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I just attended the most impactful presentation I have seen here at SxSW. It was called The 4-Hour Workweek: Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World and it’s description read, “Is your team mired in the goo and muck of old-school thinking? Are your designers and developers divided on their approach and about to throw in the towel? Are you dying to move from a stale world to a more agile, innovative approach? This panel features formerly stuck experts as well as those who have helped clients get out of the muck. Success in today’s web environment means merging design and development thinking to move to a 2.0 world and beyond.”

I almost didn’t go to this today because it was the first panel of the morning, I was tired, and I couldn’t really tell from the description whether it would be interesting or not. Well, the description was misleading. The lone presenter, Tim Ferriss, was a charismatic, dynamic, power-horse of amazing advice. Honestly, right now, my mind is a bit blown. I am filled with manic energy while I frantically try to process how my entire view of running a business and living a life may very well have just been dramatically altered.

Here are my notes from this radical presentation:

In order to control your life, you need to control three currencies

These three currencies are Time, income, and mobility. There are four phases for getting these currencies under your control.

Definition

The first thing Tim told us to do is to determine what it is that you want to create from a lifestyle standpoint and how much that will cost you. What do you want to do, be, and have? Determine what portion of your efforts are producing those results? He then went on to talk about the 80/20 principal, which dictates that 20% of your actions will produce 80% of your results.

Tim’s real-life Example: When Tim began to change his life is when he realized that out of 120 wholesale customers for his business, five of them were contributing 95% of his profit. He immediately put all non-productive customers on a holding pattern. He made it difficult for them to place orders (they had to fill out a form and fax it to him) because what he was after was not more customers, but more income. Then he found the commonalities between the remaining five clients and worked on duplicating those types of clients. He says you can apply this principal to anything by doing a time-audit.

Two questions you need to ask yourself: 1) What 20% of my activities are creating the 80% of what I want to accomplish? Based on the answer, try to duplicate those activities and eliminate the other 80%. 2) What 20% of the successful portion is difficult and more time consuming than necessary (challenging customers who are high-maintenance, for example). He strongly encourages everyone to fire more of their customers. You can do that in a non-confrontational way. Of the five clients he had left, there were two that he identified as being particularly time-consuming. He sent them an email saying something along the lines of, “Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like our work styles are compatible. I would love to continue working with you if the following conditions are met … (list changes you would need to see). If not, best of luck, etc …”

Tim then went on to tell us about Parkinson’s Law (PL), which dictates that a task will swell in perceived complexity and importance in direct proportion to the amount of time you allot it. He advises us to limit the tasks (80/20), then limit the time (PL).

Elimination

Time management doesn’t work. There is an efficiency epidemic to focus on how to do things better rather than what to do. There is a limit to how much information you can organize – it’s better to eliminate.

Tim encourages batching. He says that the average worker spends 40% of their time task-switching and getting distracted between tasks. Batching involves letting similar tasks accumulate and then performing then at limited times. He goes on to say that changing the way you handle email is going to be the single biggest turning point that you can affect immediately. He advises setting an auto-responder on your email so that you can manage people’s expectation. Something link, “Dear collegues, thank you for your email. Because of an extremely large workload and impending deadlines, I will be checking email at (these times … he suggests starting with twice a day, but when traveling he often goes to once a week or once every two weeks!). If you need immediate help, please call me on my cell phone. Additionally, if your email does not contain a question, but instead is a confirmation or declaration, I will not respond – please don’t be offended.” Wow - can you even imagine doing that? Personally, for me I think my email is a bit like crack … it’s going to be a hard habit to break!

The last thing Tim tried to impress on us regarding email is not to check email first thing in the morning! Instead, focus on getting the most important task (the one you’ve identified by 80/20) done before noon. Elimination is about identifying the crucial from the many, many. (Personal note - while completing typing that last paragraph I was distracted by incoming emails and spent a couple minutes looking at new homes for sale in my neighborhood … the opposite of batching!)

Automation

Tim says that of those remaining tasks (the ones left over after identifying the most valuable and eliminating the least valuable), some of them are important to perform but very time-consuming (including batched jobs). He says that if you make 50k a year and work 40/week for 50 weeks a year then you make about $25/hour. If you can outsource ANY of your tasks to someone you can pay $15/hour or less then do it! He REALLY believes in outsourcing. (Tim’s website, http://4hourworkweek.com/, gives an example of “an outsourced life.”)

Tim urges us to think about rules you can set for yourself rather than responding to things all the time.

Liberation

Tim says to create mobility. Entrepreneurs fear giving up control. Employees fear taking control. Employees need to get out of the office. Don’t ask for permission, but rather beg for forgiveness. Create an excuse that will take you out of the office. Then tell your boss, “I need to be out of the office for the next two weeks (or whatever time).” Then tell him/her that, “I recognize that I need to continue working – this is not a vacation – and this is how I plan to do it.” Give them a plan. While you are gone be extremely productive. When you come back to the office and show how your productivity was twice as high as when you are in the office (demonstrate the data for this). Then ask for 1-day per week out of the office for a month. Make it reversible so the boss will be more open to that. Then over time, make yourself less productive at work, and more and more productive when you work remotely so that you are more likely to be able to increase your off-site work over time. Once you’ve created more time for yourself, take advantage of that time and find out how to fill that time in a fulfilling way.

Tim wants to create a severe backlash against information overload and this culture of immediacy. He says that having people wait for you is a symbol of power – so you need to train people to do that for you. (I’m a BIG fan of training clients how to behave rather than the other way around.) Tim reiterates that we need to focus on the critical few and ignore the trivial many.

Questions

The floor was then opened up to questions, a few of which were:

How do you fire your clients without ruining your reputation? Tim says to filter your clients so that you have low-maintenance clients who fit your ideal profile. Instead of firing the others he talked about simply ignoring them unless they have something pending (not to ignore their direct requests but just not to create activities that you don’t need to, like calling and checking in with them and actively pursuing more business from them).

Do you have general rules for meetings? Tim says you shouldn’t have a meeting to figure out what the problem is – you should have a meeting to figure out what the solution to a problem is. Keep the meeting really short. Get an agenda if someone wants to have a meeting with you and define an end-time.

How transparent are you? How do you raise prices for a client if they know you are outsourcing? Tim says that he likes to be completely transparent (something I REALLY respect and agree with). He says that a good email auto responder can say something like, “I’m not available until (whatever) but here is a list of people that you can contact to get an immediate response.” Like his PR firm said to him, you can say something like, “When you recruit me, you’re also recruiting my team.”

How can you apply these principals to your personal life? Tim says to be ruthless with your personal life just as you would with your business life – who are the people who really make you happy, increase your energy, add to your ideas, etc? There are very few relationships that are the critical relationships. Nurture those. Also, in those important business relationships, if there’s anything important to tell or ask people then call them (rather than use email). He says that he calls his clients so rarely that when he does they really listen.

How do you figure out what’s important? Brilliantly, and I agree so fully, Tim says that if you can’t measure something then you don’t understand it. Also, what gets measured gets managed. How do you determine if your day was successful? What are you counting? If you’re not counting your flying blind. Once you’ve identified your metric you ask, “This is my desired output, how do I create that?” He also says to be wary of raises, in the if you get a raise, but you then have to work more hours due to that raise, then you may actually be making less money per hour.

What tools do you leverage? Tim says that the most important skill that you can develop is the ability to “deal make” and negotiate. You need the ability to create the perception of win-win situations.

Tim’s Final Thoughts

Ask yourself three times a day, “am I being productive, or am I being busy?” Another way to ask that question is, “Am I performing a crutch activity?” (A crutch activity is something you do when you want to avoid doing something that feels overwhelming (which is the thing that you should probably do).

The biggest mistake that employees make is that they underestimate their leverage. Increase your employers investment in you – really get them to invest in you and increase your value to the company, which will make them less likely to refuse requests that you make. Also, it’s just important when to ask for things as how to do so. You can wait for a time when you are integral to a project and then ask for something you want.

My Final Thoughts

I actually do believe that this presentation is going to be a pivotal experience in my life. I’m sitting in my next panel right now (all about Dreamweaver and Ajax and blah, blah, blah …) and I can’t even begin to be interested because all I can think of at the moment is about all the ways in which I need to change the way I think and do things.

I’m really, really excited … thank you, Tim Ferriss!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 10:22 am and is filed under Business, Fun, Personal, SxSW, Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.