The Weiman Consulting Letter, August 2007

Wynnewood, PA

The 4-Hour Workweek
Quotation of the Month
6 Tips for Improving Your Reading Efficiency
Updates from Weiman Consulting
Read, Relax, Repeat

The 4-Hour Workweek

I received an unusual telephone call the other day from my friend David: “Whatever you’re doing right now, stop and go out and buy The 4-Hour Workweek,” he said from his cell phone. He was on the beach, reading Timothy Ferriss’s amazing, popular and controversial new book.

Where book recommendations go (and restaurants in foreign countries, too, for that matter), my friend is something of an expert. So I stopped what I was doing and bought Ferriss’s book.

I read it in one sitting the same day I bought it, and I’m recommending it to you because it contains valuable ideas about life, work, and how to radically change the relationship between the two.

Ferriss is many things – an internet entrepreneur, a champion martial artist, a scuba diver, beach bum and author. He claims to have spent more than 5 years learning the secrets of the “New Rich.” The 4-Hour Workweek is his thesis on what he learned, and how you can apply it to your life.

The traditional life plan is to work hard, day after day, so that you can eventually retire and enjoy the spoils of your lifelong labor. But why wait until you’re so old you can’t really enjoy it? Ferriss turns the traditional lifeplan on its head, and attempts to show that by making modifications in how you manage your work, you can have mini-retirements throughout your life, enhancing the quality of your life overall without sacrificing income. In fact, he claims, reducing work time helps you focus your efforts and produce more in less time.

The bias of the book is definitely toward using computer and internet technology to maximize your income and time. For example, he suggests that you stop keeping your e-mail browser open all day and responding to messages as they come in. Instead, you set up an auto-responder that tells each person who emails you that, to serve your clients more efficiently, you’ll only be checking e-mail twice a day – at 10 and at 4 – with instructions on how to call you if they have a need that can’t wait.

Checking e-mail just twice a day? I know people who check their e-mail more than twice every ten minutes. But Ferriss uses this method to groups tasks together more efficiently, allow you to focus more attention on individual projects without constant interruption, and to reduce unrealistic expectations about how quickly we can respond to every email that pops up on our screens.

Being in a service business makes it more of a challenge to schedule responses to e-mails, but reducing the habit even 50% pays off dramatically in increased productivity.

Despite being a child of the computer and internet age, Ferriss also reaches back in time to harvest the wisdom of thinkers from the past. For example, he revisits “Pareto’s Law,” a concept by the economist Vilfredo Pareto that posited the “80/20 principle” of the distribution of wealth in a society – that 80% of the wealth is possessed by 20% of the population.

Pareto observed this ratio in other areas as well … he found that 80% of the peas in his garden were produced by 20% of the seeds he planted, for example, as well as numerous other phenomena that seemed to follow this ratio. Ferriss uses this concept to evaluate his business. He examines his client list to find the 20% of clients who are producing most of his revenue, and profiles them so that he can focus his marketing efforts on prospects who share those qualities. He also applies the concept in reverse – trying to find the 20% of clients who are the most demanding and difficult to serve and therefore the least profitable.

Those of you who have been in business for years won’t find this concept to be very radical. But it’s an excellent reminder to consistently evaluate our client lists to identify the characteristics of our highest-leverage customers.

The book is packed with ideas for reducing wasted time, streamlining processes, outsourcing tasks that don’t directly produce revenue, delegating as much as possible, and staying focused and on task so that you’re producing maximum results in the shortest time possible. It also lists plenty of resources you can quickly access online.

I bought my copy for $19.95 at Borders. It’s also available on audio CD for about $5 more. You can learn more about Ferriss and his concepts at his website, www.fourhourworkweek.com

Quotation of the Month

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’ – Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts cartoons.

6 Tips for Improving Your Reading Efficiency

Business involves reading – and with more and more to stay on top of, it can be challenging to efficiently get through all the material you need or want to stay on top of. Here are some tips from business writers Bob and Amy Bly for optimizing your reading:

1. Be selective in the number of magazines, newsletters, and trade journals you subscribe to or receive. Analyze which give you the best return on your reading time and cancel those that are borderline, repetitive or offer irrelevant information.

2. Use the magazine’s table of contents to distinguish between useful and non useful information. If you can’t read the articles right away, clip or photocopy items of interest and put them in a folder or in-basket for future reading.

3. Use waiting or travel time to catch up on business reading. Whether you are on the bus or train, in the air, waiting in bank lines or even on hold on the telephone, these spare moments, normally wasted, can be put to good use by reading.

4. Set aside a specific time each day for reading. Pick a time when your schedule is quiet and you expect few interruptions. Lunchtime or early morning may be the best periods. Keeping distractions to a minimum helps improve concentration.

5. Before you sit down to read, make sure you have everything you need. This includes a pen, highlighter, note pad or index cards (if you’re reading study material) and the complete text of the article.

6. Take a speed-reading course or buy a book that teaches you how to read faster. Do you subvocalize (say words to yourself as you read)? Do you read everything at the same speed? Speed-reading can teach you to use bad habits and develop new, efficient ones through training and practice. (One book we recommend is Speed-reading, published by John Wiley & Sons, New York.) You can also check out www.pxmethod.com.

Updates from Weiman Consulting

I was recently quoted in theLos Angeles Times business section on how to conduct exit interviews … you can read the comments (and learn why you should do them) by clicking here.

Just published – an article on creating volunteer teams to promote corporate values in non-profit organizations … it’s in the July/August issue of Nonprofit World magazine – send me your address if you’d like a reprint.

In October I’ll be presenting to nonprofit leaders at a roundtable sponsored by the Main Line Chamber of Commerce (suburban Philadelphia). The topic will relate to gaining maximum commitment and value from your staff.

Next Spring, David Frees and I are presenting a Las Vegas retreat where we’ll work with a small group of corporate leaders on setting and achieving personal and professional goals. Contact me if you want to be added to the mailing list for information on this outstanding event.

Please contact me to learn about incorporating web-based performance management and 360-degree (multi-rater) assessments and evaluations into your firm.

Read, Relax, Repeat

If work squeezing you a little too tightly lately, check out my book, The Stress Solution