Tim: The process that I was able to extract from the case studies in the book is surprisingly uniform, and I codified into four steps.
- Definition, which involves determining your target monthly income and defining certain other variables and parameters that determine your ideal lifestyle.
- Elimination which is, the batching, Parkinson’s Law, everything that can be done to remove unimportant, minimally important tasks and time-consuming activities, in addition to interruptions and managing other people.
- Automation, which is the outsourcing component and also the automation of income. How do you restructure your business that is process-driven as opposed to owner-driven and what does the virtual architecture look like, where can you find any service providers, all that’s in that section.
- Liberation, which is the mobility piece. So let’s say you have a supervisor, how do you negotiate a remote work agreement, what is the sample negotiating script look like for that. Also, once you create time, how do you design a life, how do you create those alternative activities and those alternative realities that most people never have to make decisions about, because they don’t have the time.
But the process is surprisingly uniform. And whenever I feel overwhelmed, I go back to that and do a mental checklist. I check off definition, elimination, automation -- those first three steps -- and then definitely most of what I am doing doesn’t need to be done.
Scott: We talked about a couple of your role models and inspirations. What are some of your favorite tools and favorite resources that help you reach that 4-hour workweek?
Tim: There are a number of good tools and I had a very fun time experimenting with various tools, as I was traveling around the world because I ran a multinational company from wireless locations and it presented a lot of challenges.
GoToMyPC.com is an excellent remote access solution. So if you are going to travel and don’t want to bring a laptop with you, which I recommend people do if they are going through a detox period following years of 80-hour workweeks, you can have a computer at home that you can access remotely, and you have access to a desktop, you can use Outlook and everything else. That is a very useful program that I used every week that I was gone.
Secondly, I use Skype quite extensively. I had used Vonage before, so when I was in Brazil learning how to surf, for example, I had a VOIP phone so I could receive calls to a California number and make free calls to U.S. I tend to use Skype more these days. Also for video conferencing, people feel the need for an in-person, but I am 7,000 miles away, then I use video conferencing.
I use Gmail as an external storage drive essentially, which is a very interesting way to go and you can go to Lifehacker.com to find out more about how to do that.
And then a few things I don’t do. What you don’t do is often as important as what you do. I don’t have a PDA with internet access or a Blackberry. I do have a PDA, a very simple Palm-Z22, which is $100. The two criteria that I had were 1) it had to have Outlook Contacts and Calendar and 2) it couldn’t have internet access, because if I had email in my pocket, I know I would check it every two minutes. And just as I know I am absolutely choc-a-holic, I can’t buy a bag of dark chocolate cooking chips and put them in my house because I will sit down and eat them all. Everyone has poor impulse control and I recognize that. I try to create a good environment rather than relying on discipline which is questionable.
For other tools I have my favorite laptop for mobile and digital lifestyles is one of the new Sony Vaio laptops, the VGNTXN27N. It’s extremely thin, but the reason I bought it wasn’t because it’s small, which is a very, very great benefit. It’s that with an extended battery and if I trick out the system a bit, it has 13 hours of battery life for a single charge, which is amazing and the bane of my existence is battery life. It’s really the limiting factor when you have a mobile lifestyle. It’s not always easy to find a place to charge. I had a Dell laptop and the battery’s degraded so badly that it gets about a half hour. And so going from ½ hour to 13 hours was like being reborn. I do really like that computer.
I use a Philips noise-cancelling headset when I travel and when I work in non-office environments because I was slowly losing my hearing from using a normal headset and having the volume too high to block out external noises. So, get a noise cancelling headset that folds in, is extremely portable and costs about $70.
Another thing I don’t use is an RSS reader. I don’t actually subscribe to any RSS feeds, which is hard for a lot of people to believe because I am pretty intimately involved with lot of the people in the blogosphere, and I’ve my own blog. But there are only a handful of sites I visit at night. I go to them once or twice a week and look at posts that are most popular and I think an RSS reader is like many things, like a Blackberry -- the addiction potential is very high and the potential to believe that more is better is extremely high. So people end up with 690 RSS feeds that consume 25% of the day.
Scott: So the book is The 4-hour Workweek and it’s available in stores.
Tim: It is. And if people go to 4hourworkweek.com, there are free chapters on outsourcing your life and a number of other resources.
Scott: Terrific. Tim, I would like to thank you so much for your time and wrap it up here and I’ll fill you in as I progress on my way down from my 80-hour workweek.
Tim: Happy to help. One step at a time. Thanks for having me.