The 4-Hour Workweek
Many people want to retire as millionaires, but they don’t actually crave a
million dollars; what they want is the millionaire lifestyle. They want to be
able to travel, learn new skills, and spend their time doing whatever they
want instead of working. There are two schools of thought on how to achieve
this lifestyle:
1. Deferrers follow the conventional system of working for 30-40 years of
their lives and then retiring. They use up the prime physical years of
their life working, and either run out of money or run out of things to do
with their money while they’re traditionally retired.
2. The New Rich live the “retired” lifestyle throughout their lives,
alternating periods of work and fun. Their goal is to spend as little effort
and time to make as much money as possible.
The 4-Hour Workweek teaches you how to live the second lifestyle. The 4hour workweek (4HWW) lifestyle is a specific version of the New Rich
lifestyle in which you create a business called a “muse” that makes you
money while not taking up a lot of time.
You can achieve the 4HWW lifestyle by following a four-step process
with the acronym DEAL: define, eliminate, automate, liberate. First,
you’ll define what you want to spend your time doing. Then, you’ll free up
that time by eliminating unnecessary activities and streamlining your 9-5 job
and life. Next, you’ll automate your 9-5 job and chores and create your
muse. Finally, once your muse is earning you enough money, you can leave
your 9-5 job and do everything you defined.
D: Define Your Dreams
The first step to living the 4HWW lifestyle involves addressing your fears and
defining what you want to do.
Mitigating Fear
Once you’ve embraced the idea of the New Rich lifestyle, it’s time to figure
out what might hold you back—for most people, it’s fear of uncertainty.
People are so scared of the unknown that they choose to be unhappy
instead, because at least they know what that’s like.
To assess how much your fears are holding you back, consider:
What are the things you’re not doing because you’re scared?
What are you missing out on by not doing those things?
Why aren’t you doing those things? Timing’s not a legitimate answer.
There will never be a perfect time to do anything. If the answer is fear,
continue to the next set of questions.
To get past your fears, when considering doing something (such as leaving
your job), ask yourself:
What’s the absolute worst thing that could happen?
If the worst happened, how would you fix it?
What’s the most likely thing that would happen? (It’s not the worst
thing.)
If you wanted to go back to how everything was before you made a
change, how would you do it?
Once you know exactly what it is you’re worried about, it will seem less
frightening and easier to mitigate.
The things we’re most scared to do tend to be the things that are most
important or rewarding to do.
Define Your Personal New Rich Lifestyle
Next, it’s time to define what the ideal 4HWW lifestyle would look like for
you. Do this with a dreamline—a timeline applied to a dream. There are two
general things to keep in mind with dreamlining:
It’s easier to do big things than medium ones. Most people aim to do
average things because they seem more achievable. Therefore, there’s
more competition in the middle than the top. Also, medium things aren’t
as inspiring as big things, so they won’t motivate you the way a big
project would.
Ask yourself only one question—what do you find exciting? Don’t ask
yourself what would make you happy—happiness is vague and changes
from day to day. Seeking happiness might lead you to complacency or
boredom.
You can create dreamlines on a three-, six-, or twelve-month timeline. Here
are the seven steps to dreamlining:
1. List five items for each of the following: things you want to have, do, and
be. They should be specific.
2. Translate the items on the to-be list into to-dos.
For example, if you want to be well-read, what you might do is read
specific books.
3. From the fifteen dreams you wrote down, choose your top four.
4. Figure out the amount of money per month you’d need to do all four. If
your dream is a one-off goal, divide the total cost by the dreamline
timeline.
5. Add 30% to the number you calculated to factor in savings and
setbacks. This will be your “Target Monthly Income” that you’ll achieve
in the later steps.
6. Come up with three action items for each dream. The first you should
do today, the second tomorrow, and the third the day after.
7. Do the first action for all your dreams right now.
E: Eliminate Activities That Waste Your Time
The second step to living the 4HWW lifestyle is to eliminate things that take
up time you’d rather use for something else. Stop doing unimportant things
and learning unactionable information, and cut down on time spent on email,
calls, and meetings. Finally, if you’re an employee, transition to remote work
so you have full control of your own schedule.
Do Only Important Things: Efficiency Does Not Equal Effectiveness
Most of us probably approach our chores and tasks by managing our time,
prioritizing, and finding efficient ways to get things done. However, the best
way to save time is to only do things that matter, and stop doing
everything that doesn’t.
There are two principles to keep in mind:
The 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle). This rule states that 80% of results
come from 20% of effort. Therefore, if you stop doing some of your
activities, you’ll cause only a small or negligible effect on your results.
For example, imagine you’re selling magazines. 80% of your orders
come from 20% of your customers. If you completely ignored any
customer who wasn’t in the top 20%, you would lose customers.
But you’d still retain 80% of your orders, and you could use all the
time you saved to do something else that made you money or to do
a dreamline.
Parkinson’s Law. This law states that a task will take up as much time
as you give it, and the more time you give it, the more important it will
seem.
For example, if you have five days to write a paper, it’ll take you five
days. If you have two hours, you’ll get it done in two hours.
In order to stop doing things that aren’t important, apply both laws—
only do the 20% of your tasks that give you the most return, and give
yourself short deadlines for those tasks.
Ignore Long-Winded or Unactionable Information
Ignore newspapers, radio, and TV—all media. If something important
happens that will affect you, you’ll hear about it from someone else.
If you need to learn about something, ask other people who already know
about it to summarize it for you. If you don’t have a friend who can advise
you on the subject, get a brief overview of the topic by reading a single book
on it and then contacting experts and asking good questions.
Only learn information as you need it—if you learn something too far in
advance, you’ll forget it by the time you need it, and have to spend time
relearning it. And if you start learning from a particular resource and it’s not
helpful, stop. There’s no need to finish everything you’ve started.
9-5 Time-Consumers
When you work an office job, there are three categories of things that take
up time: busywork and distractions, routine work, and work that requires
approval or additional information. You can eliminate the first and expedite
the last two:
1. Busywork. To avoid busywork, limit people’s access to you. People will try
to access you in three ways:
Email. Only check your email twice a day and set up an auto reply that
explains this to anyone who emails you. Include a phone number so
anyone can get in touch with you about anything urgent.
Phone. Set up two numbers, one for urgent inquiries and one for nonurgent. Answer the urgent number and set the non-urgent one to go
straight to voicemail. Only check your voicemail twice a day, same as
your email, and record a message that explains this, same as your email
auto reply.
In person. Avoid meetings, especially those that don’t have a clear
agenda or end time. Meetings should only be used to make decisions
and shouldn’t take longer than half an hour. If someone tries to get you
to go to a meeting, suggest they email you instead, claim you have
another commitment, or go and then leave early. Also avoid informal
chats in your office or cubicle. Put up a do-not-disturb sign, listen to or
pretend to listen to headphones, or pretend to be on the phone.
2. Routine work. Routine work needs to be done but isn’t very high-impact,
such as going grocery shopping. The most effective way to deal with these
kinds of tasks is to batch them—do them all at once at a scheduled time
instead of doing them as they come up. This cuts down on set-up time.
For example, if you grocery shop every day and it takes you 20 minutes
to travel to and from the store, that’s 140 minutes/week. If you only shop
once a week and bought everything at once, you would only spend 20
minutes/week on set-up.
3. Work that requires approval. Work that requires approval can eat up
your time whether you’re an employee or entrepreneur. The best way to deal
with these kinds of tasks is to create rules or an algorithm that covers as
many situations as possible.
For example, if employees need a manager to approve a return,
employees waste time waiting on the manager, and the manager is
interrupted. To avoid this, the boss could put in place a blanket rule that
if a refund would cost less than $20, all employees can make the call
themselves.
How to Transition to Remote Work
When you work remotely, you don’t have to physically report to an office for
40 hours a week. As long as you get your work done, no one will know how
long it took you to do it. Once you’re remote, do all your work tasks in as little
time as possible Then, use the time you’ve saved to work on your “muse” (a
specific type of business) or do something fun.
There are two methods for transitioning to remote work, the five-step and
the hourglass:
Five-step method. Here are the steps:
1. Make yourself more valuable to your company. If they’ve
invested time or money in training you, they’ll be more reluctant to
lose you.
2. Prove that you’re more productive outside the office. Call in
sick for two days and work from home. Be far more productive than
you ever are in the office and keep a record of how much you got
done. This is also good practice for working remotely and will allow
you to sort out any logistical or technical issues.
3. Pitch remote work to your boss. Frame the request as a good
business decision (you were super productive because you weren’t
in the office) and emphasize that it’s only a trial and your boss can
change her mind whenever she wants.
4. Trial remote work. Be far more productive on your remote days
than in-office days. It should be easy to be more productive
without supervision because you now know how to leverage step E
(Eliminate). Ideally, do the trial during a time that you’re
indispensable to the company.
5. Extend the trial. Keep extending the trials until your boss has
agreed to full-time remote.
The hourglass method. There are three steps to the hourglass
method:
1. Go full-time remote for two weeks. Invent a reason to leave the
office (for example, a personal issue) and tell your boss you'd like
to keep working during this time. Be extra productive during these
two weeks.
2. Go back to partially remote. Do steps c and d of the five-step
method.
3. Extend the trial, just like in step E (Eliminate) of the five-stepmethod.
If you can’t get your boss to agree to remote work, quit or get yourself
fired. You won’t be able to create your muse unless you have more free time.
Therefore, not quitting your job is effectively quitting your dreams. Doing
nothing can be a much larger mistake than doing something imperfectly.
A: Automate Time-Consuming Activities
The third step to living the 4HWW lifestyle is to automate everything you
don’t want to do. That way you can spend your time doing whatever you
want while still having money come in. To do this, you’ll hire a virtual
assistant, start your muse, and then automate your muse.
Get a Virtual Assistant (VA)
You should get a virtual assistant (VA) regardless of whether you’re an
employee or entrepreneur, and regardless of whether or not you think you
need one. Getting a VA teaches you to manage, teaches you the value of
your own time, and reinforces step E (Eliminate)—if you’re waffling about
eliminating something, you’ll cut it loose once you have to pay someone to
do it.
Any tasks you delegate to your VA should be important, time-consuming,
specific, and remote-friendly. When delegating:
Give simple, specific directions and ask your VA to rephrase your
directions to confirm clarity.
Ask your VA to get back to you in a few hours with a status update.
Give short deadlines in accordance with Parkinson’s Law.
If you send more than one task at a time (don’t send more than two), tell
the VA which is priority.
You might be wondering about security concerns, and the good news is that
information abuse is rare. When it does happen, it’s reversible. To
protect yourself, find a VA through an agency that has high security
standards, ask your VA to use credit instead of debit (it’s easier to reverse
credit card charges than debit ones), and use different passwords for all your
logins.
Find Your Muse
Now that you’ve practiced management with your VA, you’re going to start a
particular kind of business the author calls a “muse.” The goal of this
business is not to make the world better or to generate a lot of money so you
can sell the company in twenty years. The goal is simply to make money
using as little time and effort as possible—the muse should run itself.
There are three steps to creating an automated muse. Do not manufacture
any product until you’ve completed all three steps:
1. Brainstorm niche markets. Choose a market before a product so that
you know there will be demand for your product. Choose a niche market
specifically because there will be less competition and it’ll be less expensive
to advertise. There must be a magazine that serves that market (for
advertising in) and you must be part of the market (that way you’ll know
what the market wants).
For example, if you’re an athlete, you might choose martial artists as
your market.
2. Brainstorm products. Come up with possible products that would serve
the niche markets you brainstormed above. The best option is to sell an
information product that you create yourself (you don’t have to be an expert,
you just have to know more about the subject than your customers).
Information products are ideal because they’re cheap and fast to create, can
have a large markup, and are hard to copy or knockoff.
For example, you might sell a DVD of a martial arts workout. Once
you’ve filmed the workout, it’s cheap to make copies of the DVD.
3. Test your product ideas. Study your competition so you can find a way
to make your product different and then create an ad that highlights why
yours is different. Then, start advertising and “selling” your product. (Since
you don’t actually have products yet, you’re not going to be able to sell
anything; you’re just going to set up sales infrastructure to see how many
people are interested. As long as you don’t collect billing information, this is
legal.)
For example, perhaps many martial arts workout DVDs exist, but yours
is the only one that includes specific exercises for increasing the power
of your sidekick. Your ad will talk about sidekicks, and you could offer
the product on an eBay auction to gauge interest.
After testing, calculate if your muse product was profitable by comparing
how much you spent on advertising to how much money you made “selling”
your products. If it wasn’t profitable, revise your product, ad, or guarantee to
improve sales and then test again. Or try a new product.
Automate Your Muse
Once you’ve come up with a product and started your muse business, you
need to make the switch from running your muse to having your muse run
itself. There are three phases of automation, based on sales:
Phase #1: You’ve shipped 0-50 products in total. In this first phase,
you do everything yourself including talking to customers, taking orders,
packing, and shipping. Tweak your website and ads using what you’ve
learned from chatting with customers and look into getting a merchant
account at a small bank to be ready for phase #2.
Phase #2: You ship fewer than ten products per week. During this
phase, you’re still involved, but you’re going to bring on a local
fulfillment house. While researching fulfillment options, keep doing
everything yourself. Once you have someone signed up (who has low
fees and net-30 terms), give them the responses to the FAQ you’ve set
up on your website and all the questions you’ve already encountered so
they can efficiently take customer orders and questions.
Phase #3: You ship more than 20 products per week. In this phase,
you should aim for full automation. There are two steps:
Research and sign up with a large fulfillment company that handles
everything to do with orders, a credit card processor, and a call
center if you want to take phone orders. Ideally, choose companies
who already work together to avoid any communication hiccups.
Decrease interactions with customers and decrease your customer
base. Customers buy your products, but they also take up your
time, so you want to streamline customer service as much as
possible. Focus on customers who order frequently, don’t have
questions, and don’t return things. Send annoying customers to
your resellers or ignore them.
L: Liberate Yourself From the Rat Race
The final step to living the 4HWW lifestyle is to achieve the dreams you
defined in step D (Define). You’ll leave your non-muse job, “mini retire,” and
settle into your new lifestyle.
How to Leave Your Job
Once your muse is up and running, you won’t need the income from your 95 job anymore, and you can quit it to earn yourself even more free time.
You probably have some reservations about quitting. Most likely, they’re all
based in fear. Here are some common fears associated with quitting a job,
and how to mitigate them:
Permanence. Quitting a day job doesn’t mean you can never take a day
job again. It wouldn’t be that hard for you to get back to your current
state if you needed to. If you need to reassure yourself, browse jobs and
put your resume on job sites to reassure yourself that you can always
come back.
Loss of your paycheck, your medical insurance, and your
retirement accounts. If your muse isn’t already earning you enough
money, consider other ways to pay your bills, such as selling your
assets. You can buy private medical insurance, and you can transfer
your retirement accounts to a new company.
Gaps on your resume. It’s not hard to explain a gap on your resume—
simply say that you got an amazing opportunity that you couldn’t pass
up.
Mini-Retirements and Decluttering
Instead of going on a vacation or a one-time sabbatical, go on a “miniretirement.” A mini-retirement is an affordable, months-long relocation
to a new place during which you mentally disengage from the rat race
and achieve your dreams. A mini-retirement is also an opportunity to cut
down on your material possessions—as you decide whether to pack or store
belongings, get rid of anything that you don’t need.
There’s a step-by-step process to planning a mini-retirement. Some steps
you only have to do the first time you mini-retire.
1. Assess your finances and your physical possessions. What do you
need and what can you get rid of?
2. Fear-set. A common fear is danger, especially if you’re taking your kids.
Remember that where you live probably isn’t perfectly safe either and that
you can check travel advisories to get a sense of the objective safety of a
location.
3. Choose a location for your mini-retirement. You can stay in your own
country, but it’s easier to disengage from the rat race if you go somewhere
that has a different culture.
4. Prepare for your trip. There are to-dos in the months, weeks, and days
before you leave:
Months before: find people to take care of things for you at home, get
rid of belongings you don’t need, and sort out travel logistics such as
getting vaccines, medical insurance, and travel documentation.
Weeks before: set up a way for people to contact you, decide on a
schedule for your batch tasks, make copies of your important
documents, find temporary accommodation wherever you’re relocating,
and pack. The author recommends you bring as little as possible.
Days before: store your things, cancel your car insurance, and move in
temporarily with a friend or family member.
5. Get settled. Once you’ve arrived, look for longer-term accommodation,
and buy local health insurance and a local SIM card.
6. Declutter. A week after you’ve arrived, get rid of anything you brought
that you don’t need.
Living the New Rich Life
The author has a few recommendations as you start to live the New Rich
lifestyle:
Don’t do anything. Take a total break from being efficient, rushed, and
productive. You might try a silence retreat.
Donate anonymously to an organization. This helps you separate
getting credit for your actions from the act of doing them.
Use your mini-retirement to learn and/or volunteer. The author
recommends learning something such as a new language and/or a
hands-on skill. Serving others can be as simple as doing something that
makes one person’s life better—you don’t have to save the world.
Review and tweak your dreamlines after each mini-retirement.
As you first start living this lifestyle, you’ll have a lot of fun because you’ll be
doing all the things you’ve always wanted to do. Eventually, however, you’ll
probably find yourself with time you don’t know how to fill. This is normal,
and when it starts to happen to you, you should:
Acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong with your lifestyle. If you
feel lazy, it’s because you’ve been socially conditioned to constantly be
busy, not because you’re objectively being lazy.
Search for a new passion or vocation. This not only alleviates
boredom; it keeps your mind busy and off existential questions.
Ignore your brain if it asks you questions that are undefined or vague.
For example, it’s impossible to answer a question such as “What is
the meaning of life?” “Meaning” and “life” are so ill-defined that it’s
impossible to understand what the question is even asking, never
mind try to find an answer.
Ask yourself “Why?” three times every time you have a negative
thought. Then write down the answers, because this forces you to
clearly define the problem and helps get it out of your head.