The 4 Hour Work Week

To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.

The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure.”

Dreamlining is so named because it applies timelines to what most would consider dreams.

To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.

The options are almost limitless for creating “busyness”.

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

Lack of time is actually lack of priorities.

Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.

Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).

Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

Focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat.

Define a to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list.

Poisonous people do not deserve your time.

Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.

There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never.

Attempt to take Monday and/or Friday off, as well as leave work at 4 P.M.

Limit the number of items on your to-do list and use impossibly short deadlines to force immediate action while ignoring minutiae.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.

Doing the important and ignoring the trivial is hard because so much of the world seems to conspire to force crap upon you.

12:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. are times that ensure you will have the most responses from previously sent e-mail.

Complete your most important task before 11:00 A.M. to avoid using lunch or reading e-mail as a postponement excuse.

Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.

Meetings should only be held to make decisions about a predefined situation, not to define the problem.

If things are well-defined, decisions should not take more than 30 minutes.

The Puppy Dog Close is invaluable whenever you face resistance to permanent changes. Get your foot in the door with a “let’s just try it once” reversible trial.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

Batching is also the solution to our distracting but necessary time consumers, those repetitive tasks that interrupt the most important.

There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted.

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

It wasn’t scalable because there was an information and decision bottleneck: For the entrepreneur, the goal is to grant as much information and independent decision-making ability to employees or contractors as possible.

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.

Ask “Is that reasonable?” It’s hard for people to label things unreasonable.

Empower others to act without interrupting you.

SET THE RULES in your favor: Limit access to your time, force people to define their requests before spending time with them, and batch routine menial tasks to prevent postponement of more important projects. Do not let people interrupt you. Find your focus and you’ll find your lifestyle.

About working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.

Becoming a member of the NR [new rich] is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.

It is absolutely necessary that you realize that you can always do something more cheaply yourself. This doesn’t mean you want to spend your time doing it.

Remember—unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it. Eliminate before you delegate.

Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

Criticism Sandwich because you first praise the person for something, then deliver the criticism, and then close with topic-shifting praise to exit the sensitive topic.

To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy.

Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems (lost packages, replacements, refunds, etc.) in the fastest manner possible.

The more options you offer the customer, the more manufacturing and customer service burden you create for yourself. The art of “undecision” refers to minimizing the number of decisions your customers can or need to make.

Be professional but never kowtow.

For negotiation purposes as well, remember that it is best not to appear to be the ultimate decision-maker.

Getting what you want often depends more on when you ask for it than how you ask for it.

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.

If you don’t have attention, you don’t have time.

Condition yourself to notice complaints and stop making them with a simple program like the "21-day no-complaint experiment" [by Will Bowen], where you wear a single bracelet and move it from one wrist to the other each time you complain.

Embrace the choice-minimal lifestyle. It’s a subtle and under-exploited.

If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important.

Drucker stated: What gets measured gets managed.

Start small think big. identify what excites you vs. what bores you eliminate and focus on what excites you stick to what excites you no matter what people say. It’s your life, live it the way you know is right for you.