Making The 4-Hour Workweek a Reality

I'll be the first to post the pessimist reply that the four hour workweek is not a reality if your primary goal is a four hour workweek. I suppose if you follow the exact steps in Tim's book and aim to create a product-based business where everything can be automated, then the 4 hour workweek is possible. But for virtually any other type of startup business, you'll likely find yourself fully engaged and working long hours to run the business.

Maria and Anup both have great points - automate and delegate as much as possible. This is key to running any business and probably the best advice to effectively lessen your involvement in day to day operations. I've found personally that if I try to distance myself too much, the business suffers. If you can count on reliable managers, employees, contractors to carry out the work for you, then you might be on your way to living the dream of the 4 hour workweek.

I suppose my point here, is that entrepreneurship is not that simple. Tim is a visionary and an idol, but we can't all live his dream.

If you can count on reliable managers, employees, contractors to carry out the work for you, then you might be on your way to living the dream of the 4 hour workweek.

The problem I always had with the idea of the 4 hour work week is that how do you find these uber-employees that have the experience, drive, overall vision etc etc to run your business entirely for you with almost no guidance or supervision?

If they've got all that then wouldn't they be working for themselves?

Great question.

I do a lot with crowdsourcing. It's a great way to generate lists of information for a low cost with a virtual group of qualified workers. Smartsheet (I am one of the co-founders) offers something called Smartsourcing which hooks into Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I use it for generating lists of bloggers in various niche industries so I can research appropriate targets.

It's also a great way to conduct large-scale research projects. For example, I was curious whether certain catch phrases in a blog's title inspired more readership. So I used Smartsourcing to find whether (in the top 25 marketing blogs) certain terms generated more hits and more comments.

You can read about that project here, but there are lots more examples of how crowdsourcing can work:

http://brentfrei.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/whats-in-a-title---do-particular-words-affect-readership.html

Maria Colacurcio Twitter ID: @mcolacurcio

The ability to work 4 hours a week is directly proportional to what sort of goals and aspirations you have for yourself and the company you want to build. After reading Tim's book I understood his point and at the same time wondered whether that would truly make me happy.

Don't get me wrong mini-vacations, living in different parts of the world and experiencing everything life has to offer sounds like a dream. I am fortunate enough to take a little time out in the course of the year to enjoy such breaks. However whenever I do after a while I am itching to get back and get back into the startup game.

To answer your question more specifically in order to run such an enterprise one must have or learn the ability to delegate very well, choose the correct partner, be a visionary and be extremely flexible in your approach to adapt while leveraging technology. The skill sets required map onto any sort of entrepreneur, only in this case you would be using your skill sets to decrease your time involvement as much as possible.

After reading the book when it first came out. I decided to implement one area "Outsourcing". And it worked. I outsourced some tasks that took up a lot of time, but were real simple to do. And it did free up more time so I could work on more challenging projects.

So if you are looking to implement part of the book, that is a great idea. I am awaiting the new edition later this year, see if I can maybe implement more of the ideas in the book, or even do his program full time perhaps.

Let's not forget the simplest answer: pick the right industry. Some lend themselves to automation. Others demand constant attention.

Part of this is asking yourself: "What kind of life do I want to lead?"

Are you looking to raise millions in VC money, get featured on WSJ, and become the next Aaron Patzer?

Or are you looking to build a low-maintenance, relatively-niche, lifestyle company?

Your only mantra should be "Automate" . Think of everything as a candidate for automation or an outsourcing candidate. Categorize jobs which require the following if you had the perfect person to execute them -

1.Owner's involvement required 2.Owner's supervision required 3.No involvement required at all

And do No 3. as much as possible. I have this mentality with whatever I take on in my day to day job as much as possible.

I also wrote on how to delegate here

Just listened to his talk at the Rails 2009 conf. on YouTube. One point that many answers have missed is his definition of work as tasks primarily connected to income and that you want to do less. Exceptions are teachers, programmers, pastors who enjoy what they do "up to a point". The key is not to hinder other aspects of your life.

Spend time working on the business and make an effort to cut the tasks "you" see as work. This can be tough on startups since early on, everything seems important and that you want to do everything humanly possible to make your company work.

Few options:

1. Do something you love, then work = happiness.
2. Create something valuable, license to megacorp and pick up the royalties.
3. Live in the woods.