Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

By Daniel Dessinger

June 18, 2008

A coworker first told me about The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss in November of 2007. And I began reading it right around Thanksgiving; however, that was also during a time when I was having a lot of difficulty focusing on any book. I had 3 or 4 or maybe even 5 or 6 lying around my house that I'd started and just never got quite interested enough to finish. And this one got added to that pile.

I finally finished reading it in March of this year. It's definitely a book that makes you think, and I've been thinking about it and what it advocates ever since I finished it. Ferriss introduces the idea of the New Rich. He says the New Rich "are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility[1] " Basically, you live your retirement (or mini-retirements) while you're young and active, rather than waiting until retirement age when you may or may not have your health or enough money to do what you've always dreamed of doing.

He spends the rest of the book explaining how he liberated himself from his internet company by eliminating time management and automating certain tasks. He contends that the typical 9-to-5/40-hour workweek is an arbitrary idea. He believes that many people create unnecessary work just to keep busy for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. He differentiates between effectiveness and efficiency and suggests that through making yourself more effective, you'll be able to liberate yourself from the commonly accepted 9-to-5 routine by proving that you can get just as much work done in half the time.

With all the technological advances today, it's much easier for people to work from home than it ever has been, and I've heard some friends sing the praises of the freedom and flexibility, and in the very next breath, talk about how much more stressful it is. Sure you have the freedom to work from home, but then that means that you can't really get away from work. Instead of leaving work at work, you bring it home with you – literally.

Ferriss admits that implementing this sort of thing is much easier for independent entrepreneurs because you don't have a boss. You ARE the boss, but as previously stated, he doesn't say that it's impossible if you do have a boss. You just have to work a little harder, and he gives several examples of how to convince your boss that you can be just as effective from home, or anywhere else for that matter.

In these economic times, things are harder for everyone, and reading about how Ferriss has liberated himself and can therefore travel all around the world, will probably make you more than a little disenchanted with the current state of things. However, if you can quiet your ego long enough to learn from his ideas about bolstering productivity, you might just make yourself an even more important asset to your company, which in better economic times, might mean that you could one day follow in Ferriss' footsteps and maybe even blaze a few trails of your own.

* Timothy Ferris, The 4-Hour Workweek (New York: Crown Publishers, 2007), p. 7.