Book Summary of The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

This is where the E in the DEAL formula comes in: elimination. Save time by applying the 80/20 principle and eliminating time wasters. If you’re anything like the author used to be, you’ll get about 80% of your work done with only 20% of your effort.

This is called the 80/20 rule, and you might not have noticed it at work because the typical eight-hour workday hides it. Most people have to work for eight hours, so instead of focusing on how productive they are, they focus on how busy they are. They organize their inbox; they futz around with their phone; they walk self-importantly from cubicle to cubicle. And the person who looks the busiest usually gets the raise, since time spent at work is the only measure of performance at most companies.

But about 80% of what they do is pointless.

Spending a lot of time on work doesn’t necessarily mean that you are addressing the right tasks, nor that you are doing them well. In fact, that’s not the case. In fact, Parkinson’s law says that the more time we have to do something, the longer it will take us to do it. So, if we have an hour to finish the final report for our project, we’ll do it in an hour. But if we have the whole afternoon, all four hours of it, we’ll take the whole afternoon.

What you have to do is pinpoint and then prioritize the 20 percent of tasks that will yield 80 percent of results.

And this means getting rid of all tasks and activities that don’t help you reach your own goals. How can you figure out what these important tasks are? Well, go through your list of to-dos and, for each task, ask yourself: “Would I be happy if this task ends up being the only one I complete today?” If the answer is no, it could be taken out of the running.

You should especially be on the lookout for interruptions – things that prevent you from completing important tasks, from start to finish, without pause. Perhaps the most costly kind of interruptions are time wasters. A time waster is any task that you don’t have to do but could if you didn’t. The most common ones are going on the Internet, answering emails that aren’t important, making phone calls, and going to meetings.

All things that waste time can and should be taken away. But let’s just talk about ways to get rid of email as one of them.

You can start to stop checking your email by reading and responding to messages twice a day, in the afternoon and in the evening. If you can manage that, then why not go a step or two further. Try to only check your email once a day or even once a week.

Keep your friends, family, and coworkers informed as you do this. You can do this by setting up an auto-response that tells them you’re limiting the time you spend on email so you can serve them better and that it may be a while before you respond. Those around you will adapt and learn that most messages can simply wait in your email inbox or your voicemail while you tackle truly important things. If someone has a really important request, they can always call you or come talk to you in person.

If you let a lot of small questions and tasks pile up in your inbox, you can handle them all at once. This will save you time and free you from interruptions that get in the way of more important work.

All of these suggestions should help you get a lot more done. But they don’t exactly add up to a four-hour workweek. If you want to spend more time in a hammock on a remote island with a drink in your hand, you’ll have to break free from the place where your work keeps you tied down. In the next part, we’ll talk more about this.