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

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 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 for something short and action packed for a very long time. Because after all the podcasts, 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 gonna 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 twenty five percent of them because they first subscribe to Fible 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 I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else.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 anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out, if the spirit moves ya.

Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then I'll see you through some questions. No se cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal metal skeleton.

Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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 gonna 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 had 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 Can find him at cal newport.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 Work Week, How Tim Ferris's 2007 Manifesto Anticipated Our Current 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 gonna thank you again for giving me a shot way back in the day. And as I recall it, there was effectively an overflow room at the conference. 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 is my debutante ball of sorts talking about principles in the book, The Four Hour Work Week, 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 wanna 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 that 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 work week.

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 uh 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. Uh my name is Tim Ferris. Ferris, I prefer Tim, to be honest with you. Uh and I'm a guest lecturer at

Uh Princeton University in high tech entrepreneurship. Have been since two thousand two. And uh That's really all you need to know about me. for now and uh I'll jump right into it.

is my first book. And it encapsulates my experience over the last four or five years. uh conducting experiments around the world in what I call lifestyle design. Which I view as an alternative to Long haul career planning.

So three reasons you might want to listen to me today. And uh you're here already, so uh That's a good indicator. But the first reason is uh In addition to the books that I'll be mailing out to everyone, uh

I will be issuing a challenge at the end of this and the 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 all the time.

All the answers I suspect that we have a lot of shared DNA. So from two thousand to two thousand and four. I worked at various startups in the Silicon Valley, started my own Start up. Uh as a CEO.

And my schedule was seven AM to nine PM. So calls to Europe and England in the morning. The normal work day 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. Uh sleeping under cubicles, whether that's a nap or even at night, waking up and continuing working. Uh I checked email. one to two hundred times a day, you know, send receive, send receive like a a rat with a cocaine pellet dispenser. And uh 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 two thousand four I unplugged from all of that. And I realized That it wasn't sustainable. Uh the average

worker is going to have five hundred 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 two thousand four I left the United States And spent The next year and a half

conducting these experiments in in lifestyle design. And What that means is I went through twenty countries Twive countries. Doing everything that I'd postponed, everything I'd wanted to do but put off.

uh waiting for retirement essentially. And Uh even though I was receiving about a thousand email per week Uh I checked email once every ten to fourteen days. And

І не прос uh was able to actually increase the profit of my company about forty percent. So I want to talk about how that was done. And two questions to keep in mind as I'm going through Uh this presentation which I want to keep short because I really want to get to the QA because I'm sure there are both.

A lot of questions. Hopefully there will be. Uh 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? How do your decisions change? Because I would claim, I would assert that everyone in this room is too way too smart.

And uh to give you one example, uh 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 Uh he retired at one point.

Uh And uh within two days He woke up at five in the morning and 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 you 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 ten percent more customers You get ten percent more email, ten percent more phone calls every month indefinitely.

Is your business scaleable? Is your career scalable? And most important, is your lifestyle scalable? And if it isn't

When are you gonna become a bottleneck? and when are you going to face imminent meltdown? So uh I have a uh seven hundred and forty five slide presentation I'd like to go through. I am just kidding. Uh I'm not going to spend much time on the problem. Everyone here knows what the problem is, uh, whether that's time famine or Worse yet.

Some sense of boredom. Tolerably. Uninteresting. Uh

Let me just jump through this real quickly. So I I want to show you sort of the before and after in my case, and uh I'm sure some of you will be able to identify with this. 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 Uh let's see. Okay guys. You know what?

Forget PowerPoint. Uh no, that's okay. I'll I'll save you the trouble and I'll try to do my my So the first one said Hi, my name is Barry. I check email two hundred to three hundred times per day and it was in a support group.

And uh I I'm sure most of you uh 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 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.

Uh 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 twelve hours a day. Are you in a game worth winning? And is it scalable? I'll come back to this. So what I'm gonna 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 uh the s the structure that I'm gonna go through is Definition, elimination, automation, and then liberation. And uh when I look back on my own experience, I really followed that process and it is repeatable. I'll give you one key concept from each, illustrate it, and then uh tell you exactly how you can use it as soon as you leave this presentation.

So jumping into uh definition. Definition really entails. uh determining What it is that you want to create.

From a lifestyle standpoint, how much that costs. What are the financial realities of designing an ideal lifestyle? And uh 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 I'm going to go to the first time Define also entails determining What portion of your efforts are producing the results that you want.

And uh I just want to give one example. of the eighty twenty principle and how that can be applied. Some of you may be familiar with it. It's also called Pareto's principle. The eighty twenty principle dictates that twenty percent of your inputs will produce eighty percent of your desired results.

Twenty percent of the people will produce eighty percent of the result. So Looking back at my own history to give you an example of how Dramatically. a quantitative analysis using the A twenty can be.

Uh in mid two thousand four again when I reached my My threshold essentially. Uh I had approximately a hundred and twenty uh wholesale customers. And uh the company I started was a sports nutrition company, handling everything from design to manufacturing and

And Of these one hundred and twenty wholesale customers, I realized that Five of them. were contributing ninety five percent of my profit. And because I felt as though

I needed to be active from nine to five, I was creating activities for myself to fill that time. And The remaining

one hundred and and uh and fifteen We're only contributing about five percent. But I'm 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 email orders. I did this to filter my customers so I would have Low maintenance.

Customers. 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 sixty hours per week with the wholesale accounts. To about two hours per week. And was able to increase increase profit from that wholesale division about twenty percent 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 t to know what those sources are. So really sit down and see how you're spending your time. The question you need to ask, there are really two questions. The first is Which What twenty percent of my activities are producing the eighty percent of what I'm trying to accomplish? And

You really want to ruthlessly eliminate everything. And some of those things will be minimally important. But they're not important enough to spend your time on. Focus on duplicating

The second question is What twenty percent of my activities of the people I'm involved with are producing eighty percent 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

uh a huge contribution to my profit. Uh two of them were professional ball breakers. So we're faced with a a dilemma here. And that is they're contributing quite a bit of money, but uh there was a huge negative carryover. Uh I took their insults, their brow beating, and it carried over into my personal life.

Uh with me at almost because of this. So I fired those two customers. And I would encourage everyone fire more customers. Uh And the way I did that was I sent them an email.

Uh unfortunately it doesn't seem as though our work styles are compatible. Uh I would I would love to continue working with you. If the following conditions are met

No insults. No profanity. Uh if that's the case, look forward to working with you. If not Uh Best of luck. Take care, Tim Ferriss. Uh one of them left, never to be heard from again.

And the other Shaped up immediately and was placing twice as much. Or 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 Shaw, who was my professor at Princeton before I came back to speak at his class. And uh Ed Shaw uh is someone you should know. Ed Shaw was one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley. Uh but he was on the congressional side. He actually

uh lobbied to have the capital gains taxes. Lowered. And uh taught at Stanford Business School when he was twenty three, which he's in his mid sixties 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 allot it. 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 eighty twenty.

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 Yeah. Uh Time management. Just a few words on time management. I don't think it works.

Uh I think that there is an efficiency epidemic. among intelligent people, especially among technologists. Uh to focus on how to do things better as opposed to what to do. Uh 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 Uh elimination, what I'm going to talk about just briefly, uh this will be one example, is what I call batching. And uh and I'll I'll use this in the context of email. So If you've ever ordered T shirts, I'm not going to be able to Or had anything printed.

Uh The cost for Let's say printing three t shirts might be the same as printing twenty t shirts. The reason being there's an inevitable setup cost involved. And that's the same with any task. Uh

The average American worker spends twenty four percent of his or her time Simply in between tasks. Tast switching. And once interrupted, forty percent 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 twenty windows open on your computer.

Uh So batching involves Letting Similar tasks accumulate

at very limited times, as infrequently as possible. To accomplish what it is you need to accomplish. And um for knowledge workers, which all of you are, who spend at least twenty five percent of your time on email each day email 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.

is managing expectations of those around you. And training the people around you and your boss, if 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 eleven AM And four PM. specific standard time or whatever your 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. 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 Ferris. If you make that one change and you stick with it. uh the quality of life you experience. will change so dramatically that you won't you won't wish you'd done it years sooner.

Uh 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 Chances are not many people have replied. Second of all, you scramble your brain with a collection of

Disorganized. ideas and unrelated ideas. Uh so let your email accumulate. Focus on getting the one most important task. that you've identified through AD twenty done before lunch, so you can't postpone it and use that as an excuse. Uh So

Really elimination is about focusing on the crucial few instead of the trivial many. And most things. 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, uh this this is something that I've experimente quite a bit with in the last three or four years. Um 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. Uh what I recommend you do is really quantify the value of your time. And

Uh I mean I mean that in a very specific way. So if you make fifty thousand dollars per year And you work. Forty hours a week. Who already do.

And and you take two weeks of vacation a year, you make twenty five dollars an hour. Right? What I would recommend uh is that You outsource anything.

that can be done for less than twenty five dollars 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 fee for less than$15 an hour. you should assign those tasks to them. So as a personal example I have an army of about twenty five Indian MBAs. in Bangalore, who essentially run my life for me.

And they cost four dollars an hour. And there are a number of advantages to this. Uh Number one is It 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 Uh 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. Uh I have uh 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 the little wallet outline. He couldn't get a replacement for these genes. But he ripped them right down the groin. Not good to wear around.

And he sent these genes to his his group of uh professional virtual assistants in India And they had them replicated. He had people his size wearing them, putting a wallet in. Replicating

The genes exactly. And uh if if you go to Uh If you go to fourhourworkweek dot com, there's a there's a sample of Outsourcing Life, the the chapter, and there's a bit by A. J. Jacobs, who's the uh editor at large of Esquire. It's hysterical.

Absolutely hysterical. But Uh this alone has saved me an immense m amount of time. And uh So Automation. Thinking in terms of rules that you can set for yourself as opposed to responding

in a culture of of urgency. Okay. is liberation. And this is This is a a two part

The first element of liberation is creating mobility. So mobility, if you recall Ingredient, the third currency.

of ideal lifestyle design. And For Entrepreneurs, how many people are entrepreneurs in the audience as 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. Uh 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. Uh Before you can uh

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.

Honestly is overrated in my opinion. Uh 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 Наскінку

Or tripping over chairs. But uh begging for forgiveness. I give you a very good example. Uh there's a there's a case study uh that I did. with a gentleman, he's early forties.

lifetime employee at we'll say HP. It's actually a company much closer to Austin. And he's 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. Uh two years ago. He met a wonderful woman and he wanted to propose. The problem was she lived five thousand miles away in China.

And he had actually met her on a uh a tech support call that they'd made to a a client base in China. So he used what I call the hourglass approach. to to earning his mobility. What he did is he created

uh an emergency. That would take him out of the office. For two weeks. 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 uh 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 uh he took those two weeks, uh 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 uh he had all of his support calls routed to his fiance's phone. No one was the wiser. And I 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. Uh He was able to perfect his approach to working remotely. When he came back. Okay. A large period outside the office.

So he came back to the office, he 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. Uh

This is the 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 the puppy dog clothes. You know, just take the dog home. See what you think you can bring him back.

Um 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 it I would be much more productive. And uh 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 and like less productive. at work and more and more productive. Remotely. Uh until you get

back to whatever degree of mobility you want in your life. And uh there are many examples that I could give you of this, but it is very, very possible. within uh within an employment situation. Uh the second part of liberation, which I don't have too much time to go into today because I want to get to the QA. 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 uh 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 Yeah. It's not a long term uh career post whatever it is you're doing now. So

Just to give you a personal example, the first day that uh that I left the country, so how did I begin my lifestyle design experiments? Well I be I began it by uh Oh no. one of my many trips to New York City, taking a backpack with a weeks full of clothing and deciding that I just needed to leave the country. And I went to JFK and bought the first tick I could find out of the country, which was a one way to London And uh I stayed with my

Mm. 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. I woke up at ten AM. My first day without an alarm clock in four or five years. And uh

Bolted upright out of bed. I'd envisioned waking up to bird song, stretching like a cat. There's Spanish villa breathing in the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Not quite how it happened. I bolted upright like someone had put a file card into my head, looked around for my laptop, realized that I couldn't check email. And proceeded to have a complete nervous breakdown.

And wander around London for a day. going to see the sites, which I find boring. I don't really like museums that much, with some vague sense of guilt, you know, looking out of the corner of my eye at every internet cafe as I pass by. Um once you remove work as identity, once you remove Job description is self description. Uh after you've let your interests atrophy.

for a long period of time. It's quite a challenge to to make productive use of that time and fill that void. Uh so that's the last part of liberation. So Uh In s in summary uh 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 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 twenty four hour access. Um having other people wait for you is a symbol of power. All right.

And you need to train people to do that. I was recently in Florianopolis, Brazil, learning to surf. And uh beautiful place. I recommend it. Um A lot safer than real. And uh

I I was going through the airport on my way back to the US. And there was a huge Twenty foot. Advertisement. And it was for a Blackberry, a brand new Blackberry bottle.

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.

Mm. So I want to open it up to QA and then I'll ish the issue the challenge that I promised everyone for which the the prize is a round trip anywhere in the world. Uh I'm gonna open it up to QA and uh I don't want to take up any more time, so I'm not going to be able to Please go ahead.

Uh great presentation, by the way. I wish I had the stones to fire eighty percent of our clients. And uh the reason I don't is because we built up uh I own an interactive design agency and we built up a uh really good reputation in our region and we depend on word of mouth. How do you fire eighty percent of your clients without building uh bad will within the community? That's a very good question. Really fire is a strong word.

Uh and What it comes back to is When you start a company. Your objectives are often very, very clear. I am starting this business because I want to be more independent. I am starting this business because I want to control my time. I am starting this business because I want to be respected in community X.

Uh 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 s is a smart or healthy thing in business or personal life. Uh so how do you fire them? Um first of all, you need to do an analysis. It might not be eighty twenty, it could be fifty-fifty. Usually it's actually more ninety-five-five. Uh and uh

Really all I'm encouraging you to do is is focus on filtering your clients so you have low maintenance clients. Yeah. Um with and it's possible to do that. I'll just give you an example. So I have of distribution through about fifteen countries with with our products.

And uh Two hundred to four hundred people work. on the entire supply chain and distribution at any given time. Who whom I pay. Um

And I was able to to fire Uh Fire isn't really uh the correct term. In my case, I was more or less ignoring them. Um

Unless they had something pending. And honestly, if if you just make 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 hundred and twenty 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 my real estate broker who sold me my my my last house, he calls me every three weeks. Hey, how you doing?

I'm fine, how are you? Yeah, just call in to see see how you're doing. Yeah. Okay, um I'm in the middle of lunch. I'll talk to you uh

Never Never again. Uh I That's all I'm recommending. So d 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 of not creating activities, so just contacting them that you really don't need to create. Tim, so you have a a team of Indian MBAs who run the D

What happens when they read your book? Ha ha ha. That's a good question. I've thought about this. Um I'm kind of concerned that they're gonna come out with a two hour work week. Mm.

No, there well the here's the thing is Uh Hiring the Indian MBAs is an example of of something that I'm I'm quite fond of, which I call geoarbitrage or geoarb so How do you take advantage of currency differences?

really get the most bang for your buck and create the ideal lifestyle. Um 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 beating the rates they're already offering me. But it's a fair question. I was wondering about meetings. Um

So do you do you like have rules set up for running efficient meetings or do you just patch'em through to Bangalore? Like You know, but you know what I mean? Like 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 of decreasing my hours.

Uh To a virtual architecture. I've actually In six years never met

Now that having been said, uh just general rules for meetings. Um 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 than ten in person meetings in the last Five years probably. So a couple of things.

Keep them very, very short. Uh none of my none of my conference calls or meetings run more than thirty 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? What are the questions that you have for me? Because I want to prepare and I never have conference calls without preparing.

Uh And the second thing is define an end time. It's very, very common to Plan meetings. Okay, we'll have a meeting at eleven o'clock and before you know it, holy crap, it's gone to two PM And I haven't had anything.

accomplished today. So th those will be my two main recommendations. Um But I Yeah. There's a quote by Dave Barry who says that that uh in in corporate America it's popular to have meetings because they can't actually masturbate. Yeah.

And uh I I tend to I tend to agree with that. No, it's a good question. Thanks. Okay. 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 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 CC me and her on their requests and I That works out okay and I'm just wondering how you handle that sort of like actually Amy does that kind of thing. Yeah. I'm completely transparent. Uh if you send an email, if you want to see a a good autoresponder

Send an email to Timothy at brainquicken dot com. Uh that's Yeah. And uh it's very clear. It's a has uh I I'm often travelling 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'll direct them to those people. And uh Outsourcing is so Ubiquitous. that I I I am not embarrassed at all at all to admit that I use an outsourced fulfillment company, for example. Uh Dell ships many of its products from the same fulfillment company that I use.

And uh for those of you familiar with Xbox, Microsoft doesn't make that. Flextronics makes that. And uh the the Top. twelve brands of mountain bikes in the US are all made by the same three or four plants in China now. If you're a Canandale, I'd 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. 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. Um I'm completely transparent, one hundred percent. Okay, so just to continue with that, then how do you deal with the say in my case I want to increase the rate that I charge this client.

Yeah. So So how do you how do you pawn it off to a subordinate while charging them more? Mm.

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 b the the breast and brightest my goodness. Where's my mind? I'm sorry. So that's how I would approach it. Um 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? Um I will uh as far as relationship management goes, um

I just I believe there are very few relationships um that are the critical relationships. That doesn't mean that you're rude to other people. Uh but uh 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 it's almost come full circle. So email I think people expect A certain degree of Um I wouldn't say coldness, but uh sort of brisk efficiency in email.

And uh there was a great panel yesterday on 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. Uh

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 b between my most important clients. I have uh one of my partner company is a seventy million dollar company and they're trying to liquidate create uh working cash for the founders and I introduced them to a private equity manager.

And uh 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 I have a real question this time. Uh you said that uh 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, you know? Uh There's a gentleman named Arthur Jones, he's the founder of Nautilus Company.

Probably the smartest exercise scientist of the last hundred years, I would say. also the founder of MedX. He's actually on the Forbes five uh I think it was he was on the Forbes four hundred 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 uh Peter Drucker also said what what gets managed I'm sorry, what gets measured gets managed.

So it has to be quantifiable. It can't be I think this is important. What 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 now 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 it's fairly easy.

you say this is my desired output, what are the inputs that contribute to that? And uh That would be that would be the the fast answer. Um so for me I look at

Uh the 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 I just got a ten thousand dollar raise. Now making sixty grand instead of fifty thousand. That doesn't necessarily mean you're making more than twenty five dollars an hour now.

If your hours go up, you're actually making less. And that's how management consultants and i bankers, who are a lot of my friends, end up making less than someone at Burger King. Uh 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? um on the on the business side of things. I eighty twenty my personal life as well, uh but that's usually related to people. So who what are the what what are the twenty percent.

uh the people involved with me who contribute to my general well being, happiness, excitement. And I'm pretty ruthless with my social encounters too. Uh if if you really want a scalable life and you want to achieve what it is uh that you've set in front of yourself in your personal business life, you have to be very ruthless with that type of elimination. Um

So quantifiable metrics. You need to identify what your desired output is. Sorry to ask so many questions. Um this one's kind of I don't know if I should ask you but Would you take me on as an intern? Sure.

I'll give you four fifty 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 three hundred hours per week. I'm in a mentorship actually. Yeah, if if anybody's interested in being involved with the uh the book launch, it's gonna be a very, very exciting time. So please let me know. Yeah, absolutely, let's talk.

And then uh maybe um Eh cutting to your punchline or something, but you mentioned you can get a flight anywhere for free. 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. Quick question. You mentioned um certainly with your knowledge and and experience, you certainly leverage that in life, but are there any other tools that you leverage like You know you said you don't really like time management, but there's

Like calendar and planners and PDAs and Sure. No, that's a good question. Hold on a second. I'm gonna dazzle you guys with my technological sophistication. Hold on a second. You ready? This is gonna be bigger than the iPhone. All right.

This is the first PDA I've ever owned. I bought it a week ago. Cost me ninety nine dollars. It's the Palm Z twenty two, I believe. And the only reason I bought this was to have a back up 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

As far as uh what I leverage. Um I think the most important skill that you can develop is the ability to deal make and negotiate. Doesn't matter if you're a technologist, doesn't matter if you're an employee.

You're going to have to Create Uh win-win situations or the perception of win-win situations to get anything that you want. Uh because the default answer to anything that you ask for is going to be no. So how do you work from that position?

uh so I would encourage everyone to become a student of of Deal creative deal structuring. And negotiation. I think that uh that's the most valuable skill set you can do develop. Uh 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 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 and like you know feeling important reading their Twitters or writing something. So how do you do you have any advice on like getting off that crack? Sure.

I was uh 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. Uh So I went to a friend's birthday party a few months ago. And uh There are about twenty people there. And there's a a little bucket of of cupcakes.

And uh I eat about twelve cupcakes. Because it was a Saturday and Saturday's my off day where I'm allowed to eat anything I want. And so everyone was staring at me and and and really thought I was a a strange creature. Uh but I sat down next to one guy who had had about twelve glasses of wine, so I felt we were you know with my insulin levels and his blood alcohol levels, we were

And uh we we g we got to talking and he he asked me the question everyone asks me, which is What do you do? And uh 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 pathologer.

Which I'm not a pathological liar, I suppose I am a drug dealer to some extent. And uh I told him my story. I had just come back from Japan. I spent uh September in Japan learning how to Um Sword fight, Kendo.

And I told him about it and he said. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Four hour work week. You're full of shit. Come on.

And 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 uh He asked me uh he 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 I told him, Okay. Um 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 screensaver. 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 weeks combined, and he was started taking Mondays and Fridays off. To work remotely. Hi. For most of us who work in like traditional organizations with cubicles and computers on every desk and phones and conferences and meeting rooms,

Um 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 Sure. Okay. So that that relates to the challenge, so I am 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. Uh And that's just my O C D. Nature. But Um

For someone in a work environment If you could just cut five, ten hours off your week, I think that it would it would make your time here well spent. Uh 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 m they underestimate their leverage. They underrate 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 You know, I really want to take a four week course in X. I really want to have perhaps men mentorship time with executive Y.

really get them to invest in you. And that's not th that's not a uh deceitful or negative thing to do. This is improving your value to the company, uh but at the same time it will make them uh less likely to refuse requests. The second thing is that when you ask for things is just as important as how you ask for them. All right. So uh a very good friend of mine, he designed he's designed for IDO and a lot of the design firms like Frog. And

Uh 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 uh his immediate boss sent him an email. Received it on his Black Bear, but we're 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 gonna have to have a serious talk with my supervisor. And uh what I recommended

Uh my friend D, his name is Sherwood. I recommended That He increases 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. Sure would you have a great

And to play. And uh so I I told him to wait until a crunch period when he was an absolutely in 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 he said, Yeah, I'm just really not very happy. And uh

I don't know what I'm gonna do. Could be crazy. He didn't say that. But long story short, he got the trip to Munich. Um so don't underestimate the leverage that you have. Chances are Let's look at it this way.

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. And uh But it's for reasons that go well beyond the scope of of this presentation. Uh But

Uh where the hell was I? I need more caffeine. Where was I? Somebody remind me. Just talk about Ah right, okay, so if you get fired And uh a number of my my friends have gone out of their way to get fired because you get something. Very pleasant called severance.

is uh 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. Uh your employer on the other hand, let's say they lose you in the middle of an important project. That could be fatal. Okay. So don't underestimate your leverage. That would be my first my my first recommendation. And then going into what would I recommend that you do?

This relates to the challenge. So the challenge is thus. I want to Anyone here or everyone here. To Implement one of the ideas.

Whether that's the eighty twenty principle. Parkinson's law. outsourcing your life. There are two companies I'd recommend you look at closely. Your man in India, Y M I I. And brickwork.

Okay. Uh they're both based in India. Or uh some type of of liberation play. And uh

Have until This week, Wednesday at midnight. And uh Whoever whoever implements them in the most dramatic fashion will get a free trip Anywhere in the world.

Free round airfare, I should say. Not gonna 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 m certainly not least. If you continue. On the on the current track, you're gonna have five hundred months. Okay.

Since six nineteen sixty nine, the average American worker works In terms of hours, eight weeks more. than they did then. For the same income. If you just for inflation, okay? So slow down, take a look at what you're doing. There's no rush.

Okay. 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 kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading.

albums perhaps gadgets gizmas 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. Friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.