Rent - A - Dwarf (and other ideas from The 4 - Hour Workweek)

Thursday, April 03, 2008

I just finished reading Timothy Ferris’ The 4 - Hour Work Week. If you haven’t read it, let me summarize it in one sentence:

“How to export your business labor pool to India and reduce your workload to 4 hours a week so you can travel around the world and have sex with as many women as possible.”

Honestly, I found the book quite worthless, except for three good ideas:

#1 Set Impossibly Short Deadlines
“On a micro task level, limit the number of items on your to do list and use impossibly short deadlines to force immediate action while ignoring minutiae.” (page 80).

#2 Stop Responding To Emergencies And Emergencies Will Stop Coming To You
“…What if someone has an emergency? It doesn’t happen. My contacts now know that I don’t respond to emergencies, so the emergencies somehow don’t exist or don’t come to me. Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.” (page 83).

#3 Check E-mail Only Twice A Day
“Check e-mail twice per day, once at 12:00 noon or just prior to lunch, and again at 4:00 pm…never check email first thing in the morning. Instead, complete your most important task before 11:00 am to avoid using lunch or reading e-mail as a postponement excuse.” (Page 93).

But the last idea I gleaned from the book (one that you'd expect from a New York Times best-selling author) is one that is indicative of the rest of information you'll find in The 4 - Hour Workweek:

#4 Rent - A - Dwarf
“Danny Black (4’2) is the part-owner of http://www.shortdwarf.com/. Danny rents dwarfs as entertainment for $149.” (Page 147).

Thanks Timothy. You just never know when you’ll need the services of a dwarf now do you?