Book Review: The Four Hour Workweek

Time management is not an easy skill to learn.  We all struggle everyday with finding the right amount of time to do all these things we need to do, and along the way we are bombarded with advice.  Much of it falls into cliche advice like finding time for what’s "really important" in your life.  Tim Ferriss, however, has a different kind of advice to offer you in his new book, The 4 Hour Workweek.  Based on his life experiences at the age of 29, Ferriss offers useful advice on topics like outsourcing your life, creating a "low information diet," getting your boss to value performance over presence and taking "mini-retirements."  Each on its own represents an interesting way of looking at life … but together the form the premise of his promise to you that a 4 hour workweek might be well within your future.  A friend of mine celebrated his 30th birthday yesterday, and in an effort to make him feel old – I picked up a book called "When I was Your Age …" which has a list of accomplishments from people for every age.  So, for example, you can learn from the book that at age 13 Bill Gates first learned to program a computer.  In the book, for the age 29, the notable fact was the Ann Boleyn lost her head.  At age 29, Tim Ferriss has done infinitely better by publishing The Four Hour Workweek. 

I first met Tim at the SxSW show and have been following his efforts for the last two months, and reviewed an advance version of the book.  Now that it has launched, it quickly rocketed to nearly making the Top Bestseller list on Amazon  (its currently #11).  If you are interested at all in working less, getting more, and streamlining your life – you need to get this book.  Tim also publishes some great ongoing thoughts on his personal blog at www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog.