include:

• Investing in stocks, bonds, or real estate
• Creating and selling digital products, such as ebooks, courses, or software
• Building and monetizing a website or blog
• Licensing intellectual property, such as patents or copyrighted materials

As an entrepreneur, identify which passive income opportunities best align with your skills, interests, and goals.

Utilizing Virtual Assistants

Leveraging virtual assistants (VAs) is another essential aspect of the 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle. By outsourcing tasks, you can save time and energy for higher priority activities. To effectively utilize VAs, consider the following:

• Determine tasks suited for outsourcing, such as administrative work, data entry, or marketing
• Research and select reliable platforms to find and hire qualified VAs
• Establish clear expectations and maintain open communication with your VA

Avoiding Distractions

To maximize productivity within a shortened workweek, managing distractions is vital. Identify common distractions and develop strategies to minimize them. Tips for avoiding distractions include:

• Establishing a structured daily routine
• Creating a dedicated workspace free from clutter and disruptions
• Prioritizing tasks and focusing on the most important activities first
• Setting boundaries and limiting access to social media or other non-work-related content during work hours

Implementing these strategies can help maintain focus and pave the way for successfully embracing the 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle.

Real-World Examples and Interviews

Case studies of successful practitioners.

In the  4-Hour Workweek , Tim Ferriss shares case studies and real-world examples of successful practitioners who have managed to implement the 4-hour workweek lifestyle. He conducted interviews with various individuals who have restructured their lives and careers to achieve the goal of reduced working hours while still maintaining financial success.

One example of such an individual is a person who has built an online business that can be remotely managed. They have outsourced most of their tasks, allowing them to focus on their passion, which is learning tango. By leveraging the power of automation, they can spend more time in Buenos Aires enjoying their newfound freedom.

Moreover, the book discusses the experiences of a community of digital nomads who have turned their backs on traditional 9-to-5 jobs and adopted the principles of the 4-hour workweek. They work diligently for a few hours a day and then focus their energy on leisure, travel, family, or personal projects. Their pursuit of this lifestyle has led to a deeper understanding of the value of time and experiences.

Tim Ferriss’ Personal Experiences

Tim Ferriss shares his own personal journey and transformation from working long hours as a start-up founder to adopting the 4-hour workweek mindset. He narrates his life-changing experience of learning tango in Buenos Aires and how this led him to rethink his priorities and values.

His insights and experiments with outsourcing, automation, and time management have inspired many readers to reconsider their own work-life balance and strive for a more fulfilling existence. By living out the principles he espouses in his book, Tim Ferriss demonstrates the possibility of escaping the 9-to-5 grind and living a more liberated lifestyle focused on the value of time and experiences.

Impact on Work and Life

Remote work trends.

The 4-Hour Workweek book by Timothy Ferriss has had a significant impact on remote work and work from home culture. With the increasing number of companies embracing  remote work , many employees have found new opportunities for flexible working hours and location independence. As a result, more and more people are adopting the concept of  lifestyle design , where they can balance their personal and professional lives while working from anywhere. The rise in flexible work arrangements has been beneficial in promoting a healthier work-life balance and decreasing stress levels, reducing the likelihood of  burnout .

Achieving Work-Life Balance

One of the core principles of The 4-Hour Workweek is achieving a work-life balance by focusing on the concept of  relative income . Ferriss argues that relative income, which takes into account both time and money, is more important than raw earnings. By outsourcing time-consuming tasks and optimizing work processes, individuals can achieve an improved work-life balance. This allows them to spend more time on leisure activities, personal growth, and relationships. The book encourages readers to take “mini-retirements” and to plan their lives around their passions and dreams instead of limiting their plans to the scope of their careers.

Challenges and Potential Drawbacks

While The 4-Hour Workweek has undoubtedly influenced the way people approach their careers and lifestyles, there are potential challenges and drawbacks. Implementing the strategies in the book may not be feasible for everyone, depending on their specific job, industry or personal circumstances. Some critics argue that the book’s ideas often work best for those who are already self-employed or who work in a creative or freelance capacity.

Additionally, remote work and flexible lifestyles may pose challenges for some individuals, such as difficulty in separating work and personal life, feelings of isolation, or the potential lack of a support network. It is essential to carefully consider and address these challenges to ensure a healthy work-life balance while still striving for professional success. Overall, The 4-Hour Workweek can serve as an inspiration for readers, but it is important to remember that each person’s circumstances will dictate how much of the book’s principles can be applied.

Reception and Influence

New york times bestseller list.

The 4-Hour Workweek, written by Tim Ferriss, was a major success, making it onto the  New York Times  bestseller list where it stayed, more or less, for the next seven years. This impressive feat showcased the book’s wide-reaching influence and popularity.

Popular Reactions

The book resonated with people looking for alternatives to the traditional 9 to 5 work life. It presented possibilities beyond this grind and emphasized shifting focus from the value of money to the value of time. Many readers claimed that the book changed their lives and helped them redesign their careers and lifestyles.

News Coverage

The 4-Hour Workweek garnered attention not only from readers but also news outlets such as  The New Yorker . These publications revisited the book, reflecting on its principles and ideas, further strengthening its position as a powerful thought-provoker in the world of work-life balance and lifestyle designing.

Recommendations

Due to its influence and wide acclaim, The 4-Hour Workweek became a must-read book for people wanting to escape the routine of a typical work life. It received numerous recommendations from successful individuals who endorsed its innovative insights and ideas. With millions of copies sold globally, The 4-Hour Workweek remains a continued cornerstone for personal development and success for those seeking a different approach to their careers.

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Rachel Mcmichael:

I am so excited about this week’s 5-minute book review segment..

If you haven’t heard, one of my goals this year was to read at least one book a week. And so far I’ve almost doubled that goal!

But more importantly, I’ve committed to implementing at least one new thing from each book I read.

And here’s the best part —

Here’s how to enter to win…, leave a review, share a screenshot, ok without further ado, today i’m excited to introduce you to, the 4-hour work week by tim ferriss..

For years my friends have told me to read Tim’s book… I’ve had so many people tell me that the way I teach my Business with Impact Society™ members productivity and how I’ve worked so diligently to master the art of working only 4 hours a day 4 days a week is something that needs its own book.

My only hesitation was that this book was that Audible told me it was going to take 13 hours to listen to it at regular speed. “Ummm…. Tim… that’s more than three WEEKS of work according to your four hours a week title!”

And yet, as I’m constantly telling my clients “the fact that you think you don’t have time to put in automations is the EXACT reason you MUST get them in place!” – It’s a total catch-22, am I right?!

Now I always want to give you the whole story when it comes to a book – and this one is excellent. While many of the concepts weren’t “new” to me, hearing Tim share how and when he’d implemented them was fantastic… and it gave me even more ideas as I continue to work to whittle down my already limited hours each week.

But I do want to warn you that you will want to apply your own filter to this book. When he wrote this, Tim was a single man who was looking for a way to travel the world without being tied down to one location. And he did this with a products-based approach.

I have no desire to be location independent – my husband and I feel very called to live where we are. We are here on purpose and for a purpose. So if you’re like me and location independence isn’t what you’re striving for, this book is still for you.

I also have no desire to have a products business. I help online business owners, course creators, coaches, and freelancers grow and scale their business using the power of automation – so they can start and scale their businesses without sacrificing their family, free time, or sanity.

And while I’ve helped many products-based do the same – it’s not my calling. So if you’re like me and a products business isn’t what you’re growing, this book is still for you.

I applied WAY more than three things that I learned while listening to this audiobook – and if I can take away that many things as a parent who has different ambitions than Tim, then I’m confident you can too.

… it gave me even more ideas as I continue to work to whittle down my already limited hours each week.

These are my top 3 takeaways from the 4-hour work week by tim ferriss.

otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. Now we’ve talked about this before – in fact the entire premise behind my Business with Impact Society™ is the fact that 80% of the results come from 20% of the activities – so in The Business with Impact Society™ we focus on the 20% so that we can grow and scale more quickly while living a priority based life.

But what I love about the way that Tim approaches it. He says “Doing something unimportant well doesn’t make it important.”

When I heard him say that it immediately got me thinking about my own life and business — are there areas that I’m naturally good at but that aren’t actually important to the business? Are there areas I’m spending time on that aren’t really affecting the bottom line? Are there things we’re investing in that we aren’t really seeing a Return on Investment from?

#2 – The tools, templates, scripts, and systems.

The 4-Hour Work Week is broken down into four themes:

Definition Elimination Automation Liberation

And in each theme, Tim doesn’t hold back – he shares all of the books he read, the systems he used, the emails he sent, the conversations he had, and more.

Now in the definition phase, we start by defining what success looks like on our terms – not what we’ve been taught or what others are doing – but what we want. Tim wants to travel the world and work only four hours a week. I want to fulfill two purposes at once – spending more time with my family while serving more people through the Business with Impact Society™.

In the elimination phase, we take things off of our plate that aren’t in the 20%. Here Tim shares ideas like his “media fast” which I now have a low-diet of, and it has changed so many things for me! He talks about stopping a book that you just don’t like and never picking it up again. And he talks about how to say no – tactfully and gracefully.

In the automation phase, he shares all kinds of tools and systems he uses – this section was so valuable as we started using several in our business too! He shares scripts + templates and so many high-value pieces that we found so useful in this phase.

#3 – Validating Your Business Idea BEFORE You Create It

in the Business with Impact Society™ we teach a concept that we call “Getting Paid to Create Your Offer” – what I mean by that is that when I have an idea for a course or program, I validate it by asking people “if I created this, would you want it?”.

If I get enough of a response, then I create the Sales Page using my Sales Page that Sells™ framework and I “launch” the offer as a “Beta” – meaning the first round or “paid test group.”

The test group knows that we are creating this together and they get the benefit of group calls that future customers may not have access to. They also get a discounted rate. And I get paid to create the program + the accountability to get it finished WITH them.

This concept is true whether you’re creating a digital product or a physical one — validate the idea through pre-sales.

Have you read The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss?

What was your biggest takeaway? Tag me @rachelrmcmichael and Tim Ferriss @timferriss on Instagram to be entered to win one of 10 copies this week.

And if you’re looking for a list of all of my favorites, head to rachelmcmichael.com/books for a full listing of all of the books I recommend for online business owners. In this list I’m sharing my favorites for leadership, mindset, team building, productivity, audience and traffic growth, content creation, sales, and money.

As a final reminder…

We’re giving away 10 copies of this book.

Check out our New Book Recommendation Guide

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One of the most important softwares we use in our business every day is ActiveCampaign . We use it to communicate with our email list and to create funnels to take potential customers from “who's this” to “I'm ready to work with you”… but there are so many things you can use it for!

ActiveCampaign is Louis Vuitton quality CRM at a Target price! With it you can create unlimited funnels, create tags and workflows, add notes to your customer files, manage #allthethings, and there are additional upgrades that even allow for texting and DMing, all from the platform!

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Grab it now for only $297 before the price goes up..

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Grab the Productivity Playbook: rachelmcmichael.com/productivity 
• Follow Rachel on Instagram: @rachelrmcmichael

Subscribe & Review On iTUNES!

Are you subscribed to the Business With Impact podcast on iTunes ? If not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss a single content-rich episode. Click here to subscribe in iTunes!

And if you enjoyed today’s episode, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes , too. iTunes reviews get the message out about this podcast, and I love hearing your feedback! All you have to do is click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what you loved about today’s episode.

You can also take a screenshot and post it to your Instagram Stories with your biggest takeaways and tag me, @rachelrmcmichael !

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Project Life Mastery

Tim Ferriss – The 4 Hour Work Week Book Review

At the time, having a 9-5 job and hoping to one day retire was the paradigm that I was operating from. It's what I was sold by society, and I didn't know any better. The 4 Hour Work Week really opened me up and shifted my way of thinking. I was deeply inspired by Tim Ferriss' lifestyle of having the ability to travel the world and focus on doing the things he loved, while only having to work 4 hours a week.   How is this possible?  Isn't that a dream come true for most people?  It's definitely a reality, and I've been very fortunate and having achieved it for certain stages of my life years after reading the book.

(Click here to watch the video on YouTube)

The book is all about how to  “Escape the 9 to 5, live anywhere, and join the new rich.”

Most people spend their entire lives WORKING and looking forward to retirement, which is when they'll finally get the opportunity to travel and be free to do the things they really want in life. Whereas Tim believes that  retirement isn't the goal, but rather we should LIVE and ENJOY our lives today.

That'd be great, except most people live in the cultural hypnosis that we need to work 40+ hours per week to be successful and wealthy. Or that we need to go to college or university and then afterwards find a job and work until we're 60 until retirement.

Less Is Not Laziness. “Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”

In The 4 Hour Work Week , Tim talks a lot about focusing on being productive instead of busy. Most people allow meaningless tasks and chores to consume all of their time and energy. Instead, there's a better solution:  Outsourcing .

The concept of outsourcing, which is talked about in the chapter Outsourcing Life  was an intriguing one to me. Instead of doing all of those time-consuming tasks yourself, what if you could get someone else to do them for you? Wouldn't that be nice. The idea of outsourcing is to hire other people to take care of those things for you, so that you have more free time. And who doesn't want more free time?

Hiring a virtual assistant from India, Phillipines, or anywhere else in the world for as little as $3/hour, can do the following for you:

• Scheduling interviews and meetings
• Web research
• Following up on appointments, errands, and tasks
• Online purchases
• Creation of legal documents
• Website maintenance (web design, publishing, uploading files) that doesn't require a professional designer
• Monitoring, editing, and publishing comments for online discussions
• Posting job vacancies on the web
• Document creation
• Proofreading and editing documents for spelling and formatting
• Online research for updating blogs
• Updating the database for Customer Relationship Management Software
• Updating invoices and receiving payments
• Voicemail transcription

… And basically whatever else you can possibly think of.

In fact, Tim Ferriss even outsourced his dating life and has different assistants to handle practically every aspect of his business. To me, this was fascinating at the time and a huge game-changer. There were tons of things that I did for business that wasn't directly related to making profit, but had to get done. I started to think, “What if I could focus my time and attention on the things that MATTER and are IMPORTANT to me, and the things that actually produce the RESULTS, rather than consuming all my time with all this other nonsense?”  That made a lot of sense to me.

Since reading The 4 Hour Work Week, over the years I've had several virtual assistants that I've hired from websites such as oDesk.com .  I've had virtual assistants from India and the Philippines (I currently employ a VA from the Phillipines and it's worked out beautifully) for as little as $2-3/hour.  I also use websites such as Fiverr.com to leverage myself and get many tasks done for my business for only $5.  This has allowed me to leverage myself in so many ways and have my internet businesses run on auto-pilot, making me a consistent passive income.  And with this consistent passive income, I've been able to have the freedom to travel to and live in different countries around the world, while only being required to work less than 4 hours a week.

Another thing that I really liked about The 4 Hour Work Week is the “How To” approach with everything. Almost every chapter of the book is concluded with a “Comfort Challenge” or “Questions & Actions” , or a variety of different resources. This makes the advice and information easily applicable and very practical. You can put things into action immediately.

In fact, Tim tells you in-detail almost how to do everything.

An important section of the book is on creating Automated Income , which is how to create and set up a product to sell online which can generate passive income while you're asleep. And Tim actually goes through the simple process with you, showing you how you can do it for yourself.

Imagine being able to quit your job, have an automated income and cashflow managed by virtual assistants, giving you the freedom and time to do whatever it is that you want in life. Sounds really cool, huh?

That's the life of Tim Ferriss. He travels the world, is a New York Times bestselling author, speaks six languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a world record holder in tango, a national champion in Chinese kickboxing, and an actor on a hit television series in Hong Kong. And he's only thirty years old.

The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is an outstanding book. There's a lot of ideas and aspects that I got from the book that I was able to apply to my own life that has made me more effective and productive, freeing up a lot more time and also ways to generate automated income for myself.

Here is a cool summary of  The Four Hour Work Week with Tim Ferriss  that I found on YouTube:

The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss is a must-read for anyone that is looking to achieve a lifestyle of freedom.  I couldn't imagine going through life without this book, and I'm so grateful for the opportunities it's provided for me in my life. The book will really open up your mind to the possibilities in your life and give you some practical steps on how you can get more from your life.  You can get your copy at Amazon.com by clicking here .

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Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

Unless you are running on a different clock than the rest of us, you only have 168 hours to do what you need to do each week.  Figure at least 29% of that has to be used for sleep, and another 6% just for eating.  So that leaves you about 108 hours per week to split between work and fun.  If you’re like most folks, it’s not unusual to see over 60 hours per week spent on commuting to and from work, as well as on work itself.

And why do you work this many hours?  Oh, right – it’s so you can retire and not do any more work.

Tim Ferriss has written a book that solves your dilemma – The 4-Hour Workweek .  Mind you, the book has been out for a very long time, but it remains in the zeitgeist to this day. The 4-Hour Work Week presents you with tips and tricks to help you work less, earn more, and enjoy the time you’ve got while you’re still able to use it.

After being turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers, compounded by expert opinions that it would never be a best seller, The 4-Hour Workweek hit the New York Times best sellers list on May 2, 2007.  Since then, it has been published in 35 languages, been on the best seller list for over two years, and has had more than 40 printings in the US alone.

Here’s a list of what you can expect to learn in The 4-Hour Workweek :

• How to outsource your life and do whatever you want for a year, only to return to a bank account 50% larger than before you left
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of little-known European economists
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2-4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• Management secrets of Remote Control CEOs
• The crucial difference between absolute and relative income
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50-80% off
• How to fill the void and creating meaning after removing work and the office

It might sound like an aggressive copywriters attempt to sell you snake oil, but I found this book to be well written and filled with interesting anecdotes and helpful advice.  But more importantly, I found it to be useful and easy to follow.  It’s not one of those books that promises to share their secrets – but only if you buy the next three books in the series.  You could go to your library, borrow this book, and start reaping the rewards as you implement the instructions.  You could to do that today .

The book is filled with examples of how Ferriss has been able to eliminate himself as the bottleneck in his company.  Can you imagine only responding to your emails on Monday morning – and taking less than 30 minutes to do so?  Once you learn how to DEAL (Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation), you can start living the life you want to live.  And profit from it.

One of the most important aspects of this book is explaining the difference between being efficient and being effective.  Too often we focus on one at the cost of the other.  Ferriss provides excellent reasoning to help you decide when it’s the right time to be effective or efficient.

The biggest takeaways for me: mini-retirements and outsourcing.  I’m getting to the age where too many of my friends have reached that golden age of retirement, only to be struck down by a medical or financial difficulty preventing them from living the life they’ve dreamt of for the past thirty years.  Or worse, they’ve found that they achieved their dream only to find that it really isn’t what they want to do. If they had the chance to do a mini-retirement, they would have been able to enjoy the fruits of their labour, as well as test some of the alternatives.

If you are looking for a book that will help you achieve more, earn more, live more, all while enabling you to do the things you want to do – I recommend that you spend a bit of time reading this book.  I’ll be surprised if you only read it once.

With endorsements by Jack Canfield, A.J. Jacobs, and Charles L. Brock – you don’t have to take my word for it.  That being said, I haven’t met anyone that’s read the book that isn’t evangelistic about it.

This book teaches you to ask the question:

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

The answer is: you read the book, put it down and forget about it.  Then you go back to working your 50+ hour weeks until you reach the time where you want to retire, or are forced to retire.  Hopefully you’ll love what you do then, because you will have certainly earned it by the time you get there.

The next time someone asks you what you do – do you want to say you are middle management in your corporation, or would you rather say what Tim says:

“I race motorcycles in Europe, I ski in the Andes, I scuba dive in Panama and I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

Tough choice.

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Nice review of the book!

I have been thinking about going back and re-reading it again myself. It’s one of those books that as you first work through it, your mind will likely work hard to resist a lot of it as impossible… but I found the more I got through it, the more I realized that much of my resistance was just my own self-limiting thoughts.

Some of the tips offered would not be possible in my own job (my company probably would not be too keen on my offloading administrative work to some unknown person overseas), but I still loved the way it challenged my notions of what was possible.

Of course, the problem is that most of the suggestions in this book are morally questionable.

I read the book a while ago and I enjoyed it. I have outsourced some of my work based upon some of the tips I learned from reading it.

Best advice from this book is “ELIMINATION” goes hand and hand with Leo Babauta’s advice. I read the book 2 times and found it very useful, Congratulations Tim.

The basic approach of the book works for me too:

How much money do you need to be happy?; More money doesn’t mean more happiness; True freedom means to deliver from imaginary dependences;

All the other suggestions doesent work for me here in germany/europe. For example: i cant outsource my tax-/ office-paperwork to an indian contract worker or set up the next onlineshop for cheap far-east- crap.

Furthermore some of the suggestions seem in ecological and ethic terms verry questionable to me…

Hi Jason, I’ve had this book sitting on my nightstand for about a year and haven’t read it. After reading your review I think I’m going to tackle it.

Thanks, Bob

These types of books are great for easy reading and fantasy escapism, in the real world it’s all well but with kids at school or private school, fees etc etc you will need to be rather more adapted to achieve the long term success I think. Good stuff though.

Colin. … Must go now I need to dry myself down as the taxi arrives in 30 minutes to take me and the crew to the airport.

Jason, you make an excellent point about applying the idea of testing to our life. Ever since I read about the concept of a mini-retirement, I’ve started to research what would be required to move to Europe for 6 months (Toronto is great but I’m keen to get some longterm exposure to Paris and other cities).

While I’m writing here, I’m going to ask for a short favor. 🙂 [you can blame the 4HWW for making me more assertive]

I’m surveying readers of “The 4-Hour Workweek” for an article I’m writing. I just need about 15 people to finish off my survey and I’d like to invite you in. The survey link is here: http://svy.mk/1nNT9T4 .

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The 4-Hour Workweek Summary

1-Sentence-Summary:   The 4-Hour Workweek is the step-by-step blueprint to free yourself from the shackles of a corporate job, create a business to fund the lifestyle of your dreams, and live life like a millionaire, without actually having to be one.

Favorite quote from the author:

Table of Contents

Video Summary

The 4-hour workweek review, audio summary, who would i recommend the 4-hour workweek summary to.

Was I late to the party because I read this book in 2013? Sure. About 6 years late, to be exact. But that didn’t make it any less of an eye-opener to me.

Tim Ferriss needs no introduction. He’s like a digital Indiana Jones, and this was the book that brought him on to our screens.

Written more out of frustration, much less than for the love of writing, this book is Tim’s documentation of how he removed himself from his own company, in order to do what he loves: learn and travel.

It’s almost impossible to pull out just 3 things from this book, but I’ll do it anyway:

• Be effective, not efficient.
• Validate all of your business ideas.
• Charge a premium to make your life easier.

Let’s dig a bit deeper.

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: Be effective, not efficient.

If Tim’s life was designed around one rule, it would be the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle . Most people measure productivity by the time spent working , but that’s a bad indicator, because we waste so much time at work.

Tim suggests to spend your time effectively: on the 20% of things that get you 80% of the results, and not vice versa.

A famous quote of his is this: “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important” . So instead of focusing on doing as much as you can as best as you can, just focus on doing the few things that will lead to the biggest progress .

This is one of Tim’s major mantras in life and something you can adopt today that will make every single day of your life from here on out slightly better and easier.

Lesson 2: Always validate your business ideas.

Funny I mentioned him yesterday , but this lesson really sank in when I read Noah Kagan’s guest post on Tim’s blog . Before you go out and build any product or service,  make sure people give you money for it.

Will your idea for knitted coffee cosies be a hit? I don’t know, so go ask people to buy from you! This is more of a comfort zone challenge  than anything else, and it’s scary – which is a good indicator that it’s important .

2 personal examples from 2015: First, a friend approached me with an idea for a shoe business. We would solve the following problem:  People have different sized feet. They need one shoe in one size, and the other in another size.

Our idea was to go to shoe manufacturers, collect all the leftovers in different sizes, pair them up and sell them for cheap. To validate, we asked all of our friends and family, who had this problem, whether they’d pay for odd-sized shoes.

What’s more, we went into 10+ shoe stores and asked them if people approach them with this problem.

The answer:  no. No one cares, people just take the bigger pair and live with it, it’s not big enough of an issue .

Late in 2015 I wanted to create my first proper digital product. A course. So to test the idea, I created a landing page , held a webinar, and tried to pre-sell it. I sold 0 copies of the course, but that was no problem, because I hadn’t even built it yet .

Remember: ABV – always be validating!

Lesson 3: Charge a premium to need less clients and make your life easier.

Once you have validated your product and are set to start production, the next big question often is: Do I want to be high quality or the cheapest guy around?

Answer: You want to be high quality. Always.

Imagine you want to make $4,000/month, and are selling a nutritional supplement, like this one . If you charge $10 per bottle, you need to generate 400 sales per month.

If you charge $40 per bottle, you only have to make 100 sales.  The hardest part of making a sale is moving people from not giving you money to giving you money .

The amount of money is very negotiable once they’ve made the decision to purchase from you. I bet you can find 100 people who are willing to give you 4x the money much faster than you can get an extra 300 people to buy from you in the first place.

Note:  You can easily do this pricing math for any potential product with Neville Medhora’s cool pricing calculator.

That’s the first reason you should shoot for high quality and charge a premium. The second reason is that the people that are willing to pay a premium are low-hassle clients .

You will get a lot less complaints, returns and angry phone calls. Even if they don’t like it, chances are they won’t bother returning it, because they don’t have to turn every cent twice before spending it.

So promise high quality and deliver!

I read the entire book in a few sittings. I can’t believe someone compiled all the information in it in such an encompassing way back in 2007. That’s what has most shocked me about it.

Blinkist’s summary is crammed with insights, but is still only an excerpt of the plethora of great info in the book. Tim created a great step-by-step structure with lots of resources, links and tools, like the dreamline worksheet or the comfort challenges at the end of each chapter.

If you’ve entertained the idea of what your life could look like if you didn’t have to work, or could be a lot more picky about the projects you do take on, because you rest comfortably on a big, financial cushion, this is a must read.

Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account:

The 17 year old who has a tough time to make up her mind about taking a year off before college to travel and explore, the 31 year old graduate who’s a few years into his corporate career and starts to question whether this is what he wanted, and anyone who’s ever tried to sell something that was a flop.

Last Updated on July 27, 2022

Niklas Göke

Niklas Göke is an author and writer whose work has attracted tens of millions of readers to date. He is also the founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries teaching readers 3 valuable lessons in just 4 minutes each. Born and raised in Germany, Nik also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration & Engineering from KIT Karlsruhe and a Master’s Degree in Management & Technology from the Technical University of Munich. He lives in Munich and enjoys a great slice of salami pizza almost as much as reading — or writing — the next book — or book summary, of course!

*Four Minute Books participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon. We also participate in other affiliate programs, such as Blinkist, MindValley, Audible, Audiobooks, Reading.FM, and others. Our referral links allow us to earn commissions (at no extra cost to you) and keep the site running. Thank you for your support.

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Book Review: The 4 Hour Work Week

by Kyle Pearce | Mar 28, 2014 | Good Reads | 2 comments

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Seems like an odd book for a teacher to read, but based on how many times I have heard this book being referenced by podcast hosts as “must read,” I thought I should probably check it out. Thanks to the internet, more people than ever before are leaving their office jobs and pursuing alternative ways to make money. For example, the Bitcoin boom has got a lot more people looking on sites like https://www.cripto-valuta.net/es/bitcoin-trader/ , finding the best ways to invest in cryptocurrency. The most successful investors are able to maintain an income and let automatic traders do most of the work for you. There are so many other options out there for people wanting to escape their 9-5 and this book shows it.

Unsure if it is better to learn about the author once you begin reading the book, but it is really hard to hold back from sharing just a few of this guy’s accomplishments, including:

Tim has amassed a diverse (and certainly odd) roster of experiences:

• Princeton University guest lecturer in High-Tech Entrepreneurship and Electrical Engineering
• Finance and Entrepreneurship advisor at Singularity University at NASA Ames, co-founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil.
• First American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango
• Speaker of 5 languages (video samples here)
• National Chinese kickboxing champion
• Horseback archer (yabusame) in Nikko, Japan
• 2009 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute
• Political asylum researcher
• MTV breakdancer in Taiwan
• Hurling competitor in Ireland
• Wired Magazine’s “Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008?

Source: The Blog of Tim Ferriss: Experiments in Lifestyle Design

What a random list of experiences! I feel that it is important to share those with you so you can better understand the purpose of the book.

First Impression

As the title might suggest, the book is targeted more for those working from 9-to-5 in an office cubicle. Of course, many people work these long hours in office cubicles. When working these hours, it’s usually vital that staff are supported whilst sitting at their desk. That’s why most companies make sure that they provide office chairs from office monster or somewhere similar. Having a comfy chair can make all the difference to staff who are working 9-to-5. This is just one way that companies can maximize effectiveness. The book also goes on to introduce many other strategies and “rules” to help you maximize your effectiveness, reduce distractions, and get to the things you enjoy doing most in life.

The biggest takeaway I received from The Four Hour Work Week was my new found understanding of what success in life really means. Ferriss really makes you reevaluate what you consider important in your life by considering how you currently spend (or waste) your time, who we should really be focusing on impressing (i.e.: family), and what being “rich” (the “new rich”) really means.

Regardless of whether you want it or not, Tim also shares how employees stuck in the prison of the office can negotiate remote work agreements to slowly reduce the number of hours you work while accomplishing more. He extends this idea to building online businesses in order to earn income to support you and your family according to your new “Lifestyle Design” at home or abroad. He doesn’t hide any details in regards to how you can find a “muse” business that will work prior to investing any time or money, how to market it successfully, and outsource all of the work while you reap the benefits. Working from home can have a lot of benefits for many workers, it can make their life a lot easier, particularly if employees are unable to drive to work for whatever reason. It gives them the ability to work from the comfort of their own home without having to worry about the issues that come along with getting to work each day. In most cases, all they require is a good internet connection and a place to call their office (see more here ). Of course, if they are unable to work from home, then this can create problems if the employee is unable to come in for whatever reason. For example, say the employee has broken their leg then working from home is the perfect opportunity, but if they cannot work from home, then this means that they might miss out on their income. However, if they have something like this individual short term disability insurance , then there might not be an issue.

Curious yet? You should be! Here’s a few places you can check out The Four Hour Work Week :

Listen to The Four Hour Work Week FREE from Audible!

Get a FREE 30-Day Audible Trial and use your FREE book credit to listen to The Four Hour Work Week by clicking here !

Other Ways To Read The Four Hour Work Week:

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Kyle, this is a great review of “The 4-Hour Work Week.” I think you hit the nail on the head with your observation that the book redefines success. The author’s comment about the importance of TIME FREEDOM in particular struck me hard. That’s a kind of freedom that is difficult to obtain in a conventional corporate job.

I can see major challenges to implementing some of the book’s most creative ideas in a public sector/union setting – best wishes in overcoming those hurdles!

I’m also a big fan of consuming audio while commuting and doing chores. I tend to focus on audio podcasts (e.g. I Love Marketing) though I enjoy the occasional audiobook as well (e.g. John Maxwell’s leadership books).

One last point. I’m running a survey of readers of “The 4-Hour Work Week” right now ( http://svy.mk/1nNT9T4 ) for an article I’m writing. It would be very helpful to me if you could fill out the survey – it’s just 10 questions.

Thanks for the reply. Now reflecting a couple months after reading Four-Hour Work Week and reading some other self-improvement books since, I think the book helped me realize that money doesn’t make you happy. I was trying all kinds of things to make additional income and realized I was burning all of my free time doing it. I now focus on my family and passion (teaching) and that is it. I cherish my free time with family and am really looking at my future career plans through that lens.

I also completed your survey and wish you all the best on that endeavour.

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The 4-Hour Work Week By Tim Ferriss Book Summary 

Turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers, The 4-Hour Work Week nearly didn’t become the No.1 New York Times Bestseller it went on to be. Tim Ferriss wrote ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ for all those tired of postponing their life until retirement, who instead want to live life large and in the moment, right now.

In The 4-Hour Work Week, Ferriss promises a way to get all the rewards of working without having to wait until the end of your career. As a testament to his strategies, Ferriss has used them to become (amongst many other things):

• A guest lecturer at Princeton University
• The first America Guinness World Record holder in tango
• The advisor to over 30 world-record holders in both professional and Olympic sports
• A national Chinese kickboxing champion
• An MTV breakdancer in Taiwan

Post Contents

What is The 4-Hour Work Week about?

How ‘the 4-hour work week’ review is structured, rules that change the rules , dodging bullets, system reset, the low-information diet, interrupting interruption and the art of refusal, how to work 4 hours a week , beyond repair – killing your job, mini-retirements—embracing the mobile lifestyle, filling the void—adding life after subtracting work, the last chapter, want to learn more.

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The 4-Hour Work Week aims to give you more time and more mobility. These are two of the defining attributes of what Ferriss refers to as the “New Rich.” The New Rich have abandoned the deferred-life plan to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now, and Ferriss argues that you can too.

Ferriss states that people don’t want to be millionaires; they want to experience what they think only millionaires can buy. The question, therefore, is how can you achieve the lifestyle of a millionaire, without having a million dollars in the bank? Over five years, Ferriss set out to answer this question and has laid out the key to separating income from time. Consequently, ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ is not about how to save, or about finding your dream job; it’s about how to free up the most time, and automate your income.

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To become part of the New Rich, Ferriss puts forward a set of strategies to follow that spell out the acronym, DEAL. The book looks at each of the following in turn:

• D for ‘Definition:’ Turns misguided common sense on its head, and instead introduces new rules and objectives.
• E for ‘Elimination:’ This step argues for the elimination of the concept of time management.
• A for ‘Automation:’ Looks at putting your cash flow on autopilot.
• L for ‘Liberation:’ Liberation is not necessarily about cheap travel; it’s about being free from the binds that keep you tied to a single location.

The 4-Hour Work Week summary will look at each feature of Ferriss’ DEAL acronym, extracting the key points so that you can learn how to become a member of the New Rich. 

Step 1: D is for Definition

Ferriss argues that the defining feature separating the New Rich from what he refers to as the ‘deferrers’ (i.e., those saving up all of their money for retirement), is their goals and their philosophies. He lists a few of the distinctions between these two modes of thinking as follows:

• Deferrer = I want to work for myself
• New Rich = I want to have others to work for me
• Deferrer = I want to work whenever I want to 
• New Rich = I prevent work for work’s sake and do the minimum to get the maximum
• Deferrer = I want to retire young
• New Rich = I want to regularly distribute adventures and recovery periods throughout my life. Inactivity is not the goal, but doing what is exciting is
• Deferrer = I want to buy all the things I want
• New Rich = I want to do all the things I want to do
• Deferrer = I want to have a lot of money
• New Rich = I want to make a lot of money for specific reasons with defined dreams
• Deferrer = I want to have more
• New Rich = I want to have more quality and less clutter

Ferriss states that the deferrer’s desire to chase money blindly is foolish. If you can free up your time and your location, your money is automatically worth three to ten times more, as you are no longer paying rent. Ferriss chartered private planes over the Andes, enjoyed the finest wines in the world, and lived like a king in a private villa, which all cost less than paying rent in the U.S. Consequently, Ferriss states that money is multiplied in practical value according to the four W’s:

• What you do
• When you do it
• Where you do it
• Whom you do it with

This means that an investment banker making $500,000 a year for 80 hours a week, is less “powerful” than a member of the New Rich working 20 hours a week for $40,000, but who has complete freedom over the when, whom, where, and what of their lives. It’s the ability to choose that is our true power. The 4-Hour Work Week is all about identifying and creating these options so that you can make more money while working less.

When the world seems to be defining or solving a problem in a way that continuously creates subpar results, you need to ask yourself: What if you did the opposite? For example, when Ferriss was working in a sales department, he realized that most cold calls didn’t get through to their intended recipient. So, he decided to only call businesses between 8:00 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. By doing so, he avoided the secretaries. He also got twice as many meetings as his colleagues who were calling from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., for an eighth of the time.

To be a part of the New Rich, Ferriss offers ten rules that are fundamental to your success:

• Retirement is the worst-case-scenario insurance. It rests on the assumption that you are doing something you dislike for the ablest years of your life rather than enjoying those years now.
• Interest and energy are cyclical. Alternating between periods of rest and activity is essential. The New Rich distribute ‘mini-retirements’ throughout their life, instead of hoarding it all for retirement.
• Less is not laziness. Despite spending fewer hours in the office, the New Rich produce more meaningful results than a dozen deferrers combined.
• The timing is never right. Holding out for the perfect moment to make a decision will rarely come to fruition. Waiting for ‘someday’ means that you will take your dreams to the grave.
• Ask for forgiveness, not permission. People deny things according to their emotions, but they can learn to accept them after the fact.
• Emphasize strengths. Don’t fix weaknesses. By improving your strengths over your weaknesses, you focus on multiplying the results as opposed to incrementally fixing your flaws.
• When things are done to excess, they often take on the characteristics of their opposites. Too much and too often of what you want will soon become what you don’t want.
• Money alone is not the solution. We often use not having enough money as a scapegoat for not self-reflecting and working out what we want out of life.
• Relative income is more important than absolute income. Relative income looks at both money and time, whereas absolute income only looks at money. The former is how the New Rich assesses their current worth.
• Distress is bad, eustress is good. Distress refers to harmful stress that makes you weaker. Eustress refers to the type of stress that helps you grow. The New Rich seek out eustress and reject distress.

Uncertainty and the prospect of failure prevent people from trying new things. Most will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. Ferriss suggests that if fear is preventing you from making a choice, imagine the worst-case scenario in detail. Then, work out how you could salvage your life if the worst came to pass. 

This is a technique he used when he was unhappily working 15-hour days to run his company and was debating whether he could take a holiday or not. In the end, he realized that if the worst happened, it wouldn’t be fatal, he would survive, and he would be able to get back on track. 

Ferriss offers seven questions to ask yourself to help you overcome your fears:

• What is your absolute worst-case scenario?
• What could you do to repair the damage if this came to pass?
• What are the temporary and permanent outcomes and benefits of more probable scenarios?
• If you were fired today, how could you take care of your finances?
• What are you putting off due to fear?
• What is the cost (emotionally, financially, and physically) of postponing action?
• What are you waiting for?

Ferriss states that doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic. As 99 percent of the world believes they are incapable of achieving greatness, they aim for a mediocre life. The problem? The level of competition is fiercest amongst those battling to achieve “realistic” goals. Therefore, there is less competition for bigger goals. The real challenge is to work out what you want.

However, the questions ‘what do you want?’ and ‘what are your goals?’ are flawed, they need to be rephrased. Ferriss argues that, generally, we make goals because we believe we are chasing happiness. He thinks this is wrong. Happiness has become ambiguous through overuse, and while most believe sadness to be the opposite of happiness, Ferriss posits that they are two sides of the same coin. The real antithesis to happiness is boredom. Consequently, Ferriss concludes that it’s excitement, which is a better synonym for happiness, and it’s an excitement that you should strive to chase.

Thus, the question shouldn’t be ‘what do you want?’ or ‘what are your goals?’ but ‘what excites you?’ To make what excites you your focus, follow this 3-fold process:

• Shift your goals from ambiguous wants to defined steps
• Make your goals unrealistic so that they can be effective
• Focus on activities to fill the vacuum of work once it’s removed, living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things, not just owning things

Step 2: E is for Elimination

Ferriss claims that we should forget about time management. It’s a trap. You shouldn’t be trying to fill every second with work. Now that you’ve thought about what you want to do with your time, you’ve got to find a way to create more free time while maintaining or increasing your income. The key is to remember that what you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. While efficiency is essential, it’s redundant unless it’s being applied to the right things.

Ferriss utilizes Pareto’s 80/20 Principle. The idea is that 80 percent of output will result from 20 percent of input. This can be applied everywhere, from wealth distribution in society to company profits relative to their products and customers. With this in mind, Ferriss suggests slowing down and remembering that often, being busy is a form of laziness as it prevents you from thinking. 

Being selective in what you do, and even doing less is the path to being productive. By working out which 20 percent of your sources are causing 80 percent of your problems, and vice versa, you can adjust your life accordingly.

In addition to the 80/20 principle, Ferriss utilizes Parkinson’s Law. This states that the perceived importance of a task will increase in correlation with how much time has been allotted for its completion. Therefore, you should shorten your work time and limit your projects only to those that are important. How does this work in combination with the 80/20 Principle? By first identifying the few critical tasks that create the most income (80/20), and then scheduling them in with very short, clear deadlines (Parkinson’s Law).

Ferriss suggests that to move forward as part of the New Rich, you must learn to be selectively ignorant. It’s essential to ignore all information that is irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most information is time-consuming and redundant. You should critically assess what you look at, read, or watch daily and establish whether it’s contributing to your goals.

Ferriss offers a 3-step procedure to help you eradicate useless information from your life:

• Go on a one-week media fast immediately. This means, no newspapers, magazines, news websites, television, non-fiction books, and unnecessary web surfing.
• Develop the habit of asking yourself if you will use this information for something that is both immediate and important.
• Learn when to stop absorbing. If you’re reading a poorly written article, don’t continue to read it.

Ferriss defines an interruption as anything that prevents the completion of a critical task, in which there are three principal offenders:

• Time wasters
• Time consumers
• Empowerment failures

To prevent interruption from these sources, consider taking the following steps:

• Create systems that limit your availability and deflect inappropriate interruptions. This could mean replacing a meeting with a concise email.
• Batch activities to limit costs and to create more time. 
• Set autonomous rules with regular reviews of results. This prevents creating a decision bottleneck.

Step 3: A is for Automation

Some of the most critical skills necessary for becoming a member of the New Rich are learning how to communicate and to manage remotely. To get used to this idea, Ferriss suggests hiring a digital assistant to practice giving other people orders. An essential facet of being a member of the New Rich is learning how to replace yourself within a system. 

However, Ferriss is also keen to highlight the dark side of delegation. Unless a task is well-defined and vital, he states that no one should do it. Eliminate before you delegate. This means never automating something that could otherwise be eliminated, and never delegate something that could be automated. To get to grips with the idea of automating your life, Ferriss suggests the following:

• Hire an assistant—even if you don’t need one
• Start small but think big. This means looking at what’s been on your to-do list for the longest time, examining what causes you the most frustration or boredom, and delegating these tasks
• Identify your five top time-consuming, non-work tasks, and five personal tasks you could assign, just for the fun of it
• Keep in sync by using scheduling and calendars

To only work 4 hours a week and to become a member of the New Rich, the key isn’t to run a business. It’s to own a business and spend no time on it. How to do that? Outsourcing. To get the ball rolling, Ferriss states that your business should adhere to the following:

– The target product can’t cost more than $500 to test

– It must be able to be automatized within four weeks

– When established, it can’t require more than one day per week of management

From here, Ferriss provides a step-by-step process for identifying a potential business model that could work for you:

• Pick an affordable niche market. Don’t create a product then go looking for your customers. First, find a market and identify your customers, then develop a product for them. To be successful, you should be a member of your target market. This makes the process significantly easier.
• Brainstorm (and don’t invest in) products. Choose two industries that you’re familiar with that both have their own magazines where a full-page advert costs $5000 or less. Now brainstorm ideas for products that could be effectively advertised in both these magazines. The product should cost between $50 and $200, shouldn’t take more than three to four weeks to produce, and should come accompanied with a thorough online FAQ. Then choose whether you want to either resell a product, license a product, or create a product.
• Then micro-test your products. Micro-testing uses cheap advertisements to test if there is a demand for your product before manufacturing it. Do this by assessing the competition and creating a more engaging offer than them. Then test the offer using short advertising campaigns before deciding which of your potential product ideas to back.
• Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to automate it. The architecture of your business needs to ensure that you’re out of the information flow, instead of at the top of it. To do this, contract outsourcing companies as opposed to freelancers and ensure that all of your outsourcers communicate with each other to solve problems.
• Assess the value of each customer. Identify those customers who spend the least and yet ask for the most (i.e., adhering to the 80/20 rule) and cut them out. They cost far more time than they are worth. Those customers you do keep on, treat well, as if they were in an exclusive club.

Step 4: L is for Liberation

If you are currently an employee for a company and you want to enjoy the unrestricted remote living of the New Rich, there are a few things you can do:

• Increase your employer’s investment in you. This could mean asking for the company to fund you through a training course. The psychology behind this is that the more a company invests in you, the greater the loss if you quit.
• Prove increased output when out of office. You could call in sick for two days but then work from home, doubling your work output and creating tangible proof of your efforts to show your employers how well you work when not in the office.
• Prepare the quantifiable business benefit. This means creating a bullet point list that showcases how much more you achieve when not in the office.
• Propose a remote working trial period. This could start at one-day-per-week.
• From here, gradually increase your remote working time. Do so by ensuring that your remote working days are your most productive then set a meeting with your employer to discuss the results.

Some jobs, however, are simply not worth salvaging. Just because you may have invested a lot of time into a job, doesn’t make it a worthwhile venture. However, as discussed earlier, it’s fear that prevents people from making the leap. Here are four of the most common fears when thinking about quitting a job, and Ferriss’ rebuff to each of them:

• Quitting is permanent: This is a lie. It’s always possible to pick up your chosen career path with a different company at a later date.
• I won’t be able to pay the bills: Yes, you will. If you can get a new stream of income before you quit your job, great, if you don’t, it isn’t hard to eliminate most of your expenses temporarily and live off your savings for a short while. 
• Health insurance and retirement funds will cease if I quit: This is false. Do some research and transfer your 401(k) or similar to another company.
• It will ruin my resume: False. Just get creative with your CV. Plus, if you quit to do something interesting, this will often make you more attractive to employers in the long run.

After turning a three-month vacation into a 15-month trip, Ferriss asked himself, “why not take the usual 20-30 year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?” Consequently, Ferriss suggests that instead of engaging in binge travel (which most people working 40-hour a week jobs do when they get vacation time), that you go on several mini-retirements, which means relocating to another place for six months. By doing so, you will not escape your life as such but will re-examine it.

To get used to the idea of a mini-retirement, you first need to unshackle yourself from the materialism and comparative mindset that is integral to a speed- and size-obsessed culture. In his experience, Ferriss says that it takes around three months to unplug from these obsolete ways of thinking before becoming aware of just how much time is spent distracting yourself by being in constant motion.

When it comes to financing your mini-retirements, your level of luxury is limited only by your level of creativity. When you compare living expenses in a different country to the amount you are currently paying, like Ferriss, you may realize that living abroad could save you money. What’s more, before going away, it’s an excellent excuse to declutter your life from all its unnecessary belongings. This is the perfect time to use the 80/20 rule to ask yourself: What are the 20 percent of your belongings that you use 80 percent of the time, and vice versa? Then get rid of the excess.

It’s not uncommon that once you arrive on your mini-retirement, a gaping void engulfs you where you would otherwise have been busy distracting yourself with work. This frequently happens to those who retire, and it is what happened to Ferriss on his inaugural mini-retirement. The first thing to do is not to freak out as this is normal. The more goal-orientated you are, the more challenging this transition is going to be. In addition, you may also find yourself suffering from social-isolation.

In the absence of an external focus, the mind turns inwards and can create more problems to solve than necessary. However, if you find a focus or a goal, these problems can dissipate. If you find yourself mulling over existential questions without being able to get yourself out of a rut, Ferriss suggests asking yourself two things:

• Have you given each term in this question a specific definition and meaning?
• Will the answer to this question be acted upon to improve your life?

Consequently, if you can neither define it or act upon it, you should forget about it.

Overall, the most important things in life are to enjoy yourself and to feel good about yourself. While he cannot offer a single answer to the question of how to enjoy life and feel good about yourself, Ferriss does state that two components are fundamental to the New Rich: service and continual learning. 

Ferriss suggests that one of the best things you can do when on a mini-retirement is to learn a language. According to him, it hones your clear thinking while allowing you to get to grips with the culture you are immersed in. Further, Ferriss defines service as doing something that improves life beyond your own. It’s an attitude, and it’s up to you to find the area that most appeals to you and to do your part.

To help you to prepare for your mini-retirement, Ferriss suggests the following:

• Revisit ground zero: Do nothing. You cannot escape your inner demons before you face them. Consider attending a short (three – seven day) silence retreat in which all media and speaking are prohibited.
• Anonymously donate to a service organization of your choice. This can help give you ideas of what type of service you’d like to contribute to in the world.
• Combine a learning mini-retirement with local volunteering. While on the trip, note any self-critical or negative self-talk in a journal, and if you get upset or anxious, ask yourself why.
• Revisit and reset your dream lines. Your mini-retirement may have given you a greater perspective on what you want to get out of life.
• Based on the results of steps one to four, consider trying out a new part- or full-time vocation. A vocation is different from work. A vocation is a true calling or a dream occupation.

Once you discover that life is not a problem to be solved or a game to be won, a real world of opportunities opens up. By mindlessly chasing an ideal of success, you miss out on all of the fun, especially when you recognize that the only rules and limits that exist are those that you set for yourself. You can recapture the magic of your childhood. Indeed, this is required. When you do so, you will realize that there are no more chains, or excuses, holding you back from living the exciting, fulfilling life you previously could only ever have dreamed of.

You can buy ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ by Tim Ferriss on Amazon .

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The 4-Hour Workweek Book Summary, Review, Notes

In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss shows readers how to live more and work less by sharing the lessons he learned after he tried a series of “nothing-to-lose” experiments to cut the time he spent working drastically. His most valuable advice is to: 1. prioritize effectiveness over efficiency; 2. test the viability of every company idea you have, and 3. demand a premium for the conveniences that you value. The advice and strategies presented in The 4-Hour Workweek, together with the numerous real-life tales and case studies it includes, can help us with a wide range of issues, from minimalism and time management to starting and growing a business.

Book Title—  The 4-Hour Workweek Author—  Timothy Ferriss Date of Reading—   December 2022 Rating—   8/10

Table of Contents

What is being said in detail.

Timothy Ferriss talks about how he went from being a busy, underpaid office worker to a world traveler who uses technology to cover for him. He was able to make this change because of a concept called “Lifestyle Design (LD),” which is a mix of art and science. He shares his recipe so that others can learn from it. He was the kind of person who believed in working like a mule from 9 to 5, and he loved getting a weekend or two to have fun and unwind. Things have changed since then, though. He thinks that life doesn’t have to be that hard and that you don’t have to wait until retirement to enjoy the benefits of hard work.

To join the New Rich , Ferriss suggests a set of steps to take that spell out the letters DEAL. Each of the following is looked at in turn in the book by chapters.

Step I: D is for Definition

D for Definition flips our misguided common sense and teaches us the rules and basics of the new game by building a foundation for the design of our lifestyles.

Having a lot of money and being able to live like a millionaire are two very different things. In the same way, the difference between “deferrers” (D) and “newly rich” (NR) is that “deferrers” save everything good and worthwhile for the end and are surprised by how soon it comes, while “newly rich” give up this “deferred-life plan” and use time and mobility to create a luxury lifestyle in the present. The NRs stand out from the rest of the crowd because their goals show that they have very different priorities and ways of looking at life.

In real life, money can grow based on how many “W’s” you can control: what, when, where, and with whom. This is called the ‘freedom multiplier’. An NR will work for a quarter of the time that the average person does. They may make less money, but when we look at what they can do with the money they make, it will be worth more.

The “ability to choose” is what gives us real power , not the money we make. That’s why this book is all about seeing and making the choices that give us the power to choose with the least amount of work and money.

Ferriss gives some helpful rules about this:

• You shouldn’t think of retirement as the end goal of all your hard work. Instead, you should think of it as a life insurance policy that will help you if you get sick or hurt.
• NRs try to have mini-retirements throughout their lives. This lets them work when they are most productive and relax when they are not.
• Working less doesn’t mean you’re lazy unless you’re not getting much done.
• Your biggest plans will never be perfect, so you should just go for it.
• It’s better to focus on your strengths than to always try to fix your weaknesses.
• Too much, too many, or too often of something you want turns it into something you don’t want. This is true for both things and time.
• We think that money will solve all our problems, so we give up having fun in order to get it.
• The NRs don’t try to get rid of all stress because some stress is good.

Step II: E is for Elimination

E for Elimination gets rid of the old way we all think about managing time. This section shows readers how to use counterintuitive NR techniques to get better results per hour. It also focuses on “Time,” the first of the three elements of a luxury lifestyle design.

You shouldn’t try to keep yourself busy every second of the day. Instead, you should choose a different path, one that not only gives you more results but also makes them multiply. People often say they are busy to avoid doing a few important but uncomfortable things.

Effectiveness is doing things that move you closer to your goal, while efficiency is doing a task with as few resources as possible. You must remember that:

• Doing something unimportant well doesn’t make it important.
• A task is not important just because it takes a lot of time.
• How you do something is not nearly as important as what you do.

Even though ignorance may be bliss, it is also useful. Selective ignorance is when you don’t pay attention to or get rid of information or interruptions that don’t matter, aren’t important, or can’t be done anything with. The first thing you should do is limit the amount of information you take in. This is because most information is useless, takes too much time, is bad, or is out of your control.

An interruption can be a waste of time, a waste of time, or a failure to give power. Time wasters are things that can be ignored with little or no effect, while time consumers are things that need to be done but often get in the way of more important work. Empowerment failures are when someone needs permission to do something small.

The easiest way to get rid of time wasters is to limit their access and direct communication toward action.

Step III: A is for Automation

A for Automation uses outsourcing to take care of cash flow on autopilot. This section talks about income, the second part of a luxury lifestyle design.

It’s important to know that even if you can do something yourself for less money or better than most people, you don’t have to spend your time doing it. Even if the price is sometimes more per hour than what you make now, the trade is usually worth it.

Assignments that don’t make sense, aren’t important, or aren’t done in the best way are neither fun nor helpful. Delegation should be used to cut down on work, not as an excuse to do important things. No one should do something unless it is clear and important. If you don’t want to waste your time and money, you should never automate something that can be done by hand, and you shouldn’t delegate something that can be done by hand. The solution is to get rid of things before you give tasks to other people.

To join the New Rich and only work 4 hours a week, the key isn’t to run a business. It’s a way to own a business without having to work on it. Ferriss says that for your business to get going, you should do the following:

• It can’t cost more than $500 to test the product in question.
• Within four weeks, it must be possible to automate it.
• When it’s set up, it can’t need more than one day of management per week.

Step IV: L is for Liberation

To get people to work from home instead of in the office, we will do two important things: show how working from home is good for business and make it hard or expensive to say no to a request to work from home.

The author describes a simple five-step plan for increasing the power of leveraging for remote work:

• Get your employer to put more money into you. This could mean asking the company to pay for you to take a course to improve your skills. The idea behind this is that the more a company puts into you, the more they stand to lose if you leave.
• Show that you got more done when you weren’t in office. You could call in sick for two days and then work from home. This would let you do twice as much work and give your bosses proof of how hard you work when you’re not there.
• Prepare the business benefit that can be measured. This means making a list of bullet points that show how much more you get done when you’re not at work.
• Offer a trial period of working from home. This could begin with just one day a week.
• From here, you can slowly increase the amount of time you work from home. Make sure your days when you work from home are your most productive, and then set up a meeting with your boss to talk about the results.

Most Important Keywords, Sentences, Quotes

“Trying to reach arbitrary financial goals is like trying to hit a moving target. You have to learn to let go of these goals and start living the life you always wanted.”

“You cannot wait for the perfect conditions to leave your old life behind. You simply have to commit to it and correct your course of action along the way.”

“Stop using money as an excuse for why you aren’t living the life you want to live. It is not the answer, but the barrier in your mind that stops you from evaluating yourself truthfully and correcting your life.”

“Do not avoid all criticism, just the destructive kind, such as abusive relationships and bosses. Positive criticism, such as role models and trainers that push us to exceed our limits, is how we learn and grow.”

“The opposite of happiness is not sadness, but boredom. Excitement is the most practical way to achieve happiness. So do not search for what will make you happy , but for what excites you.”

“You have to change your mindset from believing that efficiency is as important as effectiveness, because what you do is more important than how you do it. Being efficient does not bring you any closer to accomplishing your goals.”

“To be effective, you will have to take a hard look at your life and work and see what things are worth your time and energy. If you play to your strengths and ignore things that make you frustrated, you end up being happier while also working less.”

“As an employee, you must focus on the most important tasks and set very short deadlines for yourself. By doing so, you’ll eliminate empty work time and force yourself to focus on those tasks in order to accomplish them in time.”

“The information you pay attention to needs to be important, otherwise it will consume your time and energy. You need to be selectively ignorant, and redirect your attention to things that matter directly to you. You can start by simply consuming less information.”

“If it’s difficult to stop consuming certain types of media or information, take a one-week information fast. Cut yourself off completely, and use that time for family or exercise. Soon you’ll figure out which information is vital to you and learn to cut out the rest.”

“Three main interruptions stop us from completing important tasks, and they are: 1) time wasters – things that can be ignored without any consequences, 2) time consumers – repetitive tasks such as emails, and 3) empowerment failures – when others need your approval to get small things done.”

Chapter III

“Get yourself an assistant. Whether you own a business or not, paying someone to do your non-vital tasks frees up your time, and allows you to focus on more important tasks. If the extra help lets you work less, it is worth it.”

“Every task you delegate should free up your time and be well-defined. Be sure to speak or write clearly on what the task is and what you expect the result to look like. Set short deadlines to ensure little time is wasted and check in periodically for updates and questions.”

“To truly live the 4-hour workweek, you need to create a business or sell a product that generates cash flow and doesn’t consume much of your time.”

“When selecting a product to sell, start with a niche market that is easily accessible. With a smaller market, there is less competition and more opportunity to charge your customers a premium price.”

“For each of your potential products, use the “best, test, and invest” method. This involves researching competition for your product and “besting” them with more compelling advertising, “testing” the product with cheap ads, and “investing” in the products that do well.”

“To escape the 9-5 in-office workweek and begin the 4-hour workweek lifestyle, you’ll need to show the benefits of working remotely, and make it extremely difficult for your boss to keep you in the office.”

“Several fears keep people from leaving their full-time jobs. They are afraid that quitting is permanent, they won’t be able to make their payments, they’ll lose their insurance and retirement accounts, and their résumé will be ruined.”

“Do not work tirelessly in the hopes of being able to afford traveling around the world later on, because it is far cheaper than you think, and more than likely you can afford it now.”

“Don’t forget to keep following and rethinking your “ dreamlines .” Anything that excites you and brings you happiness is worth doing. Try to avoid comparing yourself with others that work traditional 9-5 jobs and remind yourself you were unhappy when you worked like them.”

Book Review (Personal Opinion):

This is a great book to read if you want to find out how Tim makes a living with only 4 hours of work a week. This book is full of great ideas for getting rid of time-wasting activities and making more time for yourself, which is what we all want. He talks about ways to get rid of all the unnecessary emails, phone calls, and clutter in your life, such as by setting up scheduled checks and telling other people what your priorities are. He also talks about outsourcing to other countries, which is basically like hiring your own assistant for $5 an hour to work for you while you sleep. I think it’s a great concept for bloggers or anyone who has to study and write content but doesn’t have enough time to automate the tiny aspects like delivering flowers or organizing and gathering information on themes.

He also talks about drop shipping and product manufacturing for people who have both digital and physical products. He talks about how to automate these things with companies so that you don’t have to worry about sales, customer service, and returns.

He says that you should leave the headaches and other business tasks to the people who want to do them and only answer the most important calls and emails if they cost more than the amount you set.  This book is full of resources and concepts that anyone can use, no matter what they are going through.

On the other hand, there isn’t much “how to” information. It’s more of a reference book with a lot of filler from other people’s stories, which isn’t a bad thing, and it gives the reader a lot of room to see what they can do. The concepts in this book can help you automate your business so you can start living the 4-hour work week, but it’s up to you to put everything together. This is possible if you use your mind and think about it.

Rating : 8/10

This Book Is For:

• People who want to spend their time wisely and to get the most it.
• Your professionals who want to become more productive with the resources they have.
• Millennials who want to learn how the business world functions

If You Want To Learn More

Here is an interview with Timothy Ferris in which he generally presents The 4-Hour Workweek and his main inspirations for writing the book. Interview | The 4-Hour Workweek | Tim Ferriss

How I’ve Implemented The Ideas From The Book

Tim Ferris teaches the readers about the significance of organization, the Pareto principle of prioritization, engaging in work that one is passionate about, and knowing how to use our time wisely. All of these are aspects of my life that I have been focusing my attention on improving for a considerable amount of time.   Yesterday, I chose to have a quick phone call instead of a longer meeting in person. For example, the meeting in person would have taken a lot more time. He made me aware that I need to protect the time I spend. The book isn’t about working 4 hours a week. Instead, it’s about doing what we love in a more efficient and effective way. Most people hate their jobs, so this book will show them how to make money on their own, so they don’t have to depend on their day job.

One Small Actionable Step You Can Do

This book will show you how to base your projects (or ideas of things you would like to achieve), beginning with the first concept and progressing all the way to having extremely defined daily chores. Starting with the 80/20 rule and putting your whole attention on the one factor that will have the most impact on your success is, in my opinion, the single most essential thing you can do. By proceeding in this manner, you are advancing toward the accomplishment of that significant objective that you have set for yourself. And naturally, in addition to adopting these measures, you are also working in a more intelligent manner.

Bruno Boksic

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The 4 Hour Work Week

Tim ferriss, recommended by, book reviews, book summary.

The New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Body shows readers how to live more and work less, now with more than 100 pages of new, cutting-edge content.

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times . Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, or earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.

This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches: • How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week • How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want • How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs • How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist • How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”

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My first book review: The 4 Hour Work Week

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The 4 Hour Work Week – Book Review For Bloggers

For as long as I can remember, my love for books has taken me on some amazing adventures. But as I’ve gone through life and gotten “older and wiser”, I came across books that were promising to teach me how to make my own adventures happen. Books who have a lot more to offer if only I am willing to learn.

So I decided to start a new section of my blog dedicated to the books that made an impact on my thinking, being or doing. I will not only be sharing book reviews but important lessons I draw from these books and what I plan to do with all the acquired knowledge.

My main goal here is not to simply narrate what is in these books and give my opinions on how they are written, phrased and so on. I am no critic. But I do want to share what I’ve learned from them and suggest if I think they are worthy of your time.

I hope this new section of my blog will lead you to discover books that will be useful (or at least entertaining) for your own path.

Before I get into it, in the name of full transparency, please note that this post contains affiliate links and any purchase made through such links will result in a small commission for myself (although enough to get another puppy). If you choose to purchase anything through my links, thank you for supporting me and my blog. You are awesome! You can learn more about affiliate links  here.   Enjoy!

About The Author

When reviewing or talking about books, I don’t necessarily spend much time drawing attention to the author. But in this case, Tim Ferriss deserves a shoutout.  And I think it’s important to know a bit about him to know why I think the intel he shares in his first book, titled The 4-Hour Work Week , is of real value.

A quick google search can give you all the boring details on him and his career, but when I came across him via an interview on Youtube and it immediately because obvious that this is not a man that sells a strategy before trying it out himself.  He is actually very well known for all the experiments he does in business, health and random skills he masters in a record time.

So I picked up his book with great expectations (because he is the living proof that what he writes about works), and I was not let down.

About The Reader

Although the main purpose of this book is to “escape the 9-5 lifestyle” and to start creating a new way of life that can pretty much allow you to live anywhere in the world, this book is not only for those of us who dream to completely change our lifestyle.

Throughout reading the book I discovered so many pieces of advice and information that can apply to become a better blogger for example, because that is an area of my life where I plan to excel this year and that is constantly on my mind.

So whatever your plans are for the future, if you want to speed up the learning process and figure out a smarter way to get things done, this book is for you.

Other recommended readers : university students (it will give your life some perspective and maybe help you decide what to do once you finish your studies), young entrepreneurs and businesswomen, bloggers (it will help you see your blog as a business and 90% of the resources recommended here can be useful if you have a blog) and other thrill seekers.

About The 4-Hour Work Week

This book promises a lot: a new way of life that allows you to do whatever you want, more money with less (but smarter) work, more vacations and a lot of much-needed resources to do all that.

Other reviews and testimonials prove that great results can be achieved if you actually put into action the steps recommended here, but do not be fooled. It still takes a lot of effort, quite some time and some occasional investment.

The book focuses a lot on teaching you how to come up with a business idea, test the waters and eventually create products that can sell with little to no intervention on your part. So if that’s a business path you’re willing to take, this book is a must-read.

But as someone who is not really planning to take that route (which is why I won’t discuss that part of the book – product marketing – too much), I still found it extremely useful and learned a lot of things I have yet to apply to my own endeavors.

Gold Nuggets 

This section of my book review is the most important one to read. Instead of talking about the book, I will share the most important tips, resources, quotes or pieces of advice that I extracted from it and that you could benefit off even if you do not own or read the book yourself.

If you plan to only skim the book, these are some important pages to give extra attention to. So here we go:

• It’s ok to go about things differently and challenge the current norm (in your personal life, business or anything else). As the author puts it: “ Don’t follow a model that doesn’t work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good of a cook you are. ” (p.30)
• Doing less work doesn’t mean you are lazy. We don’t have to sacrifice more time or effort as long as we are being productive when it matters. (p.32)
• Don’t let uncertainty stop you from taking risks. Cause at the end of the day, you will end up risking your happiness. (p.40) At the end of the day, the worse case scenario in case you fail and what you set out to achieve is probably not even that bad. (p.42) As Mark Twain puts it: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
• Have impossible goals, dream big and don’t underestimate what you can do! (p.50) That’s how all great things start. Define what outcome would be worth of the trouble , the risk and uncertainty and as cheesy as it sounds, keep your eyes on the prize!
• When I say “define” what you want, I mean it. Decide what do you want to own, what trips you want to take and how much do you want to work. Now break it down and find out how much it would cost you monthly. The result is surprisingly inspiring because it makes you see how achievable it is. The whole concept of “dreamlining” is better expressed and exemplified in the book. (p.57-63)

• Use the 80/20 principle! What 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of problems or happiness? What 20% of your work determines 80% of your desired outcome? You can use this analysis for everything! (p.80)
• Learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant and unactionable. This will help you avoid keeping busy just for the sake of it.
• Never check your email first thing in the morning. Perform all time-consuming tasks in a batch to save yourself time! (p.97, p.106)
• Automate and eliminate before you delegate. (p.130)
• Decide what your time is worth it, and hire a VA to take care of all time-consuming tasks that keep you from the most important ones. This book contains piles of information of where to find VA’s, why hire one and what they can do for you.
• Stop spending your life saving for that once every two years vacation or for retirement. Instead, take mini-retirements and use them to recharge and do some living!

I’ll end this review with my favorite quote from the book: “I’ve learned that nothing is impossible  and that almost nothing is easy”.

Does this sound like a book you would benefit from? Then head off to Amazon and grab a copy!

If this book doesn’t sound like something you would enjoy, check out my selection below or visit my post on  Best Amazon Business Books For Bloggers & Entrepreneurs .

The 4 Hour Work Week – Best Business Book

Ana is a blogging coach & strategist, sharing no-fluff blogging tips that bring real results. She's been in the business of helping content creators, bloggers and solopreneurs increase their website traffic and online income for the past 4 years, and she has helped 5,000+ paying students and 500,000 blog readers with her free content and courses.

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This book describes the type of lifestyle I am seeking and can’t wait to arrive! I will be picking up this book! Thank you for the review!

Thank you so much for stopping to read it. I’m glad it will be useful. And it only scratched the surface of the great knowledge that the book contains, so I’m sure it will help you on your journey!

I’ve heard so many good things about this book but never got around to reading it. Might pick this up next. I’m currently working through the audiobook of Die Empty by Todd Henry and it’s a brilliant one about honing your craft and creative mindset. Great review! I quite like this style of sharing your favourite takeaways from the book and quotes. 🙂

That sounds like an awesome read as well. Adding it to my “must-read” list! x Thank you for stopping by!

This book sounds awesome! I’m so glad you reviewed this I’ve been hearing about this book for sometime now!! I need this book now!!

Jasmine 🙂 colorubold.com

My pleasure Jasmine! Ferriss has some pretty popular books out that I plan to get my hands on as well.

This is the type of lifestyle everyone should adapt. Can you imagine how much more relaxed everyone would be?!

http://www.upyourvlog.com

Indeed. I think it’s a great option for people to have.

A life changing book and a bible to every digital nomad in the making <3 I just bought the updated version as well.

http://www.justdalal.com

So true!! It has some great resources to get you started and place you ahead in the game.

I read your review and even ended up getting it. It is an amazing book and I’m only just starting it. Hopefully it will teach me a thing or two about treating my blog like a business.

Palesa | http://beingpalesa.com

That is so good to hear! Let me know what your favourite part was!

Hi there! My name is Ana and I'm a blogging strategist & coach, helping bloggers and female entrepreneurs boost their web traffic and online income. I created this blog as a platform where I could share no-fluff blogging strategies that bring results. Enjoy!

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The 4-Hour Work Week

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss teaches us practical methods to escape the 9 to 5 trap and create a lifestyle of freedom and fulfillment. The book emphasizes the importance of outsourcing, automation, and prioritizing tasks that genuinely matter to create a life of freedom and possibilities. Create that life now - just read below.

“The 4-Hour Work Week” book is written by Timothy Ferriss , an American writer, educational activist, and entrepreneur. This book was part of the New York Times best Seller list for over four years. He got this idea while working for 14 hours a day. Frustrated by the overwork and lack of free time, Ferriss took a 3-week sabbatical to Europe.

The genesis of the book was his escape from a workaholic lifestyle. In “The 4-Hour Work Week,” you will discover powerful techniques to increase your time and financial freedom , enabling you to enjoy a range of lifestyle options.

By automating passive income streams and liberating yourself from unproductive tasks, you can embrace the “new rich” lifestyle – a life characterized by having, doing, and being what you truly desire. This book is an indispensable resource for individuals interested in working for themselves and establishing a sustainable work-life balance.

Introduction

“The 4-Hour Work Week” revolves around breaking free from the monotonous 9-5 trap and allowing yourself to work from anywhere while achieving remarkable success. Contrary to working longer hours, the book emphasizes the importance of working smarter and reducing hours while attaining equal, if not superior, results.

By implementing the strategies outlined in this book, you can revolutionize your work habits and unlock a world of possibilities while maintaining your productivity and effectiveness.

Embrace the principles of “The 4-Hour Workweek” and embark on a journey towards liberation from the traditional work grind.

Discover how to optimize your time, enhance your financial prospects, and establish a life where work is not a hindrance but a means to pursue your passions.

Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or a corporate professional seeking a better work/life equilibrium, this book is an invaluable guide that will empower you to create a fulfilling and flexible lifestyle that aligns with your goals and aspirations.

Let’s begin.

Step 1: Definition

Before we dive into what you need to do to increase your time and financial freedom, Tim Ferriss summarizes the process you’ll go through as a 4-step process – DEAL:

• D for definition– essentially, you must define what you will do and understand the rules.
• E for elimination– next, you will ‘reset’ and eliminate the unnecessary.
• A for automation– next up is the time to automate everything possible; this may include outsourcing.
• L for liberation– finally, the part where you go out and live it.

Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of w’s you control: what you do when, where, and with whom you do it.”

Tim calls this the “freedom multiplier. You have options and the ability to choose, and Tim emphasizes that this is a real power within you. If you can follow Tim’s simple steps, you’ll see what you can achieve with minimum effort and cost . And the reality is that Tim believes you can make much more money by doing much less than you currently are!

Retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance. Planning for retirement should not be part of your plan; the idea is that your work should be so enjoyable and achievable that you can continue to work without retirement.

Interest and energy are cyclical. The best way to maintain your lifestyle is to have alternating rest periods and work/activity—plan “mini-retirements” throughout your life.

When you are in a work cycle, you’ll work at your full potential, then allow yourself the rest required when you have a break.

Less is not laziness. People assume that by doing less, you are lazy; society stereotypes those that work harder and longer hours as better. This is not true; you can work less and still be as successful.

The timing always needs to be corrected. It will never feel like the right time to do the essential things in your life. Are you quitting a job, having a baby, or moving house? You can’t continue to put these things off until the ‘time is right’ – because that time may never come!

Ask for forgiveness, not permission. This one is key; you must learn from your mistakes to grow. Don’t allow other people to say no or deny you an opportunity. Give it a go first, and apologize if it doesn’t work.

Emphasize strengths don’t fix weaknesses. Muscles are more powerful and have more of an impact on your life than your weaknesses ever will.

Don’t try and fix all your minor defects; improve your strengths, as this is where the results are. Improving a weakness may only bring mediocrity, whereas improving upon a power can bring greatness.

Things in excess become their opposite. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Remember this, as they become a burden eventually.

Money alone is not the solution. As per the previous point, more money is needed. The answer is only sometimes money.

Relative income is more important than absolute income. Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hour.

In this book, the author suggests that Distress is bad. Grief will only bring you down , making you weaker and less confident. Anyone who fires criticism at you or is abusive is only causing you pain. Find the people who are positive role models, who push you and help you grow.

Ferriss explains that most people avoid fear and pretend it’s something else altogether. They deny the fear and remain optimistic. Tim uses the example of someone who is unhappy but avoids quitting their job; they will continue to deny their unhappiness and remain confident that their work will improve in time or their income will increase.

“Fear comes in many forms, and we usually don’t call it by its four-letter name. However, fear itself is quite fear-inducing.”

Tim suggests you take the following steps to eliminate your fear of the unknown and allow yourself to leap:

• Face your nightmare and define what it is exactly. Consider what is the absolute worst thing that could happen. Define the ‘worst-case scenario.’
• Identify how to fix or repair the ‘worst-case scenario.’
• Define the temporary or permanent benefits and likely outcomes of the scenario you are considering.
• Ask yourself, ‘If you were fired today, how would you manage your finances from here?”
• Identify what you are putting off or avoiding out of fear.
• By avoiding these things, is it costing you? Whether this be financial, emotional, or physical.

What are you waiting for?

Reset and eliminate

Tim uses the concept of ‘dreamlining’ over simply goal-setting. It’s exactly what it sounds like, considering your dreams and planning to fulfill them. Tim explains that dreamlining is different from goal-setting in 3 significant ways:

• The goals shift from ambiguous wants to defined steps.
• The goals have to be unrealistic to be effective.
• It focuses on activities that fill the vacuum created when work is removed. Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things, not just owning enviable things.

Tim’s Guide to creating your dream life

What would you do if there were no way you could fail? If you were ten times smarter than the rest of the world? Have two separate timelines, one short-term (e.g., six months) and one longer-term (12 months.)

With these timelines, you need to add five things you dream about, whether it be something you dream about having, being, or doing.

Are you drawing a blank? If this hasn’t inspired you, consider what you would do if you had 100 Crore. How would this affect your dreams? And what is it that would make you excited to wake up in the morning?

What does “being” entail? Convert each “being” into a “doing” to make it actionable. Identify an action that would characterize this state of being or a task that would mean you had achieved it.

What are the four dreams that would change it all? Identify four key goals and consider how they would change your life.

Determine the cost of these dreams and calculate your target monthly income (TMI) for both timelines. We put this into action and consider your income, expenses, and monthly cash flow .

Come up with your TMI (target monthly income) that is required to realize your dreams. And then, when you have your monthly figure, divide this by 30; this is now your TDIi (target daily income.)

Determine three steps for each of the four dreams in the 6-month timeline and take the first step now. Break the dreams down, and start acting upon them immediately. You must take this first step to start turning your dreams into reality.

Step 2: Elimination

1. effectiveness and efficiency.

Tim explains the differences between being effective and being efficient. To be effective is to act in a way that helps you reach your goals. And to be efficient is to act upon any given task in the most productive way possible.

The problem, Tim explains, is that the default approach is often efficient without regard to effectiveness. So it’s critical to understand that doing something unimportant but very well does not, by default, make it essential. And similarly, spending a lot of time on a specific task does not make it necessary either.

Two laws to consider:

• Pareto’s law

“80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs, 80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time, 80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers, 80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio.”

• Parkinson’s law

“Parkinson’s law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity about the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. On the other hand, if I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill.”

Tim explains that from this, you can approach increasing productivity in one of two ways, and interestingly, these approaches are technically opposites.

Limit tasks to the important ones to shorten work time (80/20).

Shorten work time to limit charges to the important (Parkinson’s law).

Tim explains that your best approach is using both concepts together. And the best way to do this is to identify a few tasks that are both critical and will contribute to the majority of your income. Then, schedule these tasks with clear deadlines, and dedicate little time to them.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What would you do if you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day?
• What if you had a second heart attack and had to work two hours per week? What would you do?
• What would you remove if you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing 4/5 of different time-consuming activities?
• 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?
• If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?
• Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important ones?

2. Remain ignorant

We’ve all heard the phrase ignorance is bliss’ before, and Tim firmly believes that ignorance is blissful and can also be practical.

“It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.

3. Interruptions

Tim identifies three ‘interruptions’ that often get in the way of the start-to-finish completion of any given task.

• Time wasters

Time wasters include meetings, phone calls, internet surfing, emails, and discussions. These can, more often than not, be ignored with minimal consequences. Tim has a few tips to avoid time wasters as much as possible:

• Email is almost certainly the most significant interruption in the workplace. Minimize the emails you send and read.
• Make sure the sound and notification of emails are turned off.
• Try only checking your email two times a day. Tim suggests first at noon and again at 4:00 p.m. This timing will ensure you have the most responses from previously sent emails.
• Screen any phone calls you receive. You don’t have to answer them all. And limit the phone calls you make.
• Tim suggests you have two phone numbers. One can be used as your office line, and your cell phone number can only be reserved for urgent calls.
• Most issues and work-related communication are not urgent at all. Steer your colleagues, clients, etc. To the following order of communication; email first, then phone, and finally in-person.
• If someone has left you a voice mail, reply to this via email when possible. This will help teach people the best way to reach you.
• Meetings should only be held to decide about a predefined situation, not to define the problem.

If you cannot stop a meeting or call from happening, define the start and end times. Ensure you only discuss a pre-arranged topic and avoid getting side-tracked.

• Time consumers

Time consumers are the second of Tim’s most common interruptions. These can be defined as repetitive tasks that need to be completed regularly. These are the little tasks that interrupt the start-to-finish workflow of a job. Expected time consumers include:

• Reading emails
• Replying to emails
• Talking on the phone
• Doing customer service tasks
• Reporting finances or sales, errands, personal tasks
• Regular manual updates
• Anything that gets repeated frequently.

Tim points out that whenever a task is interrupted, psychologically, it can take up to 45 minutes to resume that task. Stats suggest that these interruptions consume 28% of your 9-5 working days.

– The best approach to combat these time-wasters is to wait until you have many tasks. E.g., Wait until you have plenty of emails to read and reply to or multiple phone calls to make. This approach is called batching and is a great solution to let these tasks interrupt more extensive, more critical work.

• Empowerment failures
• Empowerment failures are the third critical interruption in cases where your approval is required for something to happen when someone has to come to you before they can take the next step in their task. Or if you have to go to someone else before you can proceed with a job.
• If people you work with can only complete a task from start to finish without receiving permission or further information, it becomes a case of empowerment failures.
• As an employee, to be able to work as seamlessly as possible means having access to required information and having the ability to make as many decisions as possible.
• As an entrepreneur, for everything to run as smoothly as possible, you should provide your employees/contractors with as much information as necessary and allow them to make decisions without first asking permission.
• If you feel you are in a position where you are being micro-managed, sit down with your boss and explain to them why you have more access to information and the ability to make decisions will benefit you both by allowing you to be more productive and for your boss to have fewer interruptions.

4. Set the rules in your favor.

Limit access to your time, force people to define their requests before spending time with them, and batch routine menial tasks to prevent postponing more critical projects.

Do not let people interrupt you.

Find your focus, and you’ll find your lifestyle.”

Step 3: Automation

Tim recommends getting a remote personal assistant when the time is right . It means you can offload some of your work to them; it frees up your time to work on other things and allows you to practice giving orders. In addition, it helps to set you up as a leader; it’s time you learned to be the boss.

Deciding when to hire a remote personal assistant should be easy; it’s not time-consuming, low-cost, and low-risk. Even if you don’t think you need one yet, get one. It’s an opportunity for you to explore this way of working.

But what about the cost?

Tim identifies a question that most people ask themselves; “If I can do it better?

Tim explains that it’s not about the money but freeing up your time, allowing yourself to be creative and innovative rather than being caught up in mundane daily tasks.

Tim explains that you shouldn’t ever automate something that could be eliminated. And don’t delegate if the task can be automated. It’s not about wasting other people’s time. Their time is just as valuable as yours.

Where to begin?

Hire an assistant – regardless of whether or not you need one right now.

Identify which tasks on your to-do list have been sitting there the longest . And identify any charges you currently do that could be done by a virtual assistant. Is this where a va could come in whenever you are interrupted or frustrated?

Identify your top five time-consuming non-work tasks and five personal tasks you could assign for fun.

It’s critical to synchronize your work and share calendars and schedules so you know what’s going on.

Tim discusses the next stage; you need a product to sell. Something that’s either downloadable or shippable to help you eliminate the limitations of a per-hour-based model.

• The first thing Tim suggests you do is; pick an affordably reachable, friendly market.
• It’s much easier to tap into a current market; creating demand from scratch is hard. Wait to start with a product, then look for a customer. First, find the market, understand the customer, and create a product for them.
• Identify what you already know; look at what social/professional/industry groups you belong to or have access to. You don’t have to learn something new.
• Identify which groups you have access to have their magazines/blogs.

Tim’s next step is to; brainstorm (do not invest in) products

• The main benefit should be encapsulated in one sentence.
• It should cost the customer $50–200.
• Aim for an 8–10x markup, which means a $100 product should not cost more than $10–12.50.
• It should take no more than 3 to 4 weeks to manufacture.
• It should be fully explainable in an excellent online faq.
• Option one: resell a product, option two: license a product, option three: create a product
• Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.

“To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy.”

The third step is to micro-test your products.

• Identify the competition; it’s your job to create a more compelling offer than what’s currently out there. All you need is a simple website, just 1-3 pages, which correlates to 1-3 hours of work. Things to consider to make your offer better than the competition are; more credibility indicators. Testimonials, A better guarantee, Better selection and Free shipping.
• Test the offer using short Google Adwords advertising campaigns (three hours to set up and five days of passive observation).
• Divest or invest: identify the losers, cut them out, manufacture the winner, and prepare for sales.

Absent management

One of the critical steps in Tim’s process is that once you have a product (physical or online), you need to design your business in a way that it can run itself.

This diagram should be your rough blueprint for designing an autonomous virtual architecture:

Contract outsourcing companies that specialize in one function vs. Freelancers whenever possible so that you can replace them if someone is fired, quits, or doesn’t perform without interrupting your business. Hire trained groups of people who can provide detailed reporting and replace one another as needed.

Ensure that all outsourcers are willing to communicate among themselves to solve problems, and give them written permission to make the most inexpensive decisions without consulting you first (I started at less than $100 and moved to $400 after two months).”

Step 4: Liberation

Now, go live your life.

Follow Tim’s five steps to gravitate toward full-time remote work:

• Increase investment. Get the company to invest in training so the cost of losing you is more significant.
• Prove increased output offsite. Call in sick, work from home and make it a productive day.
• Prepare the quantifiable business benefit. Prepare your results to show the measurable benefit you gained from working at home.
• Propose a revocable trial period. Start with one day a week.
• Expand remote time. Gradually work up to multiple days at home per week. Then eventually, full-time remote work.

The book’s author said, “I have quit three jobs and been fired from most of the rest. Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Someone else makes the decision for you, and it’s impossible to sit in the wrong job for the rest of your life.”

Tim emphasizes that quitting or being fired isn’t the end of the world.

It’s not permanent. Quitting a job doesn’t mean you’ll never have another job again. It’s temporary.

You will still be able to pay your bills. The objective of Tim’s process is that you will have some cash flow prior to quitting your current job. You may need to eliminate some unnecessary spending in the short term, but your bills will still be paid if you’ve done it right.

Your resume is only rained for a while. It’s a point of difference on your resume, and you may get more interviews simply because you stand out from the crowd.

Mini-retirements

Tim tries to break the common assumption that you must wait until your career ends to embrace retirement. Instead, he suggests taking mini-retirements throughout your life rather than saving it all up for the end.

Tim recommends that you relocate your life somewhere new for anywhere from 1 month to 6 months before you return to your home. The idea is that it’s not a holiday or an escape from your life, but just the continuation of your life in a new environment, an opportunity to assess your current lifestyle and eliminate the unnecessary. Keep it slow and relaxing, allowing yourself time to reflect and plan.

Tim explains that, more often than not, people can be financially free and have the freedom of time but still find themselves caught up in the highly-stressful and money-obsessed culture of materialistic businesses.

“True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want.”

How to get ready for a mini-retirement

• Consider your assets and cash flow.
• Identify your dream mini-retirement location.
• Choose a realistic location for your mini-retirement.
• Prepare for your trip. Here’s the countdown:
• Three months out – eliminate the unnecessary
• Two months out – automate billing with credit cards.
• One month out – redirect mail to a friend.
• Two weeks out – scan and store digital documents of essential info, e.g., Credit cards, id, and insurance documents. Downgrade phone plans.
• One week out – decide on a work schedule while you’re away. Put other belongings into storage.
• Two days out – store car, add a thing to the tank to store fuel, disconnect battery leads.
• When you arrive – book to view apartments (one month only), go on bus/bike tours of the city.

Adding life after subtracting work

But this is what I always wanted! How can I be bored?

Tim explains that it’s pretty normal to find it hard to adjust to your newfound freedom. Even though it’s what you’ve always dreamed of, you may find yourself bored and wondering what to do next. If you are someone who loves chasing goals and reaching new highs constantly, it’s going to be a hard adjustment.

It’s pretty standard, Tim explains, to find yourself asking the big questions about the meaning of life, your purpose, and the point. To combat the stresses this may bring, remember the following;

“If you can’t define or act upon it, forget it. If you take just this point from this book, it will put you in the top 1% of performers in the world and keep most philosophical distress out of your life.”

Something Tim suggests you do when traveling and on your mini-retirements is to learn something new. Decide to dedicate some time to a specific skill or activity, something you’ve always wanted to do but have yet to have the time, whether it be learning a new language or how to scoreboard.

Top 13 new rich mistakes

• Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake (w4w)
• They are micromanaging and emailing to fill time.
• Handling problems your outsourcers or co-workers can handle.
• Helping outsourcers or co-workers with the same problem more than once or with non-crisis issues.
• Chasing customers, particularly unqualified or international prospects, when you have sufficient cash flow to finance your nonfinancial pursuits.
• Answering emails that will not result in a sale or a faq or auto-responder can answer that.
• Working where you live, sleep, or should relax.
• Not performing a thorough 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life.
• Striving for endless perfection rather than great or good enough, whether personally or professionally.
• Blowing minutiae and minor problems out of proportion as an excuse to work.
• Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent to justify work.
• Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence.
• Ignoring the social rewards of life.

Key takeaways

• You need to be effective & efficient. Doing more and spending more time on tasks does not make them essential.
• Avoid the ‘interruptions’: time wasters, time consumers, and empowerment failures.
• Automation and delegation are key. Get a virtual assistant, even if you don’t need one yet.
• When getting ready to create a product, find the market and the customer first, then create a product for the defined audience. Wait to come up with the product.
• Take mini-retirements throughout your life instead of saving them up until the end.

The 4-Hour Work Week Book Review

“The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss is a revolutionary guide that challenges the conventional notion of work and productivity.

Tim presents practical strategies and mindset shifts to escape the 9-5 grind and create a lifestyle of freedom and fulfillment. He emphasizes the importance of outsourcing, automation, and prioritizing tasks that truly matter.

With engaging anecdotes and actionable advice, Tim encourages readers to redefine their relationship with work, embrace lifestyle design, and pursue their passions.

“The 4-Hour Work Week” is a game-changing manual for those seeking a more efficient, flexible, and rewarding approach to work and life.

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Very few books are considered "Must Reads" in my opinion. You don't want to miss out on this one.

4 min read · May 8, 2020

There are very few books that I would consider "Must Reads".  I am not much of a reader, but when I do read, I always like to pick books that I can learn something from; something meaningful.  I can safely say that Tim Ferriss' book "The 4-Hour Work Week" is one of the best books that I have read - available at Amazon .

And for one simple reason: it teaches you how to be successfully lazy .

No, wait.  Not "lazy".  Economical.  It talks about how to take your regular 8 to 10 hour work day and maximize your productivity.  Imagine starting from a position of spending at least 40 hours a week in an office that you probably hate (or, at the very least, do not hold much emotional attachment to) and ending with the ability to complete your work from home, not taking more than a couple hours a day - all the while being more productive , useful and appreciated.

I like to consider this blog to be a mix between early retirement concepts preached by Mr. Money Mustache (understood to be one of the "founders" of this online personal finance movement) and the "get your mind right, relax, take charge and kick some ass" thoughts from Tim Ferriss.

If you like what I write about on this blog, you will definitely enjoy this read.

I will be honest - in many ways, the title of this book is complete bullshit.  Not many will truly take their 40 hours of work and essentially divide by 10, leaving their work week literally 4-hours long.  But then again, this book isn't about taking the title THAT literally.

Rather, this book is about revealing the possible and streamlining the way you do business, leaving you with more time during your day to do the things that you feel give your life the biggest bang for your buck.

Tim Ferriss adds an interesting element to the topic of financial independence, but from a much different perspective than mine.  There are two primary ways to achieve a place in your life where you are no longer dependent on a job to provide for your livelihood - otherwise known as financial independence, or popularly known throughout the personal finance community as, simply, "FI".

The first way is what I primarily preach here through Think Save Retire - maximum saving .  My wife and I save nearly 70% of our combined income every month.  This takes savings to the max and completely floods our long term savings and investments with the resources that it needs to keep growing.

The other way, which is taught by Tim Ferriss, is maximum income .  He approaches financial independence from a standpoint of sources of income and finding the easiest and most profitable ways to generate substantial passive income - emphasis on the "passive" part.  A hands-on source of income is, for all intents and purposes, a job.  A hands-off, or passive, source of income allows for location independence.  Want to travel to Europe next week?  Go right ahead - your source of income will keep doing its thing while you're away.

How the book is organized

The book is divided up into four main topics that, together, cleverly spell the word "DEAL".  These topics are the meat and potatoes of the book and gives Tim a neat little easy-to-remember acronym that readers can recognize.

The first is " Definition ".  Here, Ferriss discusses what it means to be a part of the "New Rich" and the mindset that governs the thought process of this new kind of wealth.  The ability to set and achieve specific goals, Tim argues, is what makes the difference.  For example, instead of working towards early retirement, Tim says the New Rich "distribute recovery periods and adventures throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal".

The second is " Elimination ".  This is your cleansing phase, where lifestyles are examined and negative elements that do not contribute to end goals are eliminated.  In fact, Tim is a big believer in the "low-information diet", a technique whereby you actively and intentionally avoid contact with the news, especially the 24-hour news cycle.  Focusing on primarily negative worldly matters distracts you from your goal and sometimes, Tim argues, too much information can be more damaging than not enough.

The third is " Automation ", and here is where the transition from hands-on to hands-off - or "passive" - begins to take hold.  Now that you have your specific and achievable goals established, and have eliminated the negative elements of your lifestyle and simplified your interaction with others, the job of flipping the switch to turn on that well-oiled machine begins.  He talks of putting your source of income on autopilot and letting it work without the dependence on the human element to get things done, like chapter 11 "Management by Absence" discusses.

The fourth is " Liberation ", and this is where the fun part begins.  How do you convince your boss to let you work from home (or where ever you happen to be)?  He even embraces the possibility of simply quitting your job, arguing against the notion that quitting is something that can't be reversed.  Careers, he argues, can always be picked back up at a later point.

My thoughts

I like the way Tim Ferriss writes.  He is not stuck up in the topics that he presents, and he writes not in a "low-brow" manner, but in a fashion that you might hear between two early 20's millionaires who hit it big in business early in life.

His books talk about the art of the possible and shedding the inane shackles of conventional wisdom that often leave people working dead-end jobs in an unhappy life for way too long.  I particularly enjoy his down to earth nature and ability to connect with the reader on the most basic level - ironically, a combination of drop-dead serious topics and laugh-out-loud antics.  Like other books by Ferriss, "The 4-Hour Work Week" is a fun read.

It is available from Amazon.com through the following link: http://amzn.to/1xN6qXs .

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The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich Kindle Edition

A new, updated and expanded edition of this New York Times bestseller on how to reconstruct your life so it's not all about work Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan - there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint. This step-by step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches: * How Tim went from $40,000 dollars per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per MONTH and 4 hours per week * How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want * How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs * How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist * How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent 'mini-retirements'. This new updated and expanded edition includes: More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled their income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point * Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating email, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than £5 a meal * How lifestyle design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times * The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either.

• Print length 398 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Ebury Digital
• Publication date August 31, 2011
• File size 1429 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

This engaging book makes you ask the most important question that you will ever face: What exactly is it that you want out of work and life, and why? Tim Ferriss is a master of getting more for less, often with the help of people he doesn't even know, and here he gives away his secrets for fulfilling your dreams.

This is a whole new ball game. Highly recommended.

Tim has done what most people only dream of doing. I can't believe he is going to let his secrets out of the bag. This book is a must-read!

"Tim is Indiana Jones for the digital age...Simply put, do what he says and you can live like a millionaire."

The 4-Hour Workweek is an absolute necessity for those adventurous souls who want to live life to its fullest. Buy it and read it before you sacrifice any more!

Stunning and amazing. From mini-retirements to outsourcing your life, it's all here. Whether you're a wage slave or a Fortune 500 CEO, this book will change your life!

Thanks to Tim Ferriss, I have more time in my life to travel, spend time with family, and write book blurbs. This is a dazzling and highly useful work.

"If you want to live life on your own terms, this is your blueprint."

It's about time this book was written. It is a long-overdue manifesto for the mobile lifestyle, and Tim Ferriss is the ideal ambassador. This will be huge.

The 4-Hour Workweek is a new way of solving a very old problem: just how can we work to live and prevent our lives from being all about work? A world of infinite options awaits those who would read this book and be inspired by it!

From the Back Cover

About the author.

Timothy Ferriss received his BA degree from Princeton University in 2000. Nominated as one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Business People of 2007," he runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide and is a regular lecturer at Princeton University, where he presents entrepreneurship as a tool for ideal lifestyle design and world change.

Ray Porter is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator and fifteen-year veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including Almost Famous , ER , and Frasier .

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B006X0M2TS
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ebury Digital; 1st edition (August 31, 2011)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 31, 2011
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1429 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 398 pages
• #28 in Office Management (Books)
• #35 in Workplace Behavior
• #52 in Business Office Skills

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About the author

Timothy ferriss.

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company‘s ‘Most Innovative Business People’ and one of Fortune‘s ‘40 under 40’. He is an early-stage technology investor/advisor (Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ others) and the author of four #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef and Tools of Titans. The Observer and other media have called Tim ‘the Oprah of audio’ due to the influence of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which is the first business/interview podcast to exceed 200 million downloads. Tim received his BA from Princeton University in 2000, where he focused on language acquisition and East Asian Studies. He developed his non-fiction writing with Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee and formed his life philosophies under Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe. He is far dumber than both. Tim enjoys bear claws, chocolate croissants, writing ‘About’ pages in third person and neglecting italics.

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What It’s Really Like to Have a 4-Day Workweek

T o many people in corporate America, working five days a week—Monday to Friday, 9 to 5—feels as habitual as brushing their teeth. But it wasn’t always that way. In the late 1800s, a full-time manufacturing worker could easily spend 100 hours per week on the job . It wasn’t until around 1940, after a concerted push from labor unions , that the 40-hour workweek became standard in the U.S.

Now, almost a century later, there’s growing momentum for an even more condensed schedule , with major companies—including Panasonic, Kickstarter, and the online thrift store ThredUp—trying out four-day workweeks. “We’ve all been working far too hard, and we’re missing out on life,” says Charlotte Lockhart, co-founder of 4 Day Week Global, a group pushing for shorter workweeks worldwide. “It’s affecting our health and our planet and our communities.”

Lockhart’s group advocates for what she calls the “100-80-100 rule”: workers hit 100% of their productivity targets in 80% as many hours, while earning 100% of their regular pay. For some companies, getting there is as simple as canceling some meetings and making better use of technology to free up time, while others need to completely overhaul their workflows and scheduling systems. But, Lockhart says, employers in fields ranging from hospitality to law enforcement have seen success with shortened schedules.

Read More : I Tried to Cure My Burnout. Here’s What Happened

Pilot studies in countries including the U.K., Spain, Portugal, and South Africa suggest that shorter workweeks can help employees reduce burnout, manage stress , get more sleep and exercise, spend additional quality time with loved ones, and feel all-around happier and healthier. Employers see perks, too, including lower rates of turnover and absenteeism. The study in Spain even tracked a drop in fuel emissions due to fewer commuting trips.

Additional trials are underway in countries including Germany, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. Much of the research on shorter workweeks, however, has been done by advocacy groups like Lockhart’s. Independent surveys, like one conducted by Gallup in 2022 , sometimes show a more complex picture.

In the Gallup survey, people who worked four days a week were slightly more likely to report feeling burned out, compared to those with traditional schedules—potentially because they had to cram the same amount of work into less time. That result is in direct conflict with the results of pilot studies run by groups like 4 Day Week Global; in fact, Lockhart identified burnout reduction as one of the largest benefits of a condensed schedule.

Lawmakers in states including Maryland, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and California seem to be focusing on the positive, introducing bills that would encourage four-day workweeks or at least enable further research on them. Bernie Sanders, chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, has pushed for four-day weeks as well .

Read More : Ambition Is Out

It’s hardly a new phenomenon for people to want to work less , says Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College who studies working hours. But with growing support from employers and lawmakers, she believes a sea change is coming. “Pre-pandemic, it felt like something that would be great but was unrealistic,” Schor says. “Once the pandemic came, the thinking switched because people felt so beleaguered and stressed and burned out. It became common sense that we should do this.”

Companies that have already gotten on board have taken different approaches to implementing a shorter workweek. Some achieve the full 100-80-100 system, while others take more modest steps, such as asking employees to clock in for four 10-hour shifts per week or giving half days off. TIME spoke with employees at four companies trying out these schedules to learn more about the real-world effects of a shorter workweek—and if they’re as life-changing as the hype suggests.

Name : Ashya Majied Age : 37 Location : Cleveland, Ohio Job : Brand and marketing lead at Be Equitable, a company that partners with organizations to advance equity and inclusion in workplaces. Schedule : Monday to Thursday, with Fridays off for the entire company.

That very first Friday that we had off, I woke up and moseyed downstairs to make myself some tea. It happened to be a sunny day. I looked out the window, smiled, and thought, ‘I’m so happy. This is what the research was talking about. I get why this works.’ It makes me want to go harder the other days of the week to have this feeling on Friday.

Do I have to be really intentional about my time during the week? Yes. But everything can get done in four days. It always could.

Having a weekday to handle your business—to call the doctor’s office, to call the mortgage company, to clean the house—has been huge. This Friday, I’m going to get my nails done in the morning. Before, I would try to squeeze it in at lunch, because my nail tech only works during the week. Now, I don’t have to have that guilty feeling or work late to make up the time; I just schedule my appointments on Fridays. That peace of mind is priceless. I’m also Muslim, and the day we go to the mosque is Friday. The other major religions in our country are off on their important days, and now I am, too. Fridays off means I can better support my spiritual well-being, and I love that for me.

I really feel like I needed an extra day to rest. The state of the world, to me, feels like the weight of the world, and it takes a toll on me. The four-day workweek takes just a little of that weight off. It gives me a little bit of energy, a nice little boost in a world that is suffering.

I wouldn’t want to go back to working five days a week, but I would if I had to. To any role that you have, there are pros and cons. This is a really big pro.

Names : Greg and Kelsey Brown Ages : 36 and 33, respectively Location : Missoula, Mont. Jobs : Greg is the vice president of operations at Linehaul Logistics, a freight brokerage. Kelsey is a counselor at a public school. Schedules : The Browns, a married couple, both have four-day workweeks. At Greg’s company, employees have different days off (Greg’s is Friday) and work 10-hour shifts on the days they are scheduled. Kelsey’s school has a Monday to Thursday schedule for students, faculty, and staff. She works nine-hour shifts.

Kelsey : As mundane as it sounds, it’s nice that we get chores done on a Friday so we can enjoy the weekend fully. I also really look forward to working out for an hour on Fridays. I go to classes at Orangetheory Fitness. That small piece alone has helped my overall health and well-being. I also use my three-day weekends to catch up on sleep, because I have to get up at 5:30 a.m. to get to school on time when I’m working. Sometimes I think, ‘Man, it would be nice if I didn’t have to be at work until 8 or 8:30 a.m. like other schools,’ but I don’t think that in any way outweighs the other benefits of my schedule.

I do so much more with my personal time, compared to when I worked five days a week in previous jobs. By the end of the three days that I have off, instead of having the Sunday Scaries, I’m ready to go back because I feel refreshed and recovered. I believe it makes me better at my job, because I feel ready to go on Mondays. Before, it was like, ‘Holy smokes, where does the weekend go?’

It’s awesome that Greg and I are both on a four-day schedule, too. We spend that extra time together, or we will be spontaneous and go out of town.

Greg : It definitely helps with traveling with our daughter, too. We love to go camping, and it extends the camping weekends.

I don’t always take Fridays off because I’m a manager, and because I have to leave work early some weeks to meet my daughter at the bus stop after school. I feel bad taking the four days when I have to leave early, because I’m not doing my full 10-hour shifts.

When it’s someone’s day to be off, someone else has to cover for them. That’s hard, because you’re doing two jobs. It can be kind of stressful to be out, too, handing that baton off and making sure that when you get back it’s not all dented or destroyed. But when I can do it, taking Friday off gives me that extra time to decompress. It’s very common to work long hours and weekends in this industry, so having that extra time to myself 100% helps me manage stress.

As a manager, I’ve seen how this schedule helps my employees, too. I know that we’ve seen less turnover because of it. It’s easier to hire as well. We do have one person that does the five-day workweek voluntarily because she didn’t like a four-day schedule, but that is an outlier. Every single other person would not want to go back to five days. It can be hard to implement a four-day workweek and hard to keep it going, but it is definitely worth it.

Name: Siobhan Stewart Age : 36 Location : Richmond, Va. Job : Marketing communications manager at Pixite, a company that makes creative apps. Schedule : Monday to Friday afternoon, for a 4.5-day week.

A five-day schedule honestly feels arbitrary to me. It didn’t, and doesn’t, seem balanced. You’re supposed to be on top of your steps and drinking enough water and your social life and your mental health and self-care. How do you fit that into a five-day workweek? In previous jobs, I couldn’t in a way that felt restful. I’m also a writer, and that wasn’t something I had energy for when I worked five days a week.

Now that I’m on a 4.5-days-per-week schedule, I feel lighter. I feel happier. I don't have the Sunday Scaries anymore, and I attribute that, in part, to feeling like I've had enough time to rest and recharge over the weekend. On a Friday afternoon I might read, work on my novel, journal, catch up on some chores, go on a walk with my husband, or just relax. We will do long weekends, take off and go somewhere. Even having an extra handful of hours, you feel like you have a little extra space. During the winter, getting outside for that extra daylight is also a big thing.

In general, if you are less stressed and overwhelmed and feeling better, I think you’re a better, more productive worker. That’s been the case for me. It’s hard to imagine leaving this job. Being a middle-class American means you have to trade your time for money, and when a company gives you time it's almost like an existential gift—like you're getting a chunk of your life back.

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Write to Jamie Ducharme at [email protected]