Solution # 1: Check your emails only twice a day!
Yes, you read it right, “Four Hour” week, not a “Four Day” week. Timothy Ferriss has written a book on how you can work only for four hours a week, yet deliver much more productivity and results. Not all of us may be able to shrink our work weeks to four hours, but the principles he talks about can certainly take off five to fifteen hours off the week, allowing you to do something else you enjoy.
Tim spoke at SXSW (South by South West) conference, and the whole audio of the session is available for download. Listening to that, I was surprised, curious and inspired. The 80/20 principle was not new, but the technique of elimination or checking emails only twice in the day, was something radical. Tim has a team of MBAs, sitting in Bangalore, doing most of his work, at $4 per hour. He suggests outsourcing everything that’s not profitable for you to do, given your hourly earning rates. Scot Hacker has done a fantastic summary of Tim’s talk. Both the summary and the audio are excellent and recommended to all who want to optimize their work time! Head over to Tim’s blog on how people redesigned their lives, after attending his talk at SXSW!
Try that in the real world and you won’t have a job. I recommend four times a day or once an hour if your job revolves around email.
Also you should keep track of your time for a week before you even read his book. How do you really know what you want to improve until you really know where you’re starting from?
This book is a Tiny Robbins dream world. Why outsourse when you can fit it all into a day yourself?
Oh, Ken, you’re such a drone. Go read Ferriss’s book before you pooh-pooh it. Once an hour? That’s for slaves. Any job that can’t be done without checking email once an hour is a job best lost. (Ferriss covers that too.)