Four Hour Work Week | Dorm Room Biz

Mar

Time to change your time management strategy?

Written by Chris on March 19, 2008 – 12:00 pm -

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After reading the chapter in The Four Hour Work Week about managing your time more effectively, I have decided to implement a couple of the different tactics to see if I can make my use of time more efficient and effective as opposed to just wasting time on seemingly unimportant tasks.

One of the points that Tim Ferris makes in The Four Hour Work Week (4HWW) is that if you stopped doing things during your working hours that were unimportant or that had no real effect on your actual work, you would therefore be able to get your actual work done a lot quicker and be able to take the rest of that time off – the idea being that you could cut your work load of a normal day to by a few hours a day and get the same amount of work done if not more. His suggestion includes to stop reading newspapers, watching TV, or surfing the internet and looking on sites like Digg.

Now, I do not know how far I would actually be able to take this to stop randomly surfing the internet because I do love watching hilarious YouTube videos or reading good stories on Digg.

So, what am I going to do you may be asking. Another suggestion that is provided in the book is to set time limits for activities that you work on. For students, this would be say the amount of time that you spend knocking on some homework, working on a project, studying for a test, or relaxing. My method to be more productive, on top of having a to-do list, is going to be to rank the tasks by the importance and group them into different categories. Then, I will be able to dedicate certain amounts of time to each category. My to do list may look something like this then:

School Work

Homework assignment due by Tuesday
Homework assignment due by Friday
Paper due by Friday
Project research (on-going)

eBay Related Tasks

Sort through eBay listings and update any old information
Relist any unsold items and adjust the listings if needed
Take care of packing any sold items

Website Design Tasks

Complete concept design for client A
Contact client B about starting work on project

Now if I devoted an hour each day, when needed, to knock these tasks, I would be able to easily complete everything that I needed to for that day or couple days at a time. The catch to making this technique work is eliminating all of the other distractions that you have going on – TV, email, phone calls, instant messages, friends, etc.

If you can disconnect yourself from everything else for an hour straight and focus solely on the task at hand, you should be able to find yourself much more productive and also find that you have a lot more free time to do the things that you want to as opposed to the things that you have to. These might include spending more time with your friends, spending time with your family, traveling, enjoying your surroundings, etc.

Give this technique a shot and see if it works for you. Dedicate at least a week to making this work so that if the first couple days that you try it different things come up that you could not predict from the start, you will have more chances to plan for those distractions and eliminate them in the days following. I would love to hear how this time management technique works for some of you.

I will be sure to report back about how it works for me in a week or two!

Tags: 4hww, four hour work week, strategies, time management
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Motivation, Web Development, eBay | 1 Comment »

Mar

The Four Hour Work Week – A must read for students in general!

Written by Chris on March 18, 2008 – 12:00 pm -

I know I had mentioned a while back in a post about my winter reading list that I was going to be reading The Four Hour Work Week (4HWW) by Tim Ferriss soon and would be posting a review of the book when finished. Well, I am not fully finished the book, however, I did want to put up a quick note letting you all know that the review is coming. The book is very detailed and an intense read for anyone that is interested in reorganizing their life and making major changes, so I want to be able to put together a review that is comprehensive enough to cover some of the major topics and point out some of the best information in the book. This will take some time!

Over the past week while cruising through the Caribbean, drinking beer, talking with the bartenders, enjoying the sun and different paces of life, and of course getting some sun burn, I found the opportunity to read through about half the book. If we had more time on the boat then I would have made it further – sorry but I had to experience the island excursions during my time as well.

Anyway, the book is a must read for student entrepreneurs and students in general! If you are looking for ideas on how to automate your life, work less, outsource your routine tasks, and evaluate what you really want out our your professional and personal lives, please get your hands on a copy today.

Keep an eye out for a full review of the 4HWW coming soon, hopefully within the next couple weeks. I intend to continue reading the book as much as possible over the next week to finish it up.

In the mean time, I do have a post coming up about how I am changing my thoughts on time management based off of some suggestions in the book, so look for that soon.

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