The 4-Hour Workweek (10 page)

If this approach is too confrontational for you, just politely refuse to interact with them. Be in the middle of something when the call comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether.

I’m not going to lie: It sucks. It hurts like pulling out a splinter. But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.

Remove the splinters and you’ll thank yourself for it.

6. Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied?"

Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities. You’ll just read unassociated e-mail and scramble your brain for the day. Compile your to-do list for tomorrow no later than this evening. I don’t recommend using Outlook or computerized to-do lists, because it is possible to add an infinite number of items. I use a standard piece of paper folded in half three times, which fits perfectly in the pocket and limits you to noting only a few items.

There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact. If you are stuck trying to decide between multiple items that all seem crucial, as happens to all of us, look at each in turn and ask yourself, If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

To counter the seemingly urgent, ask yourself: What will happen if I don’t do this, and is it worth putting off the important to do it? If you haven’t already accomplished at least one important task in the day, don’t spend the last business hour returning a DVD to avoid a $5 late charge. Get the important task done and pay the $5 fine.

7. Put a Post-it on your computer screen or set an Outlook reminder to alert you at least three times daily with the question, "Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?"

I also use free time-tracking software called RescueTime (www.rescuetime.com) to alert me when I spend more than an allotted time on certain websites or programs often used to avoid the important (Gmail, Facebook, Outlook, etc.). It also summarizes your time use each week and compares your performance to peers.

8. Do not multitask.

I’m going to tell you what you already know. Trying to brush your teeth, talk on the phone, and answer e-mail at the same time just doesn’t work. Eating while doing online research and instant messaging? Ditto.

If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask. It is a symptom of “task creep”—doing more to feel productive while actually accomplishing less. As stated, you should have, at most, two primary goals or tasks per day. Do them separately from start to finish without distraction. Divided attention will result in more frequent interruptions, lapses in concentration, poorer net results, and less gratification.

9. Use Parkinson’s Law on a Macro and Micro Level.

Use Parkinson’s Law to accomplish more in less time. Shorten schedules and deadlines to necessitate focused action instead of deliberation and procrastination.

On a weekly and daily macro level, attempt to take Monday and/or Friday off, as well as leave work at 4 P.M. This will focus you to prioritize more effectively and quite possibly develop a social life. If you’re under the hawklike watch of a boss, we’ll discuss the nuts and bolts of how to escape in later chapters.

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.

If doing work online or near an online computer, http://e.ggtimer.com/ is a convenient countdown timer. Just type the desired time limit directly into the URL field and hit enter. The http:// can often be omitted. For example:

http://e.ggtimer.com/5minutes (or just “e.ggtimer.com/5min”insomebrowsers)

http://e.ggtimer.com/1hour30minutes30seconds

http://e.ggtimer.com/30 (if you just put in a number, it assumes seconds)

COMFORT CHALLENGE

Learn to Propose (2 Days)

Stop asking for opinions and start proposing solutions. Begin with the small things. If someone is going to ask, or asks, “Where should we eat?” “What movie should we watch?” “What should we do tonight?” or anything similar, do NOT reflect it back with, “Well, what do you want to … ?” Offer a solution. Stop the back-and-forth and make a decision. Practice this in both personal and professional environments. Here are a few lines that help (my favorites are the first and last):

“Can I make a suggestion?”

“I propose …”

“I’d like to propose …”

“I suggest that … What do you think?”

“Let’s try … and then try something else if that doesn’t work.”

LIFESTYLE DESIGN IN ACTION

I’m a musician who got your book because Derek Sivers at CD Baby recommended it. Checking Pareto’s Law I realized that 78% of my downloads came from just one of my CDs and that 55% of my total download income came from only five songs! It showed me what my fans are looking for and allowed me to showcase those on my web site. Downloads are the way to go. iTunes sells the song and CD Baby direct deposits it to my account. Fully automated once the recording is done. There are some months I can live off download income. Once I finish paying off debt, it should be no problem to travel as an artist and create new fans all over the world and have a cyber income stream.

—VICTOR JOHNSON

As for “outsourcing” your banking, any company that needs to take checks (cheques) should consider a lock box solution. Just about any bank that does business banking offers it. All checks go to a PO box at the bank, the bank processes the checks and deposits them, and according to your instructions can send you a file of all the checks that are deposited. Normally this can be done in either a flat, Excel or other file type that can interface with any accounting systems from Excel, to Quicken to SAP. Quite cost effective.

—ANONYMOUS

CULTIVATING SELECTIVE IGNORANCE

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

—HERBERT SIMON, recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics8 and the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

I hope you’re sitting down. Take that sandwich out of your mouth so you don’t choke. Cover the baby’s ears. I’m going to tell you something that upsets a lot of people.

I never watch the news and have bought one single newspaper in the last five years, in Stansted Airport in London, and only because it gave me a discount on a Diet Pepsi.

I would claim to be Amish, but last time I checked, Pepsi wasn’t on the menu.

How obscene! I call myself an informed and responsible citizen? How do I stay up-to-date with current affairs? I’ll answer all of that, but wait—it gets better. I usually check business e-mail for about an hour each Monday, and I never check voicemail when abroad. Never ever.

But 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.

Cultivating Selective Ignorance

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)

From this point forward, I’m going to propose that you develop an uncanny ability to be selectively ignorant. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.

The first step is to develop and maintain a low-information diet. Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.

Lifestyle design is based on massive action—output. Increased output necessitates decreased input. Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four.

I read the front-page headlines through the newspaper machines as I walk to lunch each day and nothing more. In five years, I haven’t had a single problem due to this selective ignorance. It gives you something new to ask the rest of the population in lieu of small talk: “Tell me, what’s new in the world?” And, if it’s that important, you’ll hear people talking about it. Using my crib notes approach to world affairs, I also retain more than someone who loses the forest for the trees in a sea of extraneous details.

From an actionable information standpoint, I consume a maximum of one-third of one industry magazine (Response magazine) and one business magazine (Inc.) per month, for a grand total of approximately four hours. That’s it for results-oriented reading. I read an hour of fiction prior to bed for relaxation.

How on earth do I act responsibly? Let me give an example of how I and other NR both consider and obtain information. I voted in the last presidential election,9 despite having been in Berlin. I made my decision in a matter of hours. First, I sent e-mails to educated friends in the U.S. who share my values and asked them who they were voting for and why. Second, I judge people based on actions and not words; thus, I asked friends in Berlin, who had more perspective outside of U.S. media propaganda, how they judged the candidates based on their historical behavior. Last, I watched the presidential debates. That was it. I let other dependable people synthesize hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of media for me. It was like having dozens of personal information assistants, and I didn’t have to pay them a single cent.

That’s a simple example, you say, but what if you need to learn to do something your friends haven’t done? Like, say, sell a book to the world’s largest publisher as a first-time author? Funny you should ask. There are two approaches I used:

1. I picked one book out of dozens based on reader reviews and the fact that the authors had actually done what I wanted to do. If the task is how-to in nature, I only read accounts that are “how I did it” and autobiographical. No speculators or wannabes are worth the time.

2. Using the book to generate intelligent and specific questions, I contacted 10 of the top authors and agents in the world via e-mail and phone, with a response rate of 80%.

I only read the sections of the book that were relevant to immediate next steps, which took less than two hours. To develop a template e-mail and call script took approximately four hours, and the actual e-mails and phone calls took less than an hour. This personal contact approach is not only more effective and more efficient than all-you-can-eat info buffets, it also provided me with the major league alliances and mentors necessary to sell this book. Rediscover the power of the forgotten skill called “talking.” It works.

Once again, less is more.

How to Read 200% Faster in 10 Minutes

There will be times when, it’s true, you will have to read. Here are four simple tips that will lessen the damage and increase your speed at least 200% in 10 minutes with no comprehension loss:

1. Two Minutes: Use a pen or finger to trace under each line as you read as fast as possible. Reading is a series of jumping snapshots (called saccades), and using a visual guide prevents regression.

2. Three Minutes: Begin each line focusing on the third word in from the first word, and end each line focusing on the third word in from the last word. This makes use of peripheral vision that is otherwise wasted on margins. For example, even when the highlighted words in the next line are your beginning and ending focal points, the entire sentence is “read,” just with less eye movement:

“Once upon a time, an information addict decided to detox.”

Move in from both sides further and further as it gets easier.

3. Two Minutes: Once comfortable indenting three or four words from both sides, attempt to take only two snapshots—also known as fixations—per line on the first and last indented words.

4. Three Minutes: Practice reading too fast for comprehension but with good technique (the above three techniques) for five pages prior to reading at a comfortable speed. This will heighten perception and reset your speed limit, much like how 50 mph normally feels fast but seems like slow motion if you drop down from 70 mph on the freeway.

To calculate reading speed in words per minute (wpm)—and thus progress—in a given book, add up the number of words in ten lines and divide by ten to get the average words per line. Multiply this by the number of lines per page and you have the average words per page. Now it’s simple. If you initially read 1.25 pages in one minute at 330 average words per page, that’s 412.5 words per minute. If you then read 3.5 pages after training, it’s 1,155 words per minute and you’re in the top 1% of the world’s fastest readers.

Q&A: QUESTIONS AND ACTIONS

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

—ROBERT J. SAWYER, Calculating God

1. Go on an immediate one-week media fast.

The world doesn’t even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord. To realize this, it’s best to use the Band-Aid approach and do it quickly: a one-week media fast. Information is too much like ice cream to do otherwise. “Oh, I’ll just have a half a spoonful” is about as realistic as “I just want to jump online for a minute.” Go cold turkey.