Tim Ferriss: The 4-Hour Work Week
EPISODE 155
In Episode 155: let's talk Tim Ferriss, a listener favorite and his 4 Hour Work Week. Forget the old concept of retirement and all of those deferred-life plans–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times.
Whether your dream is escaping the rat race or earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management. The 4 Hour Work Week is the blueprint.
SHOW OUTLINE
INTRO
Intro from Tim = is testing your product the Secret to Success
Condition Yourself For Failure (2m49)
TIM’S STEPS TO ESCAPE THE RAT RACE
Tim tells us about the Process of Elimination
Pareto’s Law (1m22)
Tim’s Low information diet
Let things wait (1m31)
What is Hourly vs Annual income
Outsource your life (1m43)
HOW TO DO THIS
Set your objectives and be more organised in your approach to time management
Spend time on the things that are most profitable (3m58)
OUTRO
Is the 4-hour work week possible? Step back and forget about what people want you to do and what is popular
Unplug and Reset (4m)
CLIP LIST
Condition Yourself For Failure
Pareto’s Law
Let things wait
Outsource your life
Spend time on the things that are most profitable
Unplug and Reset
TRANSCRIPT
And welcome to the moonshots podcast. It's episode 95, and it's going to be a lot shorter than four hours. I'm your cohost Mike Parsons. And I am joined as always by the man of exploration himself is to Mark Pearson Freeland. Good morning. Good morning, Mike. It is a big old morning of digging in to new ideas, new tests, new opportunities to learn.
I'm pumped. How are you doing this morning? I'm doing good. I think, uh, the reason both of us should be incredibly pumped is that, that last show we did with David Goggins was one adrenaline mission packed adventure. And I think that the adventure is going to continue, but. In a different style. So who are [00:01:00] we going to discuss today?
And what is this new series? That's going to challenge some of our conventional thinking. What is this? What is in head of us? Mark Pearson, freelance. Well, continuing this concept of David Goggins with the keep learning, keep pushing yourself and go out and give things a go. We are today. Kicking off our incredible art.
Obviously unsurprising for individual episodes, all about the podcasting legend and entrepreneur, Tim Ferris. What a, what a series it's going to be. Mike, may I, I gotta tell you, um, Tim Ferris has played. A really significant role in my life. I remember reading the four hour work week (buy on Amazon) and I remember the change in juice.
Um, and I am so glad to share this with you and to share this with [00:02:00] our audience, uh, because he, he really, uh, has had a great effect on the way I see the world, the way I managed my life, both at a practical level and, um, on a bigger level too. Um, I think, uh, Tim Ferris is a beautiful segue from the thinking of Gladwell and cynic and Adam Grant who are very thoughtful, considerate guys.
Tim is taking us on an adventure where he just experiments out loud. And I think that is a very fitting, uh, topic for us here on the moonshots podcast. Yeah, I really do in a, in a time that. All of us are learning and being agile and adjusting our way of working as well as the way that we kind of coexist.
I feel like especially the lessons from four hour work week and also overall Tim's style is, is totally valuable. You know, this idea of ambition, this idea of putting your dreams into practice, [00:03:00] the idea of. Bettering yourself and learning out loud, which is a topic that you and I talk about a lot. Mike, I feel like that the whole Tim Ferriss series is going to be a real opportunity for us and our listeners to reflect on the way that we currently learn currently test currently dig into our lifestyles.
So I'm very, very pumped to, to begin this week for sure. And he's, uh, he's full books that we're going to cover will be today. We'll do the four hour work week. Uh, in the next episode, it will be the four hour shifts following that tools of Titans and tribe of mentors. So we have an Epic adventure into somebody that I think compliments so very well.
The worker Gladwell of cynic, who are profoundly challenging us on questions of why I think. What we can expect from Tim Ferriss today is some real challenges on [00:04:00] how we spend out time. If we've chosen the mission. If we know our purpose, if we've read the books in the work of Brene Brown, Simon, Sinek and others.
If we've learned from those innovators, what teams uniquely gives us is the opportunity to spend our time better, which I think is fantastic. So as we start this adventure, Mark, what's the first clip you want to hit us with? What is the first idea from Tim Ferris and his book? The four hour workweek? I think there's a lot to learn from this first clip mic of Tim Ferris.
Reflecting back, looking back at his career back at when he was in college and one of the first, and I'd say most important lessons that any of us can learn. So no better intro in my mind is hearing from Tim himself, uh, and how we can condition ourselves for failure. So my story starts with an audio book.
It was my first product. I was [00:05:00] convinced this was in college, that it would be my ticket to millions of dollars in changing the world. And it was designed for guidance counselors in high school who wanted to help States get into their first choice. Colleges spent ages putting this thing together, spent all of my money, uh, but inventory and initial run of about 400 copies.
And it's sold a grand total of. One copy to my mother, not a one was legitimately soul. And it's because I wasn't thinking as my market, I was thinking of my market. In other words, I wasn't writing for a target market that I belong to. And that was a mistake. So I learned two things from that. Number one, I think, as your market of your market and number two is that you should design your product after you know, what your market is.
Okay. So you find your market and then design a product for them. That's what I did with the four hour workweek. And even though it was turned down by [00:06:00] 26, out of 27 publishers, before it was sold, I was confident because I tested it and I had done it very cheaply. So on Google ad words, for example, I tested the title the four hour work week with about a dozen others.
And this is how it worked. I bid on terms such as retirement roll travel. Content related to the content in the book. And then when people search that on Google, on the right hand side, with the sponsored results, you would see ads that had the headlines prospective headlines as the ad titles, and then the prospective subtitles as the ad text.
And it led to an empty page. Okay. Under construction page, but Google mixed and matched the titles and the subtitles. So for less than $200, I could see which combination of title and subtitle had the highest click through rate and the four hour workweek as much of a blessing and a curse as it is, ended up being the title, that one.
As did the subtitle [00:07:00] that we used. So what I learned is through that and through all of my experiences up to this point is that you need to fail and learn how to fail conditioning. Yeah. Yourself to fail, but in very small reversible ways. And I think that, uh, what a friend of mine, Joe Sugarman said, he's one of the highest paid copywriters on the planet and that it.
And that is for every problem. Uh, the problem itself presents an opportunity that dwarfs the problem. And that is to say that if I had only looked at my failure with the audio book and viewed it as a failure in the product, let's say, and not in the process, I wouldn't have taken away much. Instead. I realized that my approach wasn't right, fixed my approach, and that has led to a lot of great success.
Woo. You know, so good. Mark. It is so good to hear people talking frankly, about failure. I mean, failure is something that we are [00:08:00] always so reluctant to admit, to let alone talk about, I find it, I mean, just off the bat, how good is that? He's like, I literally printed 400 books and. Apart from the one my mum bought the single one with.
So it reminds me so much of Eric Reese admitting when he created lean startup, as an idea, and as a book, he spent four years building a product that nobody wanted. So he's spent his career now helping others avoid that same problem. Don't you find it? When we listen to Tim Ferris and hear him say, wow, I really failed.
But. I was capable of evaluating and changing the approach, not just saying, okay, it was a dad, but the fact that he said, okay, so I changed my approach and then success came, but it started with conditioning, conditioning himself and admitting to himself that he failed. And then he's kind of learned to take [00:09:00] much more discrete, smaller reversible risks, but it all started with.
What a flop. I love that. Don't you? Yeah, I really do. And just to build on that, it's almost, once you admit that the difficulty, the desirable difficulty as some of our moonshot is, would describe it as once you had met or are open to the fact that a desirable difficulty and a challenge is an opportunity to learn and actually.
Tim's um, copywriter friend calls it an opportunity that dwarfs the problem only then can you have that confidence or maybe that clarity to look back and see them as small moments that you can, um, learn from. And I love this idea, fail in reversible ways. Fail often, fail quickly, learn from them, test and learn and go out and do it better, you know, as a.
A perfect [00:10:00] career lesson for Tim to have gone through it at an early age and then realized it's so valuable. And it's still something we can all learn from as we get older and through our careers, the idea that if it doesn't work, Hey, that's cool. Put your hands up and then we can, you can learn from it, just see it as an opportunity rather than a, um, a disappointment perhaps.
Yes. Or, or what he said, man. Okay. Is it, don't just walk away from it and say, well, that was a crap book. I'm never gonna do that again. Yeah. He did the reverse. He said, I'm going to do it again, but I'm just going to change how, how I go at it. Um, And so there's this, this little tip he's giving us, like take much smaller discreet experiments and tests.
Um, so you don't go through this entire linear process and have a big failure at the end, like test and learn through the journey and you'll get there. And Annie can be the test and learn piece can be cheap and easy. You [00:11:00] know, the technique that he's describing, even though. It might sound difficult to some of us, actually, I think it's pretty, pretty straightforward, you know, doing it under 200 bucks.
And what said, what was the output? One of the most well known and popular podcast is as well as, you know, entrepreneurs and all a best selling book. I mean, number one on the New York times bestseller, right? Boom. It's it's undeniable at all for a quick test and learn process that maybe took him a weekend, a couple hundred bucks.
I mean, talk about value. Exactly. Because he had that emergent discovery that curiosity taking these small experiments after he admitted he had failed. But then re-evaluated the process. And I think this really sets up the show ahead of us today. I think what we see is, um, Tim's thinking is confronting us with, are we doing things in the right [00:12:00] way?
How are we going about the things we do? So ahead of this, on this show, we've got all sorts of goodies. We've got some thoughts around, um, making priorities, how to think and protect yourself from information. Um, had to think about your time and evaluate it and where you spend it and, uh, identifying the things.
Uh, that mean the most and that, um, all kind of comes together with some thinking around big picture wise, the room needs we still have, even though this book is over 10 years old, we still have this fundamental requirement to kind of reset how we spend our time. And that's all ahead of as Mark. Uh, we've got a bevy of clips.
It's uh, it's, it's actually a really nice step change from say, Gladwell. And Adam Grant and some of the other authors, isn't it, it really is. And I loved the Gladwell series and I'm a big [00:13:00] fan of Adam Grant or the series and the books that we covered. But actually, yeah, I'm pretty excited to dig into, to Tim Ferriss.
I think as a, as an observation, he's pretty. It's quite practical. You know, we, we learned a lot from Malcolm Gladwell as well as Adam Grant. And there's a lot of data, which I know you and I, we love to get into and we love to hold on and see the insights that they're both saying. When you think about the Tim series, I think we're going to learn a lot of practical elements, practical tips.
I think that's where Tim Ferriss really comes into his own. Yes. Um, now, before we get into a bevy of Tim Ferriss clips and really, um, uh, unlocking the, all the insights that are in the four hour workweek, Mark, I want to ask you one thing. If our listeners are spending their time on one action, we have one small ask of them as they're listening right now.
Um, What is that [00:14:00] one ask that we would love it, of them to do, to help spread the word about our show and how to share it. Uh, there's thinking out loud and there's learning out loud. What's the one thing we ask of them. We'd love you listeners, just to pop into your podcasting app of choice and leave us a quick review.
Like Mike saying, we love it hearing from our listeners, seeing our show that we, um, that we love doing. And we love sharing with all of our listeners every week. We like seeing it appearing in charts around the world, and it's all down to you, dear listeners. And it's all down to the way that you're sharing it, the way that you're reviewing it and writing it.
That's how we get into different markets and see ourselves spiking with new listeners. And. The idea of getting our show into the ears and onto this thing of, of listeners around the world gives us such joy and inspiration. So our one request to you all listening, [00:15:00] leave us a rating and review and help spread the word.
Yeah. So. Right now, just while, while we get this next clip ready to go, just jump into your podcasting. And I mean, at worst, at least just give us a rating, a whatever it is, um, and, uh, you know, consider leaving us your thoughts in reviews. Um, what's been fantastic is, uh, over the last week, folks in Slovakia and Bulgaria.
Have, uh, given us ratings and reviews. And so we're seeing a huge growth in listeners there and not to forget that we have listeners all around the world, uh, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, Russia, Neu, Ireland. This is so cool that we can all learn out loud together. And we ask only one thing of you we'll put in the work, but we'll make the show.
If you get out there, leave those ratings and reviews. So we can share this work with more [00:16:00] people who are on a mission to be the best version of themselves that they can be. And I think one of the first things that Tim Ferriss can help us with is if we want to be the best version of ourselves. It's all about making good decisions and how to eliminate the things that don't matter and focus on the things that do.
So let's have a listen, Tim Ferris talking about paraders law. Here are a few simple steps you can take to escape the rat race entirely, not just one of the first steps is the process of elimination. To start, we need to consider something called Pareto's law, more commonly known as the 80 20 principle because in order to work less, not have everything fall apart, you'll have to modify the 20% of activities that are producing 80% are your desired outcomes also.
That time to determine the 20% of [00:17:00] activities and people who are consuming 80% of your time uses principle for everything, customers work tasks, but also for personal chores, even for friends, the goal here is twofold. Number one, to find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them. And then secondly, and this is just as important to find your strengths and those critical few tasks.
So you can multiply your output working every hour, every minute from nine to five, with some type of. Isn't the goal it's simply the structure most people use is actually a legacy from a time that's already been obsolescence in the knowledge economy. The more important thing is to shift from presence to performance, cut out the static, all the things that consume time and income without contributing back and focus on the critical few.
You'll find that very few things matter. The critical few. Where only a few things matter. I mean, that's pretty confrontational as a, as a, a [00:18:00] man myself who kind of sees any workstream that's coming across my desk or anything that I interact with during the day, I feel like it's almost a new priority.
It's a new distraction perhaps as Tim Ferriss would call it. And this is 80 20 rule. That we can dig into. I feel it's, it's so valuable. Find those inefficiencies, find your strengths and make that balance multiply. Um, in order to multiply your output, if you can find those, identify them and spend your time in the right way, manage your time in a better way.
As Tim's telling us, it's going to be so much more valuable, so much more honest with you and your priorities. Right. You know, so when I think about paraders law, What I want to do, Mark is I actually want to get you to share with us what your 80 20 really is. So if I ask you, uh, what's the 20% of the [00:19:00] things that you do that create 80% of the value, right?
Um, do you, do I know it's tricky, right? Um, it's really hard. And I think this is, this is such a good exercise. What are a couple of things you think you do in your work? Um, that create the most value. I think the value that I can bring is when I'm, I think connecting people, I think trying to communicate or align channels of communication between different parties and trying to get us to the next stage.
I think if I boil down. The best moments where I'm adding value to a project. It is that communication piece. It's probably on the phone. Maybe it's face to face. Maybe it's interpreting what somebody wants and trying to turn it into an action. [00:20:00] I think it's, it comes down to, for me, I think communication, but actually the, the conversely, the 80%, you know, all sorry, the rest of my time.
I think it gets kind of wasted. It's a lot of emails. It's a lot of back and forth. It's a lot of lack of clarity, isn't it? Yeah. So, so let's keep the experiment going. So we know that you're the super connector. What's the one thing that you do that doesn't create much value that you want to, and this is crucial to what we're learning from Tim Ferriss.
And four hour workweek is what should you eliminate?
Well, that's, it's a hard one. I have, I have been thinking about it and to be totally honest, I'm not sure whether I have the answer yet. I think that's okay. I think one of the initial responses that I had after digging into the clips this week was, you know, emails. You [00:21:00] know, we are over burdened with, with emails.
Aren't we? How much of a, a block of that is to actually be more efficient with one's time again, here's the here's the challenge is the, um, I suppose the desirable difficulty that we've got to figure out, how do you eliminate something alike emails in a world with it? You know, he's connected via instant messaging, you know, all across the world.
We have businesses and relationships on pretty much every time zone that we know. So you can't necessarily eliminated. It's trying to find the way maybe, maybe it's maybe it's the manner in which I interact with emails. Maybe that maybe is maybe there's the lesson. Okay, so, so that's great. So you're, you're centrally saying what you want to eliminate is, um, [00:22:00] the not urgent and not important email and that's a job to do, but there you go.
We've already got our feet gift from Tim Ferris, which is forcing us to use parameters or an ask ourselves. What's the thing that we do that creates the most value. And what's the thing that we do that doesn't create that value because you want to try and eliminate this. Now I want to suggest to you a followup tool, which is really powerful.
When we think about how we spend our time, it's called the Eisenhower matrix. And what it says is the way you choose them, what you want to work on right now, now in the here and now is you say, what is important? And what is urgent and that's what you do right now. Now there's Eisenhower matrix then says if it's important, but not urgent, you should immediately plan the time in your diary to do it.
Now, we're going to put a link in the show notes to the [00:23:00] Eisenhower matrix, because it's really powerful. Now, if it is a non-urgent thing, Um, you should obviously, uh, uh, sorry, if it's a not important thing, you should obviously delegate it to someone else. Who's better doing it. If it's neither urgent and not important, you just shouldn't do it at all.
So this is the four quadrants of the Eisenhower matrix. It's so very powerful because we are often taking urgent things and. Dropping the important things, which is another way of saying there are opportunities for us to create enormous value, but we allow all of these day to day distractions getting in between and we never really get to it.
Cause I think that's what we're talking about here. Isn't it, man. We just there's so many things preventing us getting to the work. Yeah. Well, exactly. Nowadays everything feels like a priority. Everything that comes over your desk. [00:24:00] It's a matter of, Oh, you better saw this out, straight away, but actually the truth is, again, I love the Eisenhower matrix.
We've we've mentioned it on the show before actually, and it's a perfect tool to analyze the importance. If something, is it a practice? Do I need to schedule it? Yeah, can I, can I reduce it? And I think, yeah. Wonderful, wonderful way of approaching that. It is, it really, really is. So there you got it. We've already got like a huge corruptive thought in our mind, which is to use paraders law to eliminate the things that don't create value and focus ourselves in the highest order of things.
Where is our unique ability? Where is the thing we were born to do is spend more time doing that and less time doing things that are neither important or urgent. Thank you, mr. Ferris. And the good news for all of us is we've got plenty, more [00:25:00] ideas, uh, disruptions for us. Where do we want to go now, Mark, we're digesting paraders law, but what should we follow it up with?
I think building on the Eisenhower matrix and thinking about how much information comes across us, this next clip or this next tip really from, from Tim Ferris is all about information and the value of letting things wait. Another critical step and a real compliment to elimination is what I call the low information diet or cultivating selective ignorance.
Keeping abreast all the new developments in any field will consume all of your time. It'll be all input and notes output you can't possibly digest all that information. So more effective approach is to try to catch up when need be as opposed to keeping up at all times a big part. Ignorance is learning to let things wait.
For example, email. So email is the single largest [00:26:00] acceptable interruption in modern life. And it's a very convenient way of simulating forward motion without accomplishing anything. It shouldn't be a workspace. It's a tool. And one of the easiest methods I've seen for controlling email and one that's become quite popular in Silicon Valley is setting up a simple autoresponder, much like a vacation auto response that says something like the following, dear, all.
Effort to actually get work done. I'm testing a new email policy. I'm checking in, responding to email only twice a day at 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM Pacific time or whatever your time zone happens to be. If you need a response before one of these two times for anything urgent, please call me on my cell phone.
Thanks for understanding this move to greater effectiveness and efficiency, whatever your name is, this gives you the breathing room finally, to single tasks and focus on completing the mission critical tasks. The critical few. From start to finish without interruption. Ooh. What a call? Uh, what a [00:27:00] siren, a to taking control of how you work.
I think what you were mentioning Mark with burrito's law is exactly what Tim addresses here. We've let email take over the show and it's time to tack back, take back the reins. We gotta step in there and say, Whoa. Let's have a batch process, but email let's take control. Email is not going to dictate what is our priority.
It shall be us and my, if I zoom out of this, I think what he's really saying thing is don't let all of these modern tools and technology become the work because just in the same way, people think being outraged on social media. Is there making a contribution? No, no. You got to actually do something if you want to change the world.
And I think it's the same here in a personal lens. If you want to realize your dreams and hopes and aspirations, you got to take control of the situation. And that starts with [00:28:00] batching your email, structuring your day, structuring your time and focusing on the things you were born to do rather than. Just tit for tat email ping pong.
Um, this speaks to me so much. I mean, I can't tell you Mark, the attention I'd put into and I don't get it right all the time, but just batching email, um, one batch in the morning, one batch in the middle of the day and then one, one big batch. Um, before I wrap up for the day, I think there's a real learning here, which is.
We can make the mistake of thinking cause were on the mail and we're responding and pushing things around. They're actually being productive, but that the, the reading and sending of email is not actually work itself, but we think it is right. Oh 100%. This, this speaks to me so much, this, this [00:29:00] tip and this, um, you know, less than that, that Tim's suggesting that we learn from, and it reminds me of, of blocking time blocking I'm a new day to really focus on some deep work.
And Mike is, you know, I'm a big fan of blocking out my calendar, focusing on one thing at a time. And this lesson from Tim Ferriss speaks to me so much. Not only block your time to work on projects and some block time to do your emails, get them out of the way, closed down that tab, close down that, that software, and then get into the work.
Cause you're right. If you're doing the work, when you're replying to emails is Tim's calling out. It's just a tool. It's a tool that enables us to get from point a to point B, but actually in the juicy details and the real creativity and innovation gets done outside of them. So this for me is one big green tick.
This is something I'm going to start doing. [00:30:00] Yeah. Yeah. Um, let things, wait, you set the priorities because anyone in a modern job is going to be so. Uh, Slack texts messaged. I messaged emailed you name it. There's just going to be a bombardment of notifications emails. The only, the only sensible way to respond is filter.
Take control. And I think this is a real challenge to us. Um, when we think about where we're spending our attention and how we're managing our workflow, but Tim's not quite finished yet in challenging some of our working assumptions on how we spend our time and where we put our attention. Uh, this next clip that we've got is really thinking, um, And evaluating the things you do through a lens of time.
And what he goes [00:31:00] on to challenge us to do is to start outsourcing. The third important tool I'd like to mention in one of my personal favorites is outsourcing to get started though. We first need to replace the very obsolete concept of annual income. This is a very deceptive metric with hourly income and people are generally extremely hesitant to delegate or outsource because they feel they can do something.
Read themselves. This is very inaccurate. So let's start with the very basic calculation. Of hourly time. If you make, let's say $50,000 per year, you can cut up less. Zero subs is fifties and you divide that in half and you get 25, you see making $25 an hour. This is assuming you get two weeks off per year and you're working 40 hours per week.
Let's just say on the very high end can hire a personal assistant at $30 per hour to handle one work day of eight hours. So your [00:32:00] cost per hours and $5. So his or her 30 minus your 25. That means $40 for full eight hour day of freedom. This also means that you can take a three day weekend every week. It will cost you $40 per week.
I hire virtual assistants around the world, which only takes a few hours to help me with just about everything. From business research, to reading email, cutting hundreds of email, down to four or five that I actually have to deal with to travel product development, purchasing planning parties. Even online dating, there are a lot of unorthodox creative uses.
Personal outsourcing is only limited by your imagination and return on investment is astounding 400, 500%. Even for someone who makes 30, $40,000 a year. Well, I, and it's again, such a great practical tip from, from Tim Ferriss here, the idea of outsourcing your life, delegating [00:33:00] it, finding virtual assistants to weigh in and managed.
Maybe it's your diary, your emails, production, whatever it might be. I, I think it's such a. Again, a bit of a confrontational or challenging, um, tip from, from Tim Ferriss that I think would undeniably have a positive impact. I think it would be so valuable to do. Um, but it's a bit of a challenge, right, Mike?
Well, it is. And it's a beautiful follow on from the Eisenhower matrix because part of this Eisenhower matrix is delegation, right. Or as Tim would call it, outsource it. And I think that I tell you this, that there's this thought that came to my mind as we're listening to him and it's like this, I want to, I want to look at the symptom that I think most of us can relate to, which is, Oh my gosh, I have so much work to do.
Right. [00:34:00] Yeah. And do you have this feeling? Yeah. Oh yeah. Regularly. And now I have to catch myself. Cause I think, I, I think I know where you're going. And then, then you like, Oh, you're making all these trade offs, so, okay. Well, I'm going to finish the week. What is like the, the, the, the minimum I can get done and survive for the next week.
Right? That's, that's how it feels for a lot of us. And, you know, we, there are ebbs and flows, but I think you could characterize the life of the modern. Knowledge worker is that we're doing so much more, we're so much more productive than other generations that we get. So many messages that we're, we're just trying to keep our head above water.
Right? Sure. Yup. So what happens is we start doing this thing where we work incredible hours Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, [00:35:00] and you're like, Just kind of falling over the finish line on Friday. Maybe we've even got this terrible habit that work is, are getting into Saturday and Sunday too. But we're getting into this bit where there's just so much to do and there's not enough time right now.
The first thing that. Tim is asking us to do is eliminate the things that should be that are not important, not urgent, um, focus on the information and the attention that really matters. And then he come brings us back now in this clip and he's saying, okay, well, there are things that you can delegate that you can.
Outsource. And here's where I think we really get to the essence of what we can take from Tim Ferris. And I want to come back to this story. I was telling like, okay, you've worked so hard Monday through Friday. You feel like you're just keeping your head above water. You don't feel like you're leading the way you're, you're just keeping up.
[00:36:00] Is that a feeling you think you could characterize for yourself Mark and that many of our listeners could, could relate to? I think that's probably a feeling that. That myself as well as probably many others can, can believe yet I've experienced. And it's crazy, right? Because you're, I've worked like crazy.
I've worked maybe 10, 11, 12 hour days back to back to back. And I'm just managing to keep up. I mean, that's just exhausting when you think about it, right? Oh, absolutely. It's exhausting. And you know, I think as an observation, it's probably one of those things that our listeners, if they've experienced it before you do you, you naturally ask yourself the question, is it worth it?
Right. And, and then, and then the, cause the thing is your work crazy. And you're like, you've just kind of fallen over the finish line. You're like, Oh, well, that didn't feel great. So I think it's, so this point that Tim turns up and [00:37:00] says, well, hang on a second. You know, you should be spending your time on the things that matter filtering and so forth.
But what he's also doing is find the things that might be, say, not urgent but important. And ask yourself, can I train somebody else to do it for me? This is where things change. Don't it doesn't matter. This is the moment where you're like, Ooh, hang on. Yeah. I mean, basically what he's, what he's kind of saying is wouldn't it be great if you had.
A double of yourself. Imagine having two people doing the work, what could you do? One of you could focus on priority. The other one could focus on the things that you've delegated as per the Eisenhower matrix. Yes. He's calling it out as quite a practical thing that we can go and do, which I think actually it is.
And, and here's where I think what we all suffer from. We S we say, Oh, I've got two choices either I can do it now. And get it done quickly, or I can [00:38:00] invest more time. To brief and delegate properly keyword properly to someone so that in the longterm it's much more efficient. And I think the mistake we all make, or we tend to make most of the time is we go, I'll just do it because it's quicker, which is great in the short term.
Terrible. Absolutely terrible in the longterm. Yeah, isn't it. Oh, and I am definitely one of those people whose natural reaction is are I'll just do it. Give me the keyboard or give me the mouse. I'll go and do that. I'll pick up the phone if you brief somebody properly. And again, that's really focused on that word and actually brief them properly.
It. Will alleviate things in the long run. And if anything, it'll make you more efficient and probably mean that the work you're doing is better because of it. Absolutely. Now here's the thing. Let's just do the math here. If you [00:39:00] invest. In spending a couple of hours to train someone, to pick up a task that maybe takes any 30 minutes in the short term, the task only takes 30 minutes, but you spend four sets of 30 minutes.
I two hours to brief them properly to document it, to take them through it, to check in and make sure they understand it. It only takes four instances of that task to occur. And you've actually already squared away and got your return on investment on your time spent. And then after that, when they successfully do the task for you, it's all profit after that because they're doing it now.
You all profit, you're already seeing yourself with more time on your hands. Right. So it's a question of asking no self what's like a repetitive non-urgent task that I can delegate [00:40:00] to somebody and over time for the medium and longterm enjoy the return because it's freeing up my time, because imagine if you said to your case, man, You could spend an hour less a day on email.
Here's where we find our motivation. I want you to imagine what you could be doing with that time. Imagine that right. I could be encouraging our moonshot listeners to leave ratings and reviews amongst other things amongst other things. But the point here is what Tim says. It's like, at what point are you going to take the time to outsource or to delegate?
And I think. If we just were to think about, Oh, if I wasn't doing that, what could I be doing of high value? I think this is where I found the motivation. So the blocker, the blocker is taking the time to breathe properly. Here is my golden tip that I [00:41:00] try to embody is that, and you've seen me do this at work, right when I want to delegate an activity or a task, particularly if it's a technology based.
Do you know what I do. I make a video where I record my screen and I give a voiceover to the thing that I'm doing. And then I sent the person that I'm delegating to a full brief and description of the re recurring task. Plus I give them video that they can constantly come back to. And this was my huge breakthrough is we often, you know what, we'll sit on the phone and tell someone a thing, but then it's like, there's a lot of information being shared and you can't return to the conversation.
So I found. Providing a video walkthrough of a screen capture or something similar to this. So they have an asset they can, can replay to themselves [00:42:00] two or three times. Is an invaluable way of delegating because so much of what we do is probably a browser based task that you can just record what you're doing in the browser with a voiceover and they can continually come back.
It's not like if they didn't take the note in the, in the chat, then the information is lost. They can just return to the video and play it a couple of times. And I think this is a huge accelerator to outsourcing and delegating. What do you think? I, 100% agree. I think having the asset that you can refer back to actually, again, saves you time.
You won't have to reiterate or revisit any of those initial delegation moments and then call it, spend the time initially to create an asset that can be reviewed on YouTube or on an email, um, in any, in a movie attachment, whatever it might be. I think that's a real aha moment, you know, [00:43:00] creating that screen capture cause you're right.
It saves a lot of time. For the individual who's picking up the work as well, because they can refer back to it. Let's try it. Yeah. Now here's the thing. Um, why does taking either a voice memo or a video screen grab, why does this work so well is because when you're delegating, you're essentially taking one task that you have learned.
And you're giving it to someone else who needs to learn it now, how do we learn? We learn through the doing so just because you get on a call and you tell someone, this is what I want you to do. They'll take notes, but it's not until they attempt to do it themselves. That they'll start to incur. Um, barriers or things they don't understand, or how does this work if you've provided the video, rather than them ringing you up a couple of days later and say, I'm sorry, I don't understand.
Or doing the task incorrectly. They can refer back to the video as they are [00:44:00] trying to actually do the task so they can learn through the doing. And I think this is really profound. I think too often. We think one call that's it full of? Got it. They're often racing, but that's not the fact people learn through doing so give them an asset that they can refer and they go, yeah.
Oh, okay. I'll go back to the 12 minutes and 30 seconds in the video where he's doing this complex thing on the screen. And then you can slow it down and pause it and go, okay, I'm going to try that. I mean, Mark, have you ever had this thing where you're doing a YouTube, how to video and you pause it, try and do what they do.
It's all the time. It's so, so valuable, you know, it's, it's it guarantees, it gives you the confidence that you're doing it correctly. Exactly. So that's why, how to videos are so popular on YouTube. So I guess what I'm really saying to wrap this up is make your own how to video for whatever it is, task you're outsourcing or delegating in your life.
[00:45:00] Be it professional, personal, give all of the context in a captured assets and people can keep coming back to it. As they're trying to learn it from you. I think this is such a good way to make outsourcing and delegation easier to make it quick and more efficient. Fantastic barreled on, I think Tim Ferriss key lessons then.
Right. Look. Yup. Learning out loud. That's what it's all about Mark. Now, just to kind of recap, we've got three big thoughts that he's given us about eliminating things that don't matter, filtering on information and putting your attention towards the things that do outsourcing and delegating things to others.
That makes sense. I think this is a great. Platform. And I think what it does now is it kind of forces us to, uh, this big question about, well, okay then. Well then where do we spend our time now, before we play that clip, I [00:46:00] think we should encourage our listeners. Matt want you to go spend their time at a certain destination?
As a son, very popular destination, online that you can all go and visit our dear listeners moonshots.io. On this side, you'll find all of our latest episodes. Once Tim Ferris, four hour work week goes live that's 95 shows all available. Not only in your podcasting app of choice, but moonshots.io online, you can also find our show notes and transcripts for all of the shows, including the Eisenhower matrix as well as Reed Hastings is culture deck you'll even find a lot of mantras mantras that we've been inspired by.
From our innovators and some of the key lessons that they've taught us, you can also sign up for our newsletter to be notified when the latest episode goes live and also follow our blog too. So moonshots.io is where all of our information is [00:47:00] go and check it out. Let us know what you think. And just as a bit of a tease, we have our hundredth centenary show coming up on moonshot, start IO.
We have published our favorite innovators that we're gonna study together. So I encourage all of you to go to moonshots.io and you'll see what's installed for our very special 100th show. But we're now coming back to Tim Ferriss and the four hour work week with thinking. About where to spend our time.
And the great news for us is that Tim Ferris has some great advice on how to spend time on the things that are most profitable. Just reiterate then what the premise of the book is. This is the book, the premise of the book. I would say there, there are two premises. The first is that the objective is not busy-ness.
So a massive action without clearly defined [00:48:00] objectives is a form of laziness. And secondly, that the deferred life plan, so to speak that is a retirement based life plan, a long haul career planning after. Redeem all the experiences you want to have, the obsessions you want to own is fundamentally flawed.
Uh, and I don't think it's a very difficult for people to argue with the logic. It's easy. It's easy to attack me. Okay. Is 30 years old, doesn't have any kids. What is this guy now? We're accused of being too nice to our guests. So Robert and I have decided we are going to attach exactly. But then we read about the kitchen boxing.
Right? So, so, um, so we like the chat room.
That's fine. I mean, if people want to attack me, if we all had the same opinion, the world would be a very boring place, but let's just take personal outsourcing as an example. I can't do it. The boss I'd get fired. Okay. Uh, first of all, I don't distinguish between work [00:49:00] or business and personal time in so much as if you're misspending that time, whether it's on household chores on the weekend, when you've put in 80 hours from Monday to Friday or checking email to simulate forward motion.
Goes to defining your measurable objectives. Those are both a waste of time. So if you have a job and there's absolutely no way you can apply it, uh, outsourcing that job, which you've got, we can question in a second. That still means, let's say your son has a birthday party on Sunday. He wants the equivalent of the seasons tickle me Elmo, which is impossible to find rather than spending your entire Saturday, uh, going from store to store over.
Let's say a period of five hours to find the time. You could call or email, ask Sunday, go to ask sunday.com. And for 40 to $50 a month, have 30 increases would be one. You call them. You say, here's my zip code. Call every toy store within a 10 mile radius. Find this toy, make a reservation or purchase it using my credit card and have it held behind the counter.
Call me when it's [00:50:00] ready to tell me where to pick it up. And that would save you four to five hours, right? Let's just say that you make $50,000 a year. Um, there are number of ways you can go about it, but an easy way to approximate your. Per hour income is she worked 40 hours a week and get two weeks of vacation years to cut off the last three zeros and chop that remaining number now.
So that would mean that if you make $50,000 a year, you make roughly $25 an hour. Okay. So if you can, for free $40, get, let's say 30 inquiries. This one inquiry alone on a weekend saves you four to five hours. Well, that's, let's say a hundred to $125 profit in time currency that you gained. Uh, and. Well, the goal is not again to get from 80 to four hours.
I don't believe in never claim that someone can do that overnight. Uh, and most people, if they enjoy their work would never want to get to four hours. Um, so the objective is to spend time on the things that are most profitable or most [00:51:00] enjoyable. And, uh, for some people let's say those are pastors, writers, teachers.
It's not being inactive. That's never the objective. I work my ass off on things that I care about. I spent I'm the. Very busy guy, as you know, but on things that I choose to spend my time on, uh, yeah, those people will say, pastor who suffers from, uh, let's say emotional fatigue, sympathy, fatigue, his objective will simply be to reduce the volume of work so that he can be most effective.
Um, and whether it's using ask Sunday or simply training yourself to check email at set times so that it doesn't become a reactive, uh, disorder. It's a good, good summarization clip that it's going over. A lot of the key lessons that we've learned. And most importantly, it's Tim calling out that it doesn't necessarily happen overnight is not necessarily saying you want to get down to four hour week because you want to clock [00:52:00] off and go to the pub, go and play sport all the time.
Instead it's reduced the amount of time. That you're being inefficient and ineffective with. And instead reappropriate or re prioritize it into something that's either more enjoyable or more important. And for me, you know, one of the key clips or key moments in the clip is right, actually at the very beginning where Tim's calling out massive inaction.
Sorry. Massive action. Without objection is a of laziness. And if we dig into that for a second, it's the idea that everything can change. You can change the way that you react to being overwhelmed with emails. I'm being me. I'm calling myself, I'm being lazy at night. Reappropriating. The way that I interact with emails.
Yes, I'm doing the same thing day in, day out, but I'm complaining about it perhaps, or I'm calling it out on moonshots [00:53:00] podcast. That actually I'm being lazy. What I should be doing is as Tim Ferriss is calling out here, test and learn test with a couple of different maybe software's or a couple of different time blocking mechanics and get better at it.
And that's, I think the real key thing that Tim's corny out in that clip, what do you think. I I'm I'm with you 100%. And I would say that there was one word that he used in that clip that I think really is the shift. Uh, and that word is choice. He's saying it is your choice to spend your time where you believe it is most effective, as opposed to what many of us struggle with, which is spending out time with things that we don't choose.
To spend our time and effort with, so he is forcing us, confronting us and saying, well, there's only one person that can solve this situation [00:54:00] and it's yourself. So you must take the steps. Number one. Do the 80 20 rule number two, process your information and not everything is both important and urgent and wherever you can outsource and delegate.
So you can spend more time on the things that are preferred bubble of that. Bring you joy. That is what he is saying. It is a choice. We are not victims. It's a choice. I think this is, uh, a very, very once you've processed this you're like dammit. Right? I'm batching my email. As of now it is. I mean, again, it's Tim Ferriss's book is.
Part inspiration and pop practical tips. Isn't it. He's calling out these truths and then saying, ah, well here's a quick idea. Why didn't you go and do this perfect batching email. I love that. I'm going to give them yeah. [00:55:00] Yup. He's, he's just making us aware. We've all got some bad habits and thank goodness.
He's not only giving us tools, uh, to kind of fix that, but I think he's giving us inspiration and, um, I want to play this last clip now, um, which helps us really put this piece of work the four hour workweek by Tim Ferriss and helps us put it in context. So for the last time on this show, let's take a listen to Tim Ferris, talking about unplugging and resetting.
The four hour work week is possible, but you need to completely unplug and reset. And the reason that's necessary is because there is an epidemic and I do mean epidemic in this country of information, abuse and information addiction. Where people have come to believe that checking email 200 times per day, having a Blackberry to your head or in your hand while you're at dinner or on the subway or in your car, or with your [00:56:00] friends, is the path to becoming more productive and more successful.
It isn't it isn't because giving everyone around you, every person in the world, immediate access to you is inviting interruption and inviting minutia to completely invade your life. Which is happening to everyone. And it did happen to me. I had no intention of writing this book, but from 2000 to 2004, I was working at startups in Silicon Valley.
I started my own, I was CEO and I worked from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM. Every day I checked outlook hitting send, receive 100 to 200 times per day, like a rat with a cocaine pellet dispenser slept under my cubicle, sent emails on Thanksgiving to prospects. It was a depressing. Scene. And it's a very unfortunately common scene.
And I think everyone is at a point of overwhelmed. There is more information than we can possibly organize. Time management is dead. How do you turn that? Turn that around the way you turn around is. You have [00:57:00] to completely unplug and reset. That means that you need to take a step back, forget about what people expect you to do.
Forget about what's popular and really look at what works and what is consuming your time. So there are four steps, definition, elimination, automation, and liberation definition is simple. First need to define your ideal lifestyle. What do you want to be doing from when you wake up to when you go to sleep?
And so what do you want to have? What do you want to be? What do you want to do? And how much does that ideal lifestyle cost? And that becomes your target elimination. Simple. It's getting rid of everything, all the static, all the noise, all the interruptions, all the micromanaging, all the people possible that interfere with getting you to that ideal lifestyle.
The third automation is about taking the few remaining tasks that are important to time consuming and either delegating, automating, or somehow outsourcing them. So in my [00:58:00] particular case, I have in army is MBAs in India, about 25 of them who work for $4 an hour and take care of tasks that would otherwise consume hundreds of my hours.
And then the last step liberation is about the final ingredient in lifestyle design, which is mobility. And then also how to use the time once you create it, which is very difficult for most people. Okay. This is fascinating, but that's the point? It is difficult. I mean, how do you put the Blackberry down?
Had aren't you worried that you're not going to make as much money that you're going to lose clients? Do you have statistics that show that that's not the case? I have statistics that would absolutely make your head spin. So if you're interrupted by email and phone, there was an experiment done at Kings Kings college.
For example, that showed that people who were stoned scored six points better on an IQ test and people who were interrupted by email and phone. And that now good to know at 26% of people in the American workforce are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The system is not working. So it's not a question of, of, if I should do this.
It's a question [00:59:00] of when it is the only real alternative. So one simple step people can take a baby step to prove the concept is to simply. Use an autoresponder set up an auto responder that tells everyone who emails you. I will be checking email twice a day. A great idea at 11 and 4:00 PM. If you require a more urgent response before one of those two times, call me on my cell phone.
Okay. If I start losing customers, I'm going to call you Tim. You can call me okay. Habit. Instead of losing customers, you'll get more done in the next 48 hours and you would end the next day. Wait, I mean, talk about a. Way to bring the show all around the four key lessons that we've covered Mike, throughout the four hours today in today's episode 95.
It's exactly what we've been talking about. You got to define the inefficiencies, identify what the priorities should be, eliminate those that you can do without [01:00:00] outsource or delegate where possible. And then you'll be liberated. You'll be able to start using that time more efficiently and using it in a way that ultimately is better value for not only you, but if you think about it for those around you too, whether it's family, friends, or we work and.
It's it was a, it was a good wake up moment for me, especially in that last clip, this information pandemic or information abuse. I think he calls it. It's exactly how I feel. There's so much with emails and contacts. So just time blocking or, or blocky mailing, and therefore keeping your plate clean and able to deep dive into other work.
It's such an easy, I think a potentially easy maybe. Way to move on from today onwards. Yeah. And I think what we really hoping learning out loud together with all of our listeners [01:01:00] is, you know, I think we've really tried to share with everyone that we, and everyone is suffering from this same overload of information.
Right. But here's the thing. If we use some of the methods that Tim is talking about. If we focus on what our natural abilities make us best out, if we do take control of the inbox, these are all. Ways in which we can have choices about how we spend out time. And that directly relates to us fulfilling our potential because it's the things we work on.
Those are the things that shall become true. And if we don't spend our time doing what we were born to do, if we're. Otherwise distracted then the key thing where it really stops. So if it's on us, so if we set that, it's our choice to get ourselves out of this, he's presenting to us this [01:02:00] roadmap, which starts with unplugging.
And re setting. And the crazy thing is he wrote this book 10, 15 years ago, and you listen to it now and it's like, he could, he could have recorded that this morning. Couldn't he? Yeah. It's still so true. It's true. And it's still particularly now when people are working remotely, regularly working from home more frequently.
This is a way to save your, your social versus work life. It's it? It seems so. Um, black and white really. So, yeah, Mark, I get the feeling you might be implementing a little bit of a batching program for the email. Would that be a deduction? I want to, I want to build on Tim Ferriss is test and learn approach and do it myself.
I think he's got so many truths here that I can, I'm not only inspired by, but I can [01:03:00] actually go and practically put into action. So I think I've, I've learned a lot. Mike from a, the four hour workweek by Tim Ferris. It's good. Right? It's really good. Well, I hope, uh, that, uh, you find all sorts of. All little small discrete tests and experiments you can do with your inbox and many more things.
Thanks to Tim Ferris. Hey, and listen. My thanks to you for sharing with me and all of our listeners, uh, has been a bit of a ride the old four hour work week, a bit of a bit of a bucket of cold water on the face. Isn't it? Yeah, it's a great, uh, confrontation as well as reminder that we can all choose how we use our time.
Yeah, powerful stuff. Okay. Well, Mark, thank you. Thank you to you and thank you to all of our listeners that seem to be popping up and all sorts of amazing places all around the world. We thank you for your [01:04:00] ears, your attention. We thank you for all your support, your reviews and writings. And we really hope that today we've given you a little bit of a wake up call on how you spend your time.
And we hope that whether it's the 80 20 rule or outsourcing and delegating or using the Eisenhower matrix, we hope that you have found a way to improve how you spend your time and focus on the things that you would naturally want to do. The things that you find your flow. And if you need to, you can go and unplug and reset, and there's no better place to do that than here together on the moonshots podcast.
That syrup.