I started reading ‘The Four Hour Work Week’, when I was working for about 12 hours every day. During this time, working for 8 hours a day trying to achieve Work-Life Balance was a distant dream. ‘Four hours work week’ was unimaginable.
The basic theme of this book is to empower entrepreneurs or employees to work for a very short span of time and still be more productive and make more money. ‘Four hours work week’ is what he has been able to achieve. We can become more productive and efficient with the help of two things – Automating and Delegating. Tim Ferris mentions several tools and techniques that can be employed in order to achieve the highest degree of automation and delegation. He went into the details of how different functions of an organisation optimised without your involvement. Sometimes I felt like he went into so many details, that it felt like absolute spoon-feeding. When Tim would list down the resources, the book would become boring, but when he came back to his experiences and examples, the book would pick up pace again.
Some of the examples that he mentions in the book seem to be a bit too far fetched, and I would be surprised if he really uses them in his daily life. But overall this book is a good read. I am not sure if I would be happy to bring down my 72 hours work week to 4 hours, but it puts the point across. Most of the tools and techniques highlighted in the book can be introduced in our daily lives and will definitely help us ease out our stressful work schedule.
Key Takeaways: The most important thing revelation in this book was mentioned quite early. It was, figuring out what you will do with the rest of the time. You cannot achieve ‘Four Hour Work Week’, unless you know what you are going to do with the time that you save. This was quite astonishing, as most of us feel that we are too stressed out during the weekday, but fail to make the most of the weekends.
Who should read: ‘Four Hour Work Week’ should be read by everyone who is busy in life and would like to have a little more free time, irrespective of what profession you are in.
