Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

I have not read the book, so this is far from fair criticism...

...but the NYT article seems to be about some rich guy who decided to pay cheap labor to read this email and do menial tasks for him, and then said that reading less email was the path to more time.

If I could pay someone to come in and do my job for me, yes, I too would have more time.

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If I could pay someone to come in and do my job for me, yes, I too would have more time.

[/ QUOTE ]

ummm, exactly?

You don't see how thats pretty useful information if you are a business owner? lol

Lots of people doing work that could be done for them for $10 an hour. They could use that extra time to sit on the beach or grow their business or do whatever they want.

The book goes into great detail about ways to save time, why to save time, and also what to do with your time once you have it.

If you do not see the value in that, well...

[/ QUOTE ]

If that's the premise of the book, then it's just not directed at me and my criticism is meaningless. If it's directed at business owners, that's not me.

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

I've heard great things about the book, haven't gotten around to reading it.

Re: the telecommuting idea - yeah it's great, but it's a fine line between being overproductive and underproductive on your off days as soon they will expect more work from you or better projects, or you will be too useful or not useful enough, just something i've heard from people that do it.

re op:

yeah it would be great to hire a bunch of people to work for me while I sit on a beach, unfortunately I can't , 99% of the population is also in this predicament....

If I had 10M then this would be no problem...but then I likely wouldn't need the book?

Sounds like the same problem as the rich dad/poor dad books or how to make a million books... you could start by saving your money and NOT buying this book....

This is just from what I gather in your post. When I read the book I'll probably change my mind.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

"If you read the book, you can see how this is definitely possible if you have enough virtual assistants (who get paid as little as $3 per hour) carrying out all of the small details for you."

How is that different from running a business? I will look into the book, but I am skeptical of this genre.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

1) every time your gf has sex with you, give her a cookie
2) when she doesn't have sex with you, don't give her a cookie
3) you will be getting tons of ass in no time!
4) hire Indian servants to train her at the gym so she doesn't get fat

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

[ QUOTE ]
I've heard great things about the book, haven't gotten around to reading it.


[/ QUOTE ]

I paid an indian guy $3 to read it for me. It's pretty good.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

I see this working for certain types of jobs that have a lot of administrative crap (booking flights, schedules, etc), but a lot of my work is client management/networking/etc that can't really be outsourced. The stuff that can be done at a computer is privileged and confidential and I would probably get fired if I tried to outsource it.

What I would consider this for is

a) paying some guy to be my pokertracker at sites without poker tracker (ie sifting through hand histories, recording date and time, + or - $ on session, limit, number of hands, etc)

and

b) keeping track of friends' and families' special occasions, sending cards and gifts, etc., making sure I keep in better touch with people.

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I see this working for certain types of jobs that have a lot of administrative crap (booking flights, schedules, etc), but a lot of my work is client management/networking/etc that can't really be outsourced. The stuff that can be done at a computer is privileged and confidential.

What I would consider this for is

a) paying some guy to be my pokertracker at sites without poker tracker (ie sifting through hand histories, recording date and time, + or - $ on session, limit, number of hands, etc)

and

b) keeping track of friends' and families' special occasions, sending cards and gifts, etc., making sure I keep in better touch with people.

[/ QUOTE ]


c. setting up a simple online business that would require none of your time that spits off enough money so both poker and your job would be optional

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
I see this working for certain types of jobs

[/ QUOTE ]

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Has anyone attempted to contact these companies? Can I hire someone in small intervals, like five hours of work, or do I have to get some sort of long-term deal?

I'd imagine using these services to gather research/data for papers would be hugely +EV.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

[ QUOTE ]
It just flips a huge bird to the notion that one needs to come in a 9 and leave at 5 in order to be a good and productive worker.

[/ QUOTE ]

I would imagine the fact that I come in and surf 2+2 for roughly six hours a day at work does the same thing.

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Wow thanks blueman!

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

fwiw, I got this book a few months ago and used some of the methods to save myself some time with basic stuff, automate some stuff, and get things done faster. He comes off as a typical self-agrandizing self-help guru douche at times, but I think almost everyone here could work better if they implemented a few things.

I've got some stuff I'm working on right now and I think blueman has done an ok job explaining it, but if anyone has any more specific questions I'll come answer some questions later tonight.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

I don't get how having someone else read my emails saves me time. Don't I still need the contents conveyed to me somehow? That would take more time than me reading it myself.

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Ok, let me fire off a few things b/c I think blueman is taking some of the book too literally and going a little too gung ho on parts.

blueman
"If you were a business owner..."

If this is how you approach the book you won't get the most possible out of it. I don't own any businesses but have been in the processing of formulating one since before hearing of this book. Either way, I can and have used stuff from the book in my current normal employee job and general life situations with good effects.

Yes it may be the ultimate goal for many people, but there is plenty to get from the book without taking it to that extent.


"He advocates hiring indian virtual assistants to handle EVERYTHING about your life. Everything."

No, he doesn't do anything close to this. He tells you about what they CAN do and says what he does, but never says that is somehow the only path to riches or free time.


"setting up a simple online business that would require none of your time that spits off enough money so both poker and your job would be optional "

Again, this book isn't about starting up internet businesses. If that's what you get from it then you just put yourself in another type of rat race. The book is about finding what you enjoy and what excites you and showing you how to realize those goals and dreams without having to wait until retirement. It's much more of a "here's a way to live happier" book than a "make money fast!!!" book.


KKF
"How is that different from running a business? I will look into the book, but I am skeptical of this genre. "

I don't think you would get much out of this book, tbh. You and Metetron, however much I dislike you both from time to time, would fit very well into the kinds of thing he preaches in the book. You might be able to get something out it, but nothing major like I was.


PITTM
"I don't get how having someone else read my emails saves me time. Don't I still need the contents conveyed to me somehow? That would take more time than me reading it myself. "

He never says to get someone else to read your emails for you. The only way I can figure blueman got to this point was his story about outsourcing his customer service out to India. Not nearly the same as having an assistant answer e-mails on your behalf for anything.

In fact, he specifically talks about how he does read his own e-mail but only once a week or less.


As for the virtual assistants, I haven't had any reason to hire one. The menial tasks that I do I do because I enjoy them. I wouldn't want to hire most of my analysis out to someone in India. However, I do have some friends who recently started a trivia company and I have recommended farming out generating a few thousand questions to assistants who have a good grasp on American culture. It would probably require a few 20-30 question trial runs to see if the assistant actually was able to do topics like "Movies" and "Music" rather than just "World History" but it's cheap labor and a lot better than scouring the web youself.

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

I liked this book and changed a couple things I was doing based on its recommendations. The presentation is a little slipshod, and the author clearly works more than 4 hours a week, but whatever.

Here are the changes. I've long been a fan of not wasting time on stuff that isn't fun or productive, so most were minor.

1. I spend less time on the internet. This frees up time. The "information diet" is a strong recommendation imo. Probably it's a half hour a day difference. Previously I avoided almost all tv and print media and still do.

2. I am placing greater emphasis on outsourcing with my current widget project. For example, I was going to write the patent app drafts to save money. Now I'm paying a lawyer to do it all.

3. I have further reduced employees' wasting of my time. People like to "meet" to discuss "issues." When the issues are interpersonal, I find people love to talk and hate to be nice to their significant idiot, so cutting this off has freed up some time.

4. It encouraged following my prior goals of working less on forced tasks and more on interesting projects.

5. I have taken extra days off to do fun stuff.

My life has not changed. Nothing in this book was new to me. Much of this correlates with age and is independent of the book, so take it with a grain of salt.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

people who think this is a novel new idea are kinda dumb. get people to work for you for as little pay as possible.. wow, i'm amazed. tell me when will i see your companies at the top of the fortune 500?

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

I feel like all this book really does is show how ridiculously inefficient and overpaid we are relative to other countries. We are basically saying "okay company, pay me X amount of money to do something and then I will turn around and have some people in India do it for Y." Now we have middlemen in just having a job, awesome.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Good book, Degen, before he closed his blog, was a fan and had pretty much modeled his activities around it.

It addresses a pretty good fallacy, IMO. The idea that as you add more and more efficiencies that save you more and more time, why would you spend that saved time at work? Yet that's exactly what most people do.

The author makes some ridiculous claims about personal accomplishments that are Aleksey Vayner-ish, and that opens him up to attack. But the ideas are pretty sound IMO.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Everyone,

You guys pride yourself on being logical thinkers, right?

1) Hire personal assistants to make your job easier.
2) Convince your boss to let you stay home from work because you are so much more productive with these personal assistants.
3) Your boss realizes that you are productive because of these personal assistants.
4)

What do you think happens next?

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

No.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Everyone,

You guys pride yourself on being logical thinkers, right?

1) Hire personal assistants to make your job easier.
2) Convince your boss to let you stay home from work because you are so much more productive with these personal assistants.
3) Your boss realizes that you are productive because of these personal assistants.
4)

What do you think happens next?

[/ QUOTE ]


your boss moves to brazil and lays you off

[/ QUOTE ]

fyp

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Very good book.


Doesn't matter who you are or what job you do. 4 Hour work week is for everyone.

Essentially, it is learning how to delegate / outsource / automate all the repetitive time consuming work in your life so it frees up your time to be more productive with your work / life.


People who criticize this book are people who have no idea or place zero monetary worth on their time, and that's why they're okay with wasting so much of it doing useless tasks / jobs.


And people who criticize this book. You look extremely foolish when you have never even read the book.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

[ QUOTE ]
Everyone,

You guys pride yourself on being logical thinkers, right?

1) Hire personal assistants to make your job easier.
2) Convince your boss to let you stay home from work because you are so much more productive with these personal assistants.
3) Your boss realizes that you are productive because of these personal assistants.
4) Your boss promotes you because you accomplish 2x more than any other wage slave employee he has

What do you think happens next?

[/ QUOTE ]

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

blueman,
seems like an interesting read. my take on this type of book is that everyone can take SOMETHING from it, but few, if any, can get close to as much out of the book as the author seems to imply you should.

i'd love to spend less time doing menial tasks, that's for sure. however, i like working, and if i only had to do a couple hours of work a day i would be bored out of my mind. i suppose i could then work on other projects, but i think i'd be a little worried about overextending myself.

anyway, what does this guy do with the rest of his time? if i had other people to just hang out on the beach with all day long i would consider it, but it doesn't really seem like a viable long term plan.

i'll check the book, though.

tc

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

[ QUOTE ]
Everyone,

You guys pride yourself on being logical thinkers, right?

1) Hire personal assistants to make your job easier.
2) Convince your boss to let you stay home from work because you are so much more productive with these personal assistants.
3) Your boss realizes that you are productive because of these personal assistants.
4)

What do you think happens next?

[/ QUOTE ]

You are misinterpreting the thread. He doesn't tell employees to farm out company work to virtual assistants, except in very specific occasions like an author needing to do research on a topic piece. He's not telling people to have your reports written by assistants or get them to work your spreadsheets. He makes a point to say not to do anything that involves company material because that would almost certainly be against your companies R&Rs.

Also, people are taking the four hours of work thing wrong. He's not talking about 4 hours a week of work period and then spending the rest of your time racing cars or whatever. He's talking about how to get the things you don't like doing down to as little time as possible. If it's your dream to use 60 hours a week to build a business that's fine. So long as you're not hating it while you do it. The goal isn't to be lazy, the goal is to be able to do things that excite you.

I would recommend you pick it up, even without an open mind. I hated it for the first 50 or so pages, but it clearly won me over in some way.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

this thread is the last straw, I'm getting a damn maid.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Taylor-

Ferriss advocates freeing up all this time in order to take extended vacations to different parts of the world. Whenever he goes to a new country, he says he dedicates himself to leaning one "mental" skill and one "kinesthetic" skill. The mental skill is learning the language. The physical skill is something like dancing or martial arts (he claims to have become a tango champion in argentina and a kickboxing champion in China, both within three months of arriving.) So he's not sitting around on the beach all day; he's going to a new country and intensely dedicating himself to learning something new.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Blueman,

Props for the new "staking" business.

Question: Have you thought about whats going to happen when someone wins big and doesn't send money? ie, how this would effect profitability and making this venture worthwhile? Obviously you've had success so far, but, even with some screening, there's no way 100% of people are sending back final table money (imo, would love to be shown wrong).

Also, if this continued to grow do you think Stars would have a problem with a good % of the tournament's player pool being backed by one individual (wrt soft play, collusion, etc.)?

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

mmb,

For what it's worth, I delegate most of my work to personal assistants. I have a maid, and outsource a lot of my work as well. The concepts he's talking about are fine, but they're the basic cornerstone in any successful business.

The author also claims he's beaten four MMA champions, but there's no evidence that he's ever done this. He makes a lot of spurious claims that are probably false, just like most "big-time" self-help books. That kind of [censored] annoys me, and it reeks of intellectual dishonesty.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

Judging a book by its cover is the new way to criticize a book? You haven't read the book, you don't even know if the crap you googled up is 100% fact or not, nor do you know anything about the author to say anything about him.

Re: Timothy Ferriss and the Four Hour Work Week
 

I don't need to read the book to see that multiple people have questioned his victories over multiple MMA champions, and the fact that he provides no good evidence that this is true. That's not something "reading the book" will help me with. Stop being an idiot.