Time is a finite resource. You only have that many hours in this world.
End of story.
If you don’t find ways to manage your most important resource (time) well, your business will inevitably suffer.
That was the issue for the now-iconic Timothy Ferriss, too, whose ”4-Hour Workweek” book remains the Bible of innovative time management.
His approach to intelligent time management turned out so popular that he applied the same to a fitness routine in a book called “The 4-Hour Body.” In fact, he writes about a healthy lifestyle, working out, and nutritional supplements almost as much as he writes about using time in a smart way. Reducing the workload is not a simple question of working less, it is more a question of lifestyle design with added benefits beyond the 9-5 escape.
You can learn more about what Ferris writes in his success case studies and see how to bring this new reality closer to you. Reading the whole book sounds like too much? Here is a shortened concept to help you get started.
The 4-Hour Work Escape
Tim Ferriss’s book gives answers to two very important questions for managers:
- How to free the most of your time?
- How to automate your income?
If you want to have others work for you, work whenever you want to, retire young, accumulate experiences more than money, invest, and live a quality life without the unnecessary clutter of things, people, and experiences, this blog post is for you.
Cutting down your work time resembles a mini-retirement. It is like having a daily sabbatical that recharges, refocuses, and prevents burnout.
It is no wonder so many people want to liberate their time. Interestingly enough, working with others saves hours in the day. It just needs to be done in a specific way that you may not yet know. By hiring an expert team and using automation to tackle most of the boring stuff, you can replicate this model in your life.
If you are interested in stopping to constantly spin the wheel and break down the 9-to-5 routine, reinventing how much you work may be just the right solution.
Let us see how to maximize your productivity and eliminate time-wasters with a digital leadership system based on automation and virtual teams.
Is Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek Possible?
Even if you haven’t read it, you have probably heard of the book’s premise. In a nutshell, you work less and smarter.
The idea of going from 60 hours to 6 hours a week is possible. But how? Is it realistic to expect to have it all? Is “live anywhere and join the new rich” just hype or it holds depth and potential?
The 4-hour working week gives you the ability to choose. While money can get you plenty of conveniences, having the power of choice is wealth beyond money.
There are several ways in which you can get to that point of wealth. And, despite the critique of the 4-hour workweek, which says that entrepreneurship is about personality development and that not everyone can survive by working less, the core concept of working fewer hours has never been truer and easier to accomplish.
Anyone who transitioned from the old ways of doing business to new work was once stuck in the comfort-zone mentality. The typical venture outside the comfort zone for the digital leader used to be earning more money and getting more clients.
But what if earning more money and getting more clients equals less free time and more stress?
Tim Ferriss says you can get to working only several hours per week in four steps:
- Definition
- Elimination
- Automation
- Liberation
It is not only essential to achieve your goals but also how you achieve them.
Tips and tricks about the 4-hour workweek are available on the Virtual Frontier Podcast – listen below!
How Do You Do a 4-Hour Workweek?
To get to your four hours per week, you need to ask yourself four questions:
- What is my passion?
- Who belongs to my team?
- Where is my office?
- When are my working hours?
What you do, who you do with it, where you do it, and the time you do it will give you the liberty of mobility, extended choice, better team relationships, and everything else that goes with the passive income lifestyle.
What is My Passion?
The product or the service you sell needs to be something you have passion about; find what drives you to work in a particular business. Most likely, you will be good at it or know a lot about it. It needs to be something you enjoy doing. Being good about it and dedicated to a business will help you develop products or services that sell.
Who Belongs on My Team?
Regardless of how great you are at what you do, you cannot be great at everything you do. You need other people who can handle different aspects of your company. If you have a great idea for an app, you will be the driver to bring it to realization, but you still need someone to engage in app development, a marketing person, and perhaps several others to handle other bits of work. Think about the people you need via their complementary skills.
Where is My Office?
One of the key reasons people loved Tim Ferriss’s 4-hour workweek is the ability to work from anywhere. Mobility is an important value for the digital entrepreneur because it gives more freedom of choice. Due to restrictions, the choice for many in 2020 was to invent ways for home productivity while remaining mobile digitally.
Your personal office space can be in one place, even at your home, but the advantage of working with freelancers is that you get to spread your team globally.
When Are My Working Hours?
How much you work is crucial in the premise of the four-hour workweek.
But when you work also makes a difference.
When working with freelancers from everywhere, adaptation to varying work schedules is a must.
If you work only in the mornings, you will miss the benefits of free daily time. Some leaders find late afternoon work the most productive. Others can keep focus only for short bursts of time.
The ability to choose your working hours is a benefit for everyone on a freelance virtual team, simply because of time zones and personality differences. Use them as an advantage by creating a flexible hourly structure for your business.
The Realistic Way to Achieve the 4-Hour Work Week
Working less than 10 hours a week is not a dream that can ever happen.
But it can sound too daunting if you don’t have the tools to do it.
Working with freelancers allows you to get out of that impossible rut of constantly having to work for long hours while growing your business.
1. Define
If you are reading this blog, chances are you already know what you sell. However, to grow, you either need to add more products and services or change the quality of a current one. Entrepreneurs don’t want to take the risk of expanding exactly because they are afraid of losing the precious resource of time.
To get to the 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferris you need to scale.
Learn more about how to scale a business from this video:
The key ingredient of the special scaling recipe is the reliance on a freelance virtual team that can assemble and disassemble in a jiffy. As long as you have a team of people that don’t generate extra fixed costs, you can identify new products or product changes, risk-free.
2. Eliminate
That brings us to the conclusion that you need to get rid of high and unnecessary fixed costs. An expensive consulting contract, a software license, or inactive employees that remain on the payroll are just a few examples of what could be eating your resources. Do a health check to see if you can replace long-term contracts with per-hour software or talent.
Effective delegation is an elimination tool you can use to limit time spent on tasks that aren’t your forte.
Once you delegate tasks that a freelance expert can do for you, better than you, you can focus on the business strategy. Strategizing is the spine of your business that justifies a big chunk of those elusive four hours a week.
Learn more about how to delegate properly.
3. Automate
Certain tasks are better done by people; others are best done by software. There are hundreds of AI-supported tools that can help you automate the excessive number of hours spent in the traditional 40-hour workweek. For instance, task management, project management, marketing campaigns, and scheduling meetings are tasks that should not keep you stressed, and overworked.
Furthermore, think of automating your communications. If you dislike the burnout of real-time video apps, experiment with video chat, chatbots, and video recordings.
Learn about asynchronous communication to save more hours down the line!
4. Liberate
While the essence of the 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferris is to liberate more time, the meaning of freedom is in the improvement of how you live and how you work. The four-hour workweek is a mindset and lifestyle change that lets you maximize business expansion with projected risk-taking.
The Attainable 4-Hour Workweek: Build Your Virtual Freelance Team
To reduce the number of hours you work each week, do the following:
- Define how to grow with new products or product improvements – strategize.
- Find stress-free, low-risk ways to invest in business expansion – scale.
- Compile a trusted virtual team that will let you focus on strategy – delegate.
- Ascertain the digital tools for automation – automate.
Don’t know where to start? We have free tools that can help you find the best way forward for your business and new lifestyle design.
Strategize, scale, delegate, and automate with the delegation Master Pack. Click below to get free access:
