Review: The 4 hour workweek

The first few chapters of the book can be summed to be the importance of relative income. Money has to be coupled with time (the freedom to do things that you want) for one to be the New Rich.

So what do I want, what excites me? 

I want to run a social enterprise organising projects to raise awareness about certain issues. 

With the convenience of the Internet, I think outsourcing some of your job would be a huge time saver. Imagine you are a HR associate who needs to check out the background of your candidates, you can simply outsource the Googling and Facebook-ing to your helper in India for a low fee. The time saved would be worth the money.

I agree with some other reviewers who said that the first 60 odd pages are already well worth the money.

Quotes from the book:

• Money gives empty bragging rights
• So what separates the New Rich characterized by options, from the Deferrers, whose who save it all for the end only to find that life has passed them by? 
• The NR want others to work for them (vs to work for yourself). They want to prevent work for work's sake, and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect (vs to work when you want to). 
• Retirement is not the goal!
• Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. Society should stop rewarding personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity. 
• Let's define "laziness" anew—to endure a non-ideal existence to let circumstance or others decide life for you, or to amass a fortune while passing through life like a spectator from an office window. Don't save retirement for the end! 
• The size of your bank account doesn't change this, nor does the number of hours you log in handling unimportant e-mail or minutiae.
• Focus on being productive instead of busy.
• If the potential damage is moderate or in any way reversible, dont give people the change to say no. Most people are fast to stop but hesitant to get in the way if you're already moving. 
• Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase
• what would excite me? 
• No more passing days as the living dead, no more dinners where his colleagues compared cars, riding on the sugar high of a new BMW purchase until someone bought a more expensive Mercedes.
• There's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh, it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything," and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyway." Either way, nothing happens.The level of competition is fiercest for "realistic" goals, paradoxically making them the most time-and energy-consuming 
• Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.
• I need to Liberate myself from the office environment before they can work ten hours a week to escape from the expectation of long hours.

What you can do to become the NR. 

• Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important. 
• Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
• Focus on the important few and ignore the rest. Lack of time is actually lack of priorities!
  More customers is not automatically more income. More customers is not the goal and often translates into 90% more housekeeping and a paltry 1-3% increase in income 
• Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines (80/20 + Parkinson's Law).

• Allocate the bare minimum so time is not wasted on work which only gives 20% of result. 
• Even if you know what's critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace it, leaving you at the end of the day with nothing accomplished.
• Define a short to-do list and a not-to-do list
• "If this is the only thing I accomplish today,will I be satisfied with my day?"
• Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?
  If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask
• Stop asking for opinions and start proposing solutions 
• I suggest that... What do you think? / Let's try... and then try something else if that doesnt work. 
• My contacts now know that I don't respond to emergencies, so the emergencies somehow don't exist or don't come to me. Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.
• Instead, complete your most important task before 11:00 A.M. to avoid using lunch or reading e-mail as a postponement excuse.
• Structure emails with "If... Then..."
• Meetings should come with a agenda
• That sounds doable. So I can best prepare, can you please send me an e-mail with an agenda? That is, the topics and questions we'll need to address? That would be great. Thanks in advance.
• Force invaders to give a 30s summary by not letting them"get back to me". Insist on "What can i do for you". If it is still not clear, get them to send a email to "remind me"
• Develop a number of rules to work autonomously with less approval seeking and talk it over with Boss. 
• "hate to interrupt you so much and pull you away from more important things that I know are on your plate.. Would that be reasonable? "
• Automate your life with a PA from Brickwork 
• if you spend your time, worth $20-25 
• Per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources.
• When giving constructive advice, avoid calling a problem a problem. call it a thing. 

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