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The 4-Hour Workweek

June 8, 2009 By

Check e-mail once a week? Give your cell number to only a few people? Work less than 10 hours a week? That’s insanity…or a really good plan. Timothy Ferriss, bestselling author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”, not only goes against the business norm and breaks most business rules every written, he’s making a fortune doing it.51fsazava3l_sl500_aa240_1

Timothy’s book gives you ways to save time, outsource administrative help (he prefers overseas sources) and give people who work for you more authority to make day-to-day decisions. In the section, Time Wasters: Become an Ignoramus, he describes how e-mail time wasters are the easiest to eliminate and deflect. He feels that e-mail is “the greatest single interruption in the modern world” and offers a few suggestions.

  • Turn off the audible alert if you have one on Outlook or a similar program and turn off automatic send/receive, which delivers e-mail to your inbox as soon as someone sends them.
  • Check e-mail twice per day, once at 12:00 noon or just prior to lunch, and again at 4:00 P.M.  (Because) 12:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. are times that ensure you will have the most responses from previously sent e-mail.
  • Never check e-mail first thing in the morning. Instead, complete your most important task before 11:00 A.M. to avoid using lunch or reading e-mail as a postponement excuse.
    Work less…make more…makes sense.
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5 Ways to Make Meetings More Efficient

May 20, 2009 By

logo_226x83_greyI’m a closet techie nerd—I like technology almost as much as I like chocolate—so Popular Science really does it for me. In a recent issue, Pop Sci (it’s hip to be square) shared “5 things you can do to make meetings more efficient.” Some of the tips are aimed at corporate employees so all of you corporate employees who are working naked, this one’s for you. But fellow entrepreneurs, pay attention…we can use some of these tricks too.

  • Hold them online. The Web-conference software dimdim runs into your browser. It lets you present PowerPoint slides, share your desktop and shine a laser pointer on a virtual whiteboard. It also has voice and video capabilities.
  • Find a time. Turn planning a meeting over to diarised. Give the application a list of names and meeting times that work for you. It e-mails attendees and comes up with the best time for a meeting based on responses from everyone, then it follows up with a confirmed date.
  • Say you’re late. Use Oops I’m Late cell phone software to compare your clock, calendar, your phone’s GPS coordinates and the meeting place to figure out if you’re going to be there on time. If you’re going to be late, the site sends everyone who is attending the meeting an automated apology along with your new ETA.
  • Keep them short. Meeting Miser adds up the salaries of attendees to convert each minute into a dollar figure. That tends to keep meetings from dragging on too long.
  • Bail out. When you want to escape a meeting early, plan ahead and use getmooh (as in “get me out of here”) to get you out of the meeting. Before the meeting starts, figure out what time you want to leave and the service will send you what appears to be an important phone call.
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