4OO
the
-hour
workweek
The transition from 19th-century clippers to email
should have given entrepreneurs more free time…
written by Brock Dickinson
Two hundred years ago, the Niagara region became
the unlucky spot between a rock and a hard place, as
American and British troops clashed in what would later
become known as the War of 1812. And although we
continue to debate the notion of who “won” the war, we
have the luxury of taking away one clear lesson from the
conflict: time is speeding up.
I don’t mean this in sense of some Hollywood spectacle, with scientists and superheroes racing to restore
time to its proper alignment. Nor do I mean it in any ense
Q3 2010 | BUSINESS NIAGARA 23
4OO
the
-hour
workweek
sense that physicists or cosmologists could measure. But
from a real-world, down-to-business, human perspective,
time is speeding up. And it’s a careful study of the War of
1812 that shows us this most clearly.
When war was declared by the Americans on June 18,
1812, one of the key reasons they gave was a series of
British “orders in council” which tried to prevent the Americans from trading with Napoleon’s France. What the
Americans didn’t know was that Robert Jenkinson, Britain’s newly named prime minister after his predecessor was
assassinated, had repealed these orders in May. News that a
prime cause of the war was gone didn’t reach Washington
for weeks. Of course, the same thing happened in 18141815, at the end of the war. In December of 1814, British
and American diplomats in Belgium signed the Treaty of
Ghent, ending the war. But back in America, no one knew,
and the fighting continued. The Battle of New Orleans
lasted until Jan. 26, 1815, when ships from Europe finally
brought word that the armies locked in combat were officially at peace.
Back in 1812, this was the speed of business. A simple
exchange of information, let alone a complicated business
transaction, could take months. Only slowly did this begin
to change. The first transatlantic steamship crossing in 1819
cut the speed of business from months to weeks, though it
was well into the 1830s before anyone had regularly scheduled steamship service across the Atlantic. In 1919, Albert
Read made the first transatlantic flight, in a series of short
hops that took him almost 12 days to travel from Long
Island, New York to Plymouth, England. Within a decade
or two, barnstorming airmail pilots pushed the speed of
business to mere days, giving way to jet travel (business
measured in hours!), fax machines (minutes!) and email
(seconds!). Today, with the support of BlackBerries and
iPhones, we can communicate with any other point on the
planet in less than an eighth of a second.
In theory, this phenomenal increase in the speed of business should have freed up great chunks of time for entrepreneurs and business operators. But somehow it didn’t.
The British humourist Cyril Northcote Parkinson hit upon
the reason in 1955, when he coined Parkinson’s Law: Work
expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. If
ever there was a sentiment shared by entrepreneurs, that’s
the one.
But if you’ve been watching the bookshelves recently,
you may have noticed that American small business guru
Timothy Ferriss has just released an “expanded and updated”
edition of his book The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss suggests
that a careful mix of Internet savvy, outsourcing and the
ruthless elimination of low-volume, high-hassle customers
24 BUSINESS NIAGARA | Q3 2010
can allow small businesses to thrive and grow with less than
four hours of effort a week. He suggests “mini retirements”
to fill the rest of your time, and has taken up tango dancing
and Chinese kickboxing with his many extra hours. Not
surprisingly, previous editions of the book have reached #1
on both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.
On the face of it, Ferriss’ claims are the 21st-century
equivalent of the Fountain of Youth. Yes, he suggests, you
can have it all – wealth, success, prestige – with next to no
effort. But if this is true, how is it that so many of the rest
of us entrepreneurs seem to have 400-hour workweeks? The
speed of business may have increased since soldiers trooped
across Niagara in the War of 1812, but the entrepreneurs of
today’s Niagara are battling to find out where all that extra
time went.
The truth is, we all like to dream. And any entrepreneur who tells you that you can make it big on 16 hours
a month is dreaming in Technicolor. Success in small business takes effort, it takes planning, it takes hard-won knowledge, and it takes time. But maybe, at the heart of Ferriss’
dream, there’s a tiny kernel of truth. Maybe, after 200 years
of business speeding up, after 50 years of Parkinson’s Law,
we can think a little bit about how to make speed work for
us, rather than us simply speeding our work.
The basic tools of the four-hour workweek are all in place:
outsourcing, drop shipping, automation, call centres,
mobile offices. And while Ferriss may exaggerate our ability
to live the high life on minimal effort, maybe it is possible
to make a dent in the ever-expanding length of our entrepreneurial workweeks. Maybe it is possible to break Parkinson’s Law, even if we can’t entirely repeal it. Ultimately,
cutting that 400-hour workweek to a four-hour workweek
may not be possible. But there are times when a 40-hour
workweek would be just fine. BN