The Tim Ferriss Show - #548: The Lost Presentation That Launched The 4-Hour Workweek — “Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World” from SXSW 2007

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

The Lost Presentation That Launched The 4-Hour Workweek — “Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World” from SXSW 2007 | Brought to you by “5-Bullet Friday,” my very own email newsletter. More on it below. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. This is a special episode, which features my very first speech at SXSW in March of 2007! I didn’t know that a recording existed, and it was a great surprise when Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and writer for The New Yorker sent it to me. He used it as part of his research for a recent article that was published in The New Yorker titled “Revisiting The 4-Hour Workweek: How Tim Ferriss’s 2007 manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval.” And the 2007 SXSW speech was really the event that put everything into high gear. Influential tech bloggers who had heard the SXSW talk wrote about The 4-Hour Workweek, which put it on the radar of bigger media outlets. Eventually, the book made it onto The New York Times Best Sellers list, where it stayed, more or less, for the next seven years. It’s been a wild ride. One last thing: Hugh Forrest, if you’re listening, thank you again for giving me a shot way back in the day! Please enjoy!This episode is brought to you by “5-Bullet Friday,” my very own email newsletter that every Friday features five bullet points highlighting cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world.It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday.*For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers,

have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast. Some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday.

So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time.

So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a question? and thanks for checking it out. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This episode is a special episode. I'm very

excited about this. And it is a trip down memory lane to look at one of those pivotal moments that you can sometimes point to where everything changed, even though at the time it wasn't clear just how large of an impact it was going to have in this case in my life. So this episode features my very first presentation at the South by Southwest conference from March of 2007. I didn't even know that a recording of this existed. I'd always wanted, I'd always hoped that there had been a recording, but I had concluded there wasn't. And it was a great surprise when Cal Newport, you can find him at calnewport.com, author of Deep Work and a writer for The New Yorker, among other outlets, sent it to me. He found it online. He used it as part of his research for

a recent article that was published in The New Yorker, which is titled Revisiting the Four-Hour Workweek, How Tim Ferriss' 2007 Manifesto Anticipated Our Current Moment of Professional Upheaval. So this South by Southwest presentation was a very big deal. I could not have predicted it would have the impact that it did. I was given a slot last minute by Hugh Forrest. So Hugh, if you're listening to this, I thank you all the time. I'm going to thank you again for giving me a shot way center in downtown Austin. And it was provided to me somewhat last minute, and you could get snacks in this overflow room. There were a handful of different stages. And a number of things happened. I prepared my ass off, because this was my debutante ball of sorts, talking about principles in the book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which had not yet even been published at that point. It came out the next month. And I stayed with a friend named Jason in Austin. And the way I prepared was by going into his garage. He had, I want to say,

three chihuahuas. And they would follow me out. I would go into the garage and I would present to this empty garage, but including the three chihuahuas. And if I could get them to stop and sit and look at me for an extended period of time, I concluded that something, some type of presentation, charisma, or God knows what, je ne sais quoi, was working with these canines. Because I was the only audience, the only test audience I had to work with. And I did it over and over and over again. with these canines because I was the only audience, the only test audience I had to work with. And I did it over and over and over again. And thank God I did it probably a hundred times because when I finally got to the convention center, got up on stage to present, and it ended

up being standing room only because it struck a chord. I mean, right place, right time for the message. My computer crapped out and I prepared all these slides and none of it worked. So I had to freestyle and just do it from memory without any visual aids. And it worked. It really worked. That was when a handful of bloggers first heard about the four-hour workweek. I became friends with a number of them, sent out galleys, and then ultimately it cascaded into people like Robert Scoble taking note of it and mentioning the book. And then, shazam, what would you know, hit escape velocity in Silicon Valley first, then made it onto the New York Times bestseller list where it stayed more or less for the next seven years. And it has been one hell of a crazy ride. So once again, Hugh Forrest, thank you for giving me a shot way back in the day. I will never forget it. And now without

further ado, here is the lost speech, the lost presentation from South by Southwest 2007. Please enjoy. My name is Tim Ferris. Ferris, I prefer Tim, to be honest with you. And I'm a guest lecturer at Princeton University in high-tech entrepreneurship, have been since 2002. And that's really all you need to know about me for now. And I'll jump right into it. The 4-Hour Workweek is my first book. And it encapsulates my experience over the last four or five years conducting experiments around the world in what I call lifestyle design, which I view as an alternative to long-haul career planning and solves a lot of the problems that that presents.

So three reasons you might want to listen to me today. And you're here already, so that's a good indicator. But the first reason is in addition to the books that I'll be mailing out to everyone, I will be issuing a challenge at the end of this, and the prize is a round trip ticket anywhere in the world. So please pay attention. The second reason is even though I don't have all the answers, I don't claim to have all the answers, I suspect that we have a lot of shared DNA.

So from 2000 to 2004, I worked at various start-ups in the Silicon Valley, started my own start-up as a CEO. And my schedule was 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. So calls to Europe and England in the morning, to wholesalers and distributors, the normal workday, as it were, and then calls to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and then three or four hours of email at night. And that was six or seven days a week, sleeping under cubicles, whether that's a nap or even at night, waking up and continuing working. I checked e-mail one to 200 times a day, send, receive, send, receive, like a rat with a cocaine pellet dispenser. And I was proud of that. I was very proud of the fact that I was able to do that. And I was part of the overwork ethic that I think is epidemic, not only in this country but elsewhere.

And the third reason is that in mid-2004, I unplugged from all of that. And I realized that it wasn't sustainable. The average worker is going to have 500 months of solid work in his or her lifetime. And it just isn't sustainable. It's not a scalable model, and I'll talk about that more. So in mid-2004, I left the United States and spent the next year and a half conducting these experiments in lifestyle design.

And what that means is I went through 20 countries, 25 countries, doing everything that I had postponed, everything I had wanted to do but put off, waiting for retirement, essentially. And even though I was receiving about 1,000 email per week, I checked email once every 10 to 14 days. And in the process, was able to actually increase the profit of my company about 40%. So I want to talk about how that was done. And two questions to keep in mind as I'm going through this presentation, which I want to keep short because I really want to get to the Q&A because I'm sure there will be a lot of questions. Hopefully there will be. Two questions. The first is, how do your decisions and priorities change

if retirement will never be an option? All right? So if you are going to have to work in some capacity until the day you die, how do your priorities change? How do your decisions change? Because I would claim, I would assert, that everyone in this room is way too smart and way too easily bored to ever retire.

And to give you one example, there's a gentleman who also used to guest lecture at Princeton University named Frank Slattery, very accomplished businessman, acquired more than 130 companies in his tenure at a large corporation. And he retired at one point based on the advice of his doctors because he had had heart surgery. And within two days, he woke up at five in the morning, was putting on his suit and his tie. And his wife said, what are you doing? He said, I'm going out to start another company. He was unable to fill that void that he had created after removing work as his identity. And that's something we really want

to avoid. The reason he doesn't speak at Princeton anymore is because he had quadruple bypass surgery and he can't do that. All right. So what if retirement isn't an option? That's question one. Question two is, let's say you get what you want in the game that you're playing. Let's say that you get 10% more customers, you get 10% more customers, you get 10% more email, 10% more phone calls every month indefinitely, is your business scalable? Is your career scalable? And most important, is your lifestyle scalable? And if it isn't, when are you going to become a bottleneck? And when are you going to face imminent meltdown? So I have a 745 slide presentation I'd like to go through.

I'm just kidding. I'm not going to spend much time on the problem. Everyone here knows what the problem is, whether that's time famine or, worse yet, some sense of boredom, doing something that is tolerably uninteresting. So let me just jump through this real quickly. So I want to show you sort of the before and after in my case, and I'm sure some of you

will be able to identify with this. So this is the, oh, boy, here we go, tech support, first thing in the morning. I wasn't going to use PowerPoint because I hate PowerPoint, but I wanted to give you a few very basic...there we go. So I'll let you read this. I don't want to read it for you. But let's see. Okay, guys, you know what? Forget PowerPoint. No, that's okay. I'll save you the trouble and I'll try to do my sort of dramatic reenactment of what those cartoons were supposed to accomplish. So the first one said, hi, my name is Barry. I check email 200 to 300 times per day.

And it was in a support group. And I'm sure most of you at some point have felt that way. And then the after was also from the New Yorker, and it was a photo of a guy, an executive, on his desk. He has a phone to his head, and he's saying, no, no, Thursday doesn't work for me. How about never? Does never work for you? And that's where I would like to get all of you at some point.

And then the last slide was an encapsulation of what I view as the biggest problem. And it was a quote by Robert Frost, which was, if you work faithfully eight hours a day, one day you can become the boss and work 12 hours a day. Are you in a game worth winning? And is it scalable? I'll come back to this. So what I'm going to do is run through just

a few of the principles, the commonalities I found among people who are able to really design ideal lifestyles for themselves. And that entails controlling three currencies. In order of importance, time, non-renewable, income, and mobility. And the structure that I'm going to go through is definition, elimination, automation, and then liberation. And when I look back on my own experience, I really follow that process, and it is repeatable. And I'll give you one key concept from each, illustrate it, and then tell you exactly how you can use it as soon as you leave this presentation. So jumping into definition, definition really entails determining what it is that you want

to create from a lifestyle standpoint and how much that costs. What are the financial realities of designing an ideal lifestyle? And that requires first and foremost defining not only what you want, but actually, again, in order of importance, what you want to do, what you want to be, and what you want to have. I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but define also entails determining what portion of your efforts are producing the results that you want. And I just want to give one example of the 80-20 principle and how that can be applied. Some of you may be familiar with it. It's also called Pareto's principle.

The 80-20 principle dictates that 20% of your actions, 20% of your inputs will produce 80% of your desired results. 20% of the people will produce 80% of the results. So looking back at my own history to give you an example of how dramatically a quantitative analysis using the 80-20 can be, in mid-2004, again, when I reached my threshold, essentially, I had approximately 120 wholesale customers. And the company I started was a sports nutrition company, handling everything from design to manufacturing

to distribution through about 15 countries. And of these 120 wholesale customers, I realized that five of them were contributing 95% of my profit. And because I felt as though I needed to be active from 9 to 5, I was creating activities for myself to fill that time. And the remaining 115 were only contributing about 5%, but I was spending all of my time chasing them. So what did I do? I took all of those nonproductive customers and put them on a holding pattern, which meant

that they could place orders, but I would not contact them by email or phone. I would not chase them. Not only that, but I would make it actually more difficult for them to order. Now why would I want to do this? And what I did is I required them to actually print out, fill in a form and fax it to me as opposed to making phone or e-mail orders. I did this to filter my customers so I would have low maintenance customers. Because what you're after is not more customers necessarily but more income. And then I focused on taking those five most productive customers who never complained,

always paid on time, never required any management, finding the commonalities and duplicating them. So in the process, I was able to cut my time down from about 60 hours per week with the wholesale accounts to about two hours per week. And I was able to increase profit from that wholesale division about 20% within the first two weeks, just with one additional large profile customer. And you can apply this not only to customer base, you can apply it to your suppliers, you can apply it to your personal activities. So you need to do a time audit just as though

you would determine where you're consuming calories when you're on a diet. You need to know what those sources are. So really sit down and see how you're spending your time. And the question you need to ask yourself, there are really two questions. The first is, what 20% of my activities are producing the 80%

of what I'm trying to accomplish? And you really want to ruthlessly eliminate everything else possible. And some of those things will be minimally important, but they're not important enough to spend your time on. Focus on duplicating your points of strength and what's really producing results. The second question is, what 20 percent of my activities of the people I'm involved with are producing 80% of what I don't want? And you may want to actually eliminate those before anything else.

In my particular case, I noticed of those five wholesale customers who were making a huge contribution to my profit, two of them were professional ball breakers. So we're faced with a dilemma here. And that is they're contributing quite a bit of money, but there was a huge negative carryover. I took their insults, their brow beating, and it carried over into my personal life. I just had a lot of anger and anxiety with me at almost all times because of this. So I fired those two customers. And I would encourage everyone to fire more customers.

And the way I did that was I sent them an e-mail, both of them, and I said, unfortunately, doesn't seem as though our work styles are compatible. I would love to continue working with you if the following conditions are met. No insults. No profanity. If that's the case, look forward to working with you. If not, best of luck. Take care.

Tim Ferriss. One of them left, never to be heard from again. And the other shaped up immediately and was placing twice as much orders on a monthly basis. So that's one piece of definition. Another principle that I'll let you do a little bit of homework on yourself that I can't go into too much detail here is called Parkinson's law. And Parkinson's law was introduced to me by Ed Schau, who was my professor at Princeton

before I came back to speak at his class. And Ed Schau is someone you should know. Ed Schau was one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley. But he was on the congressional side. He actually lobbied to have the capital gains taxes lowered so all the investment came in. And taught at Stanford Business School when he was 23, which he's in his mid-60s now, very uncommon. In any case, one of his guiding principles in life had been Parkinson's Law. And Parkinson's law dictates that a task will swell in perceived complexity and importance in direct correlation to the time that you allotted. All right?

So what we find is there are actually two ways to dramatically cut down the amount of time necessary for any task and to increase your results dramatically. The first is you limit the tasks to the important so they don't take much time. That's the 80-20. And then the Parkinson's Law is you limit the time so that you limit yourself to the truly important. Okay? So moving on to the next, which is elimination. This is probably my personal favorite. Time management, just a few words on time management, I don't think it works. I think that there is an efficiency epidemic among intelligent people, especially among technologists, to focus on how to do things

better as opposed to what to do. I think there's a limit to the amount of information that you can organize. I prefer to eliminate as many inputs as possible. So elimination, what I'm going to talk about just briefly, and this will be one example, is what I call batching. And I'll use this in the context of e-mail. So if you've ever ordered T-shirts or had anything printed, the cost for, let's say, printing three T-shirts might be the same as printing 20 T-shirts. The reason being there's an inevitable set-up

cost involved. And that's the same with any task. The average American worker spends 24% of his or her time simply in between tasks, task switching. And once interrupted, 40% never go back to their original task and complete it. They move on to yet another task, another task, another task. And this is how you end up with 20 windows open on your computer. So batching involves letting similar tasks accumulate and then performing them at very limited times, as infrequently as possible to accomplish what it is you need to accomplish. And for knowledge workers, which all of you are, who spend at least 25% of your time on e-mail each day, e-mail is going to be the

single biggest turning point that you can affect directly. So what I would recommend, if you guys are listening instead of twittering, is that you set an autoresponder on your email. And one of the major keys to achieving a four-hour work week, which is, it's not a misnomer, it's not a typo, this is possible, is managing expectations of those around you and training the people around you and your boss, if you you have one to obey those rules that you set for yourself So the autoresponder would go something like this and I've used this on many occasions dear colleagues

Thank you for your email Because of extremely high workload and pending deadlines in a move to efficiency and effectiveness. I will be checking email at 11 a.m And 4 p.m. Pacific Standard Time or whatever your time zone is. If you have a question that requires an immediate response before one of those two times, please call me on my cell phone. Also, if your email does not contain a question but is a confirmation or a statement, I will not respond. Please don't be offended. I appreciate it. Smiley face, exclamation point, however you want to make that appear very friendly. Thank you for your understanding, Tim Ferriss. If you make that one change and you stick with it, the quality of life that you experience will change so dramatically that you will wish

you'd done it years sooner. It doesn't have to be twice a day. I recommend twice a day for a few reasons. You need to let email accumulate. One of the worst habits you can get into is checking email first thing in the morning because, first of all, chances are not many people have replied. Second of all, you scramble your brain with a collection of disorganized ideas, unrelated ideas.

So let your email accumulate. Focus on getting the one most important task that you've identified through 8020 done before lunch so you can't postpone it and use that as an excuse. So really elimination is about focusing on the crucial few instead of the trivial many. And the most important thing that I learned from Ed Chow was that most things don't matter at all, and almost all the rest matter very, very little. So moving to automation, this is something that I've experimented quite a bit

within the last three or four years. Of those remaining tasks, so you have determined what your most valuable inputs are, you've eliminated as much as possible. Now you have a certain collection of tasks, some of which are important to perform but very, very time consuming. That includes your batched tasks, which could be anything from laundry to paying your bills to checking paperwork, filing sales reports, anything of that type. What I recommend you do is really quantify the value of your time. And I mean that in a very specific way.

So if you make $50,000 per year and you work 40 hours a week, God bless those of you who already do. And you take two weeks of vacation a year, you make $25 an hour. What I would recommend is that you outsource anything that can be done for less than $25 an hour. Now, there's certain tax mathematics that you would want to work into that, so let's just say $15 an hour. Anyone that you can pay to perform a task for you for less than $15 an hour, you should

assign this task to them. So as a personal example, I have an army of about 25 Indian MBAs in Bangalore who essentially run my life for me. And they cost $4 an hour. And there are a number of advantages to this. Number one is it removes the excuse, the ability for you to create crap tasks for yourself that are time consuming. You don't have any excuse anymore. The second is they can work while you sleep, which is nice. So any type of Internet research, any type of spreadsheets, almost any type of work can be outsourced. I have one friend who I interviewed for this book who had a favorite pair of jeans.

He'd had these jeans for five years. They were worn in just perfectly. He had the little wallet outline. He couldn't get a replacement for these jeans, but he ripped them right down the groin. Not good to wear around. And he sent these jeans to his group of professional virtual assistants in India, and they had them replicated. He had people his size wearing them, putting a wallet in,

replicating the jeans exactly. And if you go to 4hourworkweek.com, there's a sample of outsourcing life, the chapter, and there's a bit by AJ Jacobs, who's the editor at large of Esquire. It's hysterical, absolutely hysterical. But this alone has saved me an immense amount of time. So automation, thinking in terms of rules that you can set for yourself as opposed to responding in a culture of urgency.

Okay, the last piece is liberation. And this is a two-part portion. The first element of liberation is creating mobility. So mobility, if you recall, is the third ingredient, the third currency of ideal lifestyle design. And for entrepreneurs, how many people are entrepreneurs in the audience as opposed to employees? Okay. How many people are employees or have their time set by someone else? Okay. So entrepreneurs have the hardest time with automation because they fear giving up control. I'm an awful micromanager.

This took me a long time to learn. For employees, on the other hand, they tend to fear taking control. So liberation from a mobility standpoint, getting out of the office is very intimidating for them. Before you can automate fully or eliminate as an employee, you have to get out of the office, at least part time. Because if you're only working two hours a day but you're still stuck in the office, that's no fun at all. You just end up surfing the web all day, which

honestly is overrated in my opinion. So there are a couple of approaches to doing this. It can be pulled off, and it can be pulled off very, very, very, very well. One key principle in doing this and almost anything else in life is not asking for permission or tripping over chairs, but begging for forgiveness. So I'll give you a very good example. There's a case study that I did with a gentleman. He's early 40s, lifetime employee at, we'll say, HP. It's actually a company much closer to Austin. And he's a lifetime careerist. He has no desire to start his own company. He does not have the risk tolerance for it. There was a problem, though. Two years ago, he met a wonderful woman and he wanted to

propose. The problem was she lived 5,000 miles away in China. And he had actually met her on a tech support call that they'd made to a client base in China. So he used what I call the hourglass approach to earning his mobility. What he did is he created an emergency that would take him out of the office for two weeks. He said, I'm really sorry. This is the situation. I have a family emergency, or I need to install my DSL, whatever your excuse might be. I need to take two weeks out of the office. I recognize that I need to continue working. I don't want to take vacation days. This is how I propose we do it.

Notice, this isn't a can I do, this is I need to do, how will we do it. And he took those two weeks. Beforehand, I should note, he worked each Saturday for about three weeks to make sure that all the communications worked, that he could actually work remotely and he had the discipline to do so. Then he took two weeks and he went to China. And he had all of his support calls routed to his fiancée's phone. No one was the wiser.

And between proposing and eating pig face or whatever he did on that side of the world they do eat pig face. I lived there for six months. He was able to perfect his approach to working remotely. When he came back, it's called the hourglass approach because you start with a large period outside the office, you come back in and then you balloon back out. So he came back to the office and said, this is what happened. My productivity was twice as high and he had all of the data

that he had gathered along the way. This number of extra billable hours, this number of clients contacted, this many projects completed. And he was able to really demonstrate the data to support what he was suggesting, which was one day remote per week. That's all I want, one day remote per week. You can always change your mind, which is called the puppy dog close. You know, just take the dog home, see what you think, you can bring him back. Make it reversible. If you propose a permanent change, your boss is going to say no. Just one day per week, let's try it out. This is what I found. I think I would be much more productive. And even suggest a day in the middle of the week to start

because it won't appear like you're trying to get a three-day weekend. And the boss will be more open to that. And then, over time, you make yourself less productive at work and more and more productive remotely until you get back to whatever degree of mobility you want in your life. And there are many examples that I could give you of this, but it is very, very possible within an employment situation.

The second part of liberation, which I don't have too much time to go into today because I want to get to the Q&A, is taking advantage of the time that you create. So if I only had more time, and then you have this glut of time, the question of what to do with it is a lot harder to answer than you might think. Because spending a week on the beach, that's enough. You'll rub cocoa butter on your belly for about five days and you'll be so bored you'll

want to poke bicycle spokes through your eyes. It's not a long-term career post whatever it is you're doing now. So just to give you a personal example, the first day that I left the country, so how did I begin my lifestyle design experiments? Well, I began it by, on one of my many trips to New York City, taking a backpack with a week's full of clothing and deciding that I just needed to leave the country. And I went to JFK and bought the first ticket I could find out of the country, which was a one-way to London. And I stayed with two of my former classmates in London and woke up the next morning. And I had already set the rule that I'd be able to check email once per week, every Monday.

And that was not a Monday. And I woke up at 10 a.m., my first day without an alarm clock in four or five years, and bolted up right out of bed. I'd envisioned waking up to birdsong, stretching like a cat under a Spanish villa, breathing in the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Not quite how it happened. I bolted up right like someone had put a foghorn to my head, looked around for my laptop, realized that I couldn't check email, shouted for my friend, realized they were at work, and proceeded to have a complete nervous breakdown, and wander around London for a day, going to see the sights, which I find boring. I don't really like museums that much, with some vague sense of guilt, looking out of the corner of my eye at every internet cafe as I pass by. Once you remove work as identity, once you

remove job description as self-description, after you've let your interests atrophy for a long period of time, it's quite a challenge to make productive use of that time and fill that void. So that's the last part of liberation. So in summary, I really want to make the point that I believe the point of life is to enjoy it. And that the three currencies, the three currencies, time, income, and mobility, are vehicles to achieving that. They're not ends in and of themselves.

And I hope that this presentation, at the very least, really my ideal outcome is to catalyze a severe national backlash against information overload and this culture of immediacy. Because life doesn't improve necessarily with Twitter and Dodgeball and 24-hour access. Having other people wait for you is a symbol of power. And you need to train people to do that. I was recently in Florianopolis, Brazil, learning to surf.

And beautiful place. I recommend it. A lot safer than Rio. And I was going through the airport on my way back to the U.S. and there was a huge 20-foot advertisement. And it was for a Blackberry, a brand-new Blackberry model in Brazil. And the title was, Now Your Email Can Find You Anywhere in the World. And that's my idea of hell. I encourage you, I really encourage you to focus on the critical few and ignore the trivial many. And it's possible to do that within the confines of being an

employee. So I want to open it up to Q&A and then I'll issue the challenge that I promised everyone for which the prize is a round trip anywhere in the world. I'm going to open it up to Q&A and I don't want to take up any more time. So please go ahead. Great presentation, by the way. I wish I had the stones to fire 80% of our clients. And the reason I don't is because we built up an interactive design agency and we built up a really good reputation in our region and we depend on word of mouth. How do you fire 80% of your clients without building a bad will within the community? That's a very good question.

Really, fire is a strong word. And what it comes back to is when you start a company, your objectives are often very, very clear. I'm starting this business because I want to be more independent. I'm starting this business because I want to control my time. I'm starting this business because I want to be more independent. I'm starting this business because I want to control my time.

I'm starting this business because I want to be respected in Community X. It's very easy to lose sight of that and focus on the insidious quarter-by-quarter growth mentality. I don't think indefinite growth is a smart or healthy thing in business or personal life. So how do you fire them? First of all, you need to do an analysis. It might not be 80-20, it could be 50-50.

Usually it's actually more 95-5. And really all I'm encouraging you to do is focus on filtering your clients so you have low maintenance clients who fit your ideal profile. And it's possible to do that. I'll just give you an example. So I have a distribution through about 15 countries with our products. And 200 to 400 people work on the entire supply chain and distribution at any given time, whom I pay. And I was able to fire. Fire isn't really the correct term.

In my case, I was more or less ignoring them. Unless they had something pending. And honestly, if you just take that one step, you're not going to create any bad will. Because if they have a request, you'll answer that request, but I'm not calling my 120 customers every day to see how they're doing, because it just isn't a good use of my time

and it's not necessary. When somebody calls me, like my real estate broker sold me my last house, he calls me every three weeks. Hey, how you doing? I'm fine. How are you? Yeah, just calling to see how you're doing. Okay. I'm in the middle of lunch. I'll talk to you never, never again. That's all I'm recommending. So it doesn't have to be as strong as saying, you know what, you're wasting a lot of our time. We have more important people to deal with. Please never call us again.

It's just a matter of not creating activities, so just contacting them that you really don't need to create. All right, Tim, so you have a team of Indian MBAs who run the... What happens when they read your book? That's a good question. I've thought about this. I'm kind of concerned that they're going to come out with a two-hour work week. No.

Well, here's the thing. Hiring the Indian MBAs is an example of something that I'm quite fond of, which I call geo-arbitrage or geo-arb. So how do you take advantage of currency differences and changing economic conditions to really get the most bang for your buck and create the ideal lifestyle? When Estonia is cheaper than India, I'm going to go to India. And right now, India, they can't really outsource to anybody else.

I mean, they could try, but they're going to have trouble beating the rates they're already offering me. But it's a fair question. I was wondering about meetings. So do you, like, have rules set up for running efficient meetings, or do you just patch them through to Bangalore? Like, you know, but do you know what I mean? I do, I do. Okay. Okay, so, no, that's a very good question. I should say that my entire company is a virtual architecture at this point. I shifted everything in the process of decreasing my hours to a virtual architecture. So I've actually, in six years, never met any of the main people that I work with.

Now, that having been said, just general rules for meetings. The first thing is you shouldn't have a meeting to decide what the problem is. You should have a meeting to solve that problem. So whenever someone contacts me, I've had fewer than 10 in-person meetings in the last five years, probably, and very few conference calls. So a couple of things. Keep them very, very short. None of my conference calls or meetings run more than 30 minutes. Define the problem in advance. So if someone says, hey, let's jump on the phone to hash things out, I say, great. Send me an agenda. What are the topics you want to cover? What are the questions that you have for me? Because

I want to prepare, and I never have conference calls without preparing. And the second thing is define an end time. It's very, very common to plan meetings. Okay, we'll have a meeting at 11 o'clock and before you know it, holy crap, it's gone to 2 p.m. and I haven't had anything accomplished today. So those would be my two main recommendations. But I... There's a quote by Dave Barry who says that in corporate America, it's popular to have meetings because they can't actually masturbate. And I tend to agree with that.

But no, it's a good question. Thanks. Hi. I think I have two questions. I'm not sure if I want to ask the second. But the first is about transparency. And I've been... I have two questions. I'm not sure if I want to ask the second. But the first is about transparency. And I have a production assistant. She's actually fantastic. And she's taken over a lot of work for me. And at this point, I've put my clients directly in contact with her.

So they see me and her on their requests. And that works out okay. And I'm just wondering how you handle that sort of like, actually, Amy does that kind of thing. I'm completely transparent. If you send an email, if you want to see a good autoresponder, send an email to timothy at brainquicken.com. That's one of the products that I'm involved with.

And it's very clear. I'm often traveling for business. It could be seven to ten days before I return your email. In the meantime, here are the following people, the following links, the following resources that should answer almost any question you could possibly have. And it will direct them to those people. And outsourcing is so ubiquitous that I am not embarrassed at all to admit that I use an outsourced fulfillment company, for example. Dell ships many of its products from the same fulfillment company that I use.

And for those of you familiar with Xbox, Microsoft doesn't make that. Flextronics makes that. And the top 12 brands of mountain bikes in the U.S. are all made by the same three or four plants in China. Now, if you're a Cannondale, let let's say you might not want to admit that, but I think as a smaller operator, you can actually spin it so that you seem very smart. If you say, look, that's not my core competency. I'm focusing on doing this for you.

And contact so-and-so at Group X who will be able to handle that for you. So I'm completely transparent, 100%. Okay, so just to continue with that, then how do you deal with, say, in my case, I want to increase the rate that I charge this client. So how do you pawn it off to a subordinate while charging them more? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what my PR firm did to me. They say, no, when you hire us, you're not just working with me,

you're working with our team. And we're bringing on the breast and brightest. My goodness, where's my mind? I'm sorry. So that's how I would approach it. You're recruiting a team instead of just me. Hello. So with your email autoresponder, it says if you send a statement,

don't expect really to hear back, which makes sense efficiency-wise. But then what do you say for relationship management? I mean, do you think relationship management borders on the real estate guy calling you and being like, hey, how's it going? Is that... I will... As far as relationship management goes, I believe there are very few relationships

that are the critical relationships. That doesn't mean that you're rude to other people, but I think that email has reached a critical mass where people are now ignoring email. If you want your congressman to respond to you, you send them a handwritten letter. It's almost come full circle. So email, I think people expect a certain degree of, I wouldn't say coldness, but brisk efficiency in email. And there was a great panel yesterday on the entirety of email, and I can talk to anybody more about that later.

But for relationship management, I call people on the phone when I have something interesting or important to tell them or ask them. And I also help my clients who are important to me as opposed to just checking up to see how they are. So I will actively look within all of my contacts to see if I can make introductions between my most important clients.

I have one of my partner companies is a $70 million company and they're trying to liquidate some of their company to create working cash for the founders. And I introduced them to a private equity manager. And those are the types of things that I handle by phone call, very infrequently, so that when you do call them, they know it's important, they pay attention, they don't ignore you. I was just messing with you last time, man.

I have a real question this time. You said that you should eliminate what's not important and focus on what's important, which is obviously great advice. I give it to people a lot, too. But what people always ask me is, how do you figure out what's important and what's not important? That's an excellent question.

It's something I like to talk about, so thanks for bringing it up. There's a gentleman named Arthur Jones. He's the founder of Nautilus Company. Probably the smartest exercise scientist of the last 100 years, I would say. Also the founder of Medautilus company, probably the smartest exercise scientist of the last 100 years, I would say. Also the founder of Med-X. He was on the Forbes 400 list at one point. Very smart guy. And he said, if you can't measure it, you don't understand it. If you can't measure it, you don't understand it. And Peter Drucker also said, what gets measured gets managed. So it has to be quantifiable. It can't be,

I think this is important. How do you measure your results? How do you measure how your day is successful? Is it additional sales? Is it additional clients? What are you counting? If you're not counting something, you're flying blind, as far as I'm concerned. You need to have a quantifiable metric. And once you identify that metric, then it's fairly easy. You say, this is my desired output. What are the inputs that contribute to that? And that would be the fast answer. So for me, I look at what I call relative income versus absolute income. So it's very easy to trick yourself when you look at annual income. You say, oh, wow, I just got a $10,000 raise. So now I'm making 60 grand instead of 50,000.

That doesn't necessarily mean you're making more than $25 an hour now. If your hours go up, you're actually making less. And that's how management consultants and iBankers, who are a lot of my friends, end up making less than someone at Burger King. So I look at how many hours am I putting in and how much am I getting paid per hour and what contributes to that on the business side of things. I AD20 my personal life as well, but that's usually related to people. So what are the 20% of the people around me or the people involved with me who contribute to my general well-being, happiness, excitement? And I'm pretty ruthless with my social encounters, too. If you really want a scalable life and

you want to achieve what it is that you've set in front of yourself in your personal business life, you have to be very ruthless with that type of elimination. So quantifiable metrics. You need to identify what your desired output is. Sorry to ask so many questions. This one's kind of, I don't know if I should ask it, but would you take me on as an intern? Sure.

I'll give you $4.50 an hour. Well, it's only four hours a week, right? Well, see, my work week is four hours a week because I make your week 300 hours per week. I'm in a mentorship, actually. Okay, yeah, let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. If anybody's interested in being involved with the book launch, it's going to be a very, very exciting time,

so please let me know. Yeah, absolutely, let's talk. And then maybe I'm cutting to your punchline or something, but you mentioned you can get a flight anywhere for free. Yes. Okay. So here's... Wait, but you had a technique for doing it or is this a challenge or...

It's... No, I'll tell you exactly what it is. But first I want to see if we have a... There might be a question behind you. A quick question. You mentioned certainly with your knowledge and experience, you certainly leverage that in life, but are there any other tools that you leverage? You said you don't really like time management,

but there's calendar and planners and PDAs and any other tools besides the knowledge and experience. Sure. No, that's a good question. Hold on a second. I'm going to dazzle you guys with my technological sophistication. Hold on a second. You ready? This is going to be bigger than the iPhone. All right.

This is the first PDA I've ever owned. And I bought it a week ago. It cost me $99. It's the Palm Z22, I believe. And the only reason I bought this was to have a backup of my Outlook calendar and contacts. And the one criterion that I had for PDA was that it did not have Internet access. So as far as what I leverage, I think the most important skill that you can develop is the ability to deal-make and negotiate.

It doesn't matter if you're a technologist. It doesn't matter if you're an employee. You're going to have to create the win-win situations or the perception of win-win situations to get anything that you want. Because the default answer to anything that you ask for is going to be no. So how do you work from that position? So I would encourage everyone to become a student of deal, creative deal structuring

and negotiation. I think that that's the most valuable skill set you can develop that lends itself to every other. So I think that, like, I'm taking, I'm hearing that you're saying, like, being connected and constantly being interrupted and a lot of that really, like, distracts you from the things that are really important because all those small things make you feel important in that moment. So that's, like, crack.

And, like, everyone in this room is probably, like, twittering room is probably twittering and feeling important, reading their twitters or writing something. So do you have any advice on getting off that crack? Sure. So I was I'll tell you a very brief story. I don't know how much time I have, but I'll just keep on talking until someone kicks me off. So I went to a friend's birthday party a few months ago. And there were about 20 people there. And there was a little bucket of cupcakes. And I ate about 12 cupcakes because it was a Saturday. And Saturday is my off day where I'm allowed to eat anything I want.

And so everyone was staring at me and really thought I was a strange creature. But I sat down next to one guy who had about 12 glasses of wine, so I felt we were, with my insulin levels and his blood alcohol levels, we were about at the same comprehension level. And we got to talking, and he asked me the question everyone asks me,

which is, what do you do? And I don't have a good answer to that because what I do with my time and what I do for income are two very different things. So whatever I say, I end up either sounding like a pathological liar or a drug dealer, which I'm not a pathological liar. I suppose I am a drug dealer to some extent. And I told him my story. I had just come back from Japan.

I spent September in Japan Learning how to sword fight Kendo And I told him about it And he said Wait, wait, wait Four hour work week You're full of shit, come on

And I explained that actually I was going to call it the two hour work week And it was a compromise with my publisher Because they felt that two hours was too unbelievable, but four hours, that's just about right. And he asked me, he said to me, look, I have everything. I'm doing everything right. I have the house, I have the car, I have the family.

I like my job, I just do way too much of it. How do you create that time? And I told him, okay, all you need to do is ask yourself three times a day, am I being productive or am I being busy? That's all you have to ask. Put it on your screen saver. Have it pop up. That's the one interruption I'll allow you. Have that pop up three times a day. And he actually translated that into different phrasing, which I think is really helpful, which is, am I doing a crutch activity? Everyone has their crutch activities that they sort of default to if they want to put off something uncomfortable. Am I performing a crutch activity? And he

ended up getting more done in the week that he implemented that than the previous four weeks combined. And he started taking Mondays and Fridays off to work remotely. Hi. For most of us who work in traditional organizations with cubicles and computers on every desk and phones and conferences and meeting rooms, when we go back, I mean, the structure is so locked in just by the way it's designed. What do you advise that people do when they first get back to the office? Sure.

Okay. So that relates to the challenge, so I'm going to segue into that also. The first is I'm an extreme example. I'm nuts. I take this to a very, very ridiculous extreme. And that's just my OCD nature. But for someone in a work environment, if you could just cut five, ten hours off your week, I think that it would make your time here well spent. But before I even get into that and I start lowering expectations, I would say that the biggest mistake I see employees make is they underestimate their leverage. They underestimate the amount of leverage they have.

And one good way to increase your leverage, by the way, two things that are related to mobility. The first is increase your employer's investment in you so that the cost of losing you is more painful than granting you permission to do whatever it is you're asking for. So I really want to take a four-week course in X. I really want to have perhaps mentorship time with executive Y. Really get them to invest in you. And that's not a deceitful or negative thing to do. This is improving your value

to the company, but at the same time, it will make them less likely to refuse requests. The second thing is that when you ask for things, it's just as important as how you ask for them. All right? So a very good friend of mine, he designed for IDEO and a lot of the design firms like Frog. And he just doesn't stand up for himself. And he was recently given a Blackberry. And I was with him when this happened. It was a Saturday night. And his immediate boss sent him an email, received it on his Blackberry.

We were just going into the subway. He responded on his cell phone two minutes later. And the boss called him and said, what the fuck? I just sent you an email. You can't do this. This is a Saturday. And he said, this happens again. We're going to have to have a serious talk with my supervisor.

And what I recommended my friend do, his name is Sherwood, I recommended that he increase his value, like I told you. And he's admitted to me, he says, I'm so overworked because I have this, this, and this skill set and I'm the only person who can do it. I said, Sherwood, you have a great hand to play. And so I told him to wait until a crunch period when he was in absolutely an integral part. And then he made his request, which was to take three weeks off to go to Oktoberfest in Munich. And he said, yeah, I'm just really not very happy.

And I don't know what I'm going to do. It could be crazy. He didn't say that. But long story short, he got the trip to Munich. So don't underestimate the leverage that you have. Chances are, let's look at it this way. Let's say you do get fired. What's the worst thing that happens?

I've been fired from every job I've had except for the one that I created myself. But it's for reasons that go well beyond the scope of this presentation. But where the hell was I? I need more caffeine. Where was I? Somebody remind me. What was I talking about?

All right. Okay, so if you get fired, and a number of my friends have gone out of their way to get fired Where was I? Somebody remind me. What was I talking about? All right, okay, so if you get fired, and a number of my friends have gone out of their way to get fired because you get something very pleasant called severance, is the worst thing that happens is you get unemployment and you take a little extended vacation until you find your next job. Everybody here, if you've made it this far in life, your genetic pool is deep enough that you'll get a job soon enough. Your employer, on the other hand, let's say they lose you in the middle of an important project.

That could be fatal. So don't underestimate your leverage. That would be my first recommendation. And then going into what would I recommend that you do, this relates to the challenge. So the challenge is this. I want anyone here or everyone here to implement one of the ideas from what we've just discussed, whether that's the 80-20 principle, Parkinson's law, outsourcing your life. There are two companies I'd recommend you look at closely, YMII and Brickwork, both based in India, or some type of liberation play. And have until this week, Wednesday at midnight, and whoever implements them in the most dramatic

fashion will get a free trip anywhere in the world. Free round trip airfare I should say. Not going to put you up in a five star hotel. So Wednesday by midnight try to implement any idea from this presentation and tell me how it works. And that's it. So last but certainly not least, if you continue on the current track you're going to have 500 months of work in your adult lifetime.

Since 1969, the average American worker works, in terms of hours, eight weeks more than they did then for the same income if you're just for inflation. So slow down, take a look at what you're doing. There's no rush. So thank you all very much for coming. And I hope you enjoyed it. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people

subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend,

something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.