How to get the most out of everything you do

Timothy Ferriss, bestselling author of The Four Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, joined Chris Hurn to discus his book and its applications.

Chris: It seems like there are a fair amount of people who are immediately turned off by the title. There’s a little bit of a story behind how you got that title, right?

Tim: Absolutely. The title is controversial. The objective, really, with writing the book was to show people how to reclaim time and how to use entrepreneurship as a tool for the ideal lifestyle design and world change. The title of the book came out because the initial title, which was Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit (it was a tongue-in-cheek reference to some of the content of my course), was vetoed by Wal-Mart. They did not find it funny at all.

So I ran a Google Ad Words test with about 10 prospective titles, submitting keywords like “world travel,” “retirement,” etc., where the ad titles were the headlines and the ad text were the subtitles. Within a week, for $200, I was able to see which combination had the highest click through rate. So that’s how it came about. I knew it would produce a very strong polarizing effect: people would either love it or hate it, and I think that proved very important for the book’s success online. And it certainly wouldn’t have been parodied on Jay Leno or anything else that has happened without the title being the way that it is.

Chris: Without oversimplifying, it seems like the book is really a bit of a philosophical treatise on, like you said “reclaiming time.”

Tim: Attention management is very important versus time management for many different reasons. Let’s say that you have not planned your weekend or scheduled anything to displace work during the weekend, and you get to Saturday morning. You wake up after a hard Monday to Friday week, and you have this void to fill. So you choose to fill that void not by feeling bored, you’re intelligent, so you will not choose that. Instead, you choose to feel productive by scanning email for 10 minutes. You think, “I’m gonna scan email for 10 minutes and make sure there are no big problems, and then I’ll move on with my weekend.”

Lo and behold, you find an issue that you can’t address until Monday. This leads us into a curious set of circumstances, because now the free time that you have for the next 48 hours is rendered useless by preoccupation. So you have time, but you don’t have attention. And therefore, you end up not being productive, not being relaxed, but end up in this middle ground where you get neither of those two things.

Chris: I think there was a study in your book or maybe I’ve read it elsewhere, that for every time you let yourself be interrupted — if you’re in the middle of a focused activity — it takes a good 10 to 20 minutes before you can refocus and get your attention back on the task you were doing before you got interrupted.

Tim: Exactly right. So not only do you have that setup cost that you just mentioned in the “restarting cost” but 40 percent of the time, the task that’s interrupted is not completed the same day, and you end up with a series of unfinished, half-started To-Do tasks. And that’s how you get to the end of the day, and you’re like, “Wow, I had lunch, did one errand, and I haven’t finished anything on my To-Do list. How did that happen?”

Chris: Right. Well, can you give us an example about what you refer to as a “low information diet” as a way to create time.

Tim: There’s a gentleman reader [of my blog] who recently told the story of how his two-year-old daughter thought it would be funny just before a long weekend to throw his Blackberry and his wife’s cell phone in the toilet and watch it go around in circles as she attempted to flush it out of the house.

Both parents ended up not working for about four days. This was a high-level executive, and no crisis came to pass that couldn’t be fixed some other way, whether that was by checking email or by having him route phone calls to another number. In this case, he was unable for about four days to check anything on a handheld or receive phone calls to his cell phone. It worked so well that he ended up buying a simplified, older model cell phone without any ability to send email, and he’s now getting more done as a result.

Chris: You talked a lot in the book about resources for outsourcing various things. Will you talk a little bit about absolute and relative income?

Tim: Sure, absolutely. The difference between these two is subtle but very important. Many people fixate on annual income. It’s kind of like the, “How much do you bench press?” question among guys. It’s like, “How much does he make per year?” and it’s really not an apples to apples comparison, because you’re leaving out some very important variables. So it would be like asking how much can he bench press without figuring out how much this person weighs. It’s not really a meaningful number until it’s put into context. So, let’s say that you make $100,000 a year and you get a raise to $120,000, but let’s also assume that your workload has increased 25 to 30 percent as a result. So what has really just happened? Even though on paper if you were to say, “I just got a 20 percent raise” that sounds fantastic, but if you’ve got a 25 percent raise also in workload, then you’re actually getting demoted. You’re earning less per hour.

For that reason, we end up looking not just at absolute income, which is annual income, but relative income, which is your hourly income. A very quick way to estimate that, if you work 40 hours per week and have two weeks of vacation per year: if you make $100,000 for example, cut the last three zeroes off, that leaves you with 100, and you cut that in half and you make $50 an hour.

Once you determine that number, you can start to do an 80/20 analysis of your time. Parado’s Law dictates that 20 percent of your inputs product 80 percent of your outputs. It also means that 20 percent of your activities will consume 80 percent of your time. You can use a program like rescuetime.com, which you can download for free, and it’ll tell you exactly how you’re spending your time productively or unproductively on your computer and online without doing any data entry.

So identify what are the 20 percent of activities that are consuming 80 percent of your time. The next question is: can I find someone to do any of those tasks? Can I pay someone less than $25 an hour to do these things? The answer is, of course, almost always yes, and an excellent service to use as an experiment just to have some fun with this is Ask Sunday.

So you can go to asksunday.com. You can get a virtual assistant in India or the Philippines to do 30 tasks for you per month for $60. So something that might take you several hours, let’s say your son or daughter or friend has a birthday on Saturday and rather than spend four or five hours trying to find this one item that they want, you could just call Ask Sunday and say, “You have my zip code. I want you to call every toy store within a 15-mile radius of my home. Find this one particular item and reserve it in my name behind the counter, and then call me with the address and phone number.” That would take you as long as I just took to say it. So 30 seconds and you save four hours. If you make $25 an hour, that’s $100 and you just spent $2 to do that.

Chris: That’s a good example. I think a lot of people fail to properly prioritize their time, and by that I mean they’re not valuing their time, for the highest and best use. A good example, which I think you’ll be proud of, is that I’m in Tampa at a mastermind group today, but I live in Orlando. For the first time ever, I actually hired a driver just so I could sit in the back seat coming over here because I’ve got a few articles I’ve got to get done. I just sat in the back seat and typed rather than drive myself, since obviously I can’t drive and type at the same time. People don’t seem to do this very often, do they?

Tim: No they don’t. I think it takes training, because if you are constantly going from, let’s just say waking up, rushing to the office, immediately leaving the office and then either continuing to work at home or running errands, you don’t really see the value of your free time. In other words, you don’t have a real grasp of just how many cool things you can do in your life or how much revenue, how much profit you could generate if you had extra hours to dedicate to projects or running your business rather than – so working on your business, instead of in your business — and once you start to just experiment, it makes a big difference.

Just make it a test for a week or two. Don’t say, “I’m gonna start using a driver every time I commute to work.” Just say, “This one time, for this one week, I’m gonna spend $150 or $200, and I’m gonna have someone drive me to and from work… let’s just say three times this week. So, I’m going to spend $150 as an experiment and see if I get a greater return on investment than $150.” That return on investment would not only be in dollar amounts but also in experiences. Also, in how you feel when you go to bed and how you wake up.

When you go to sleep, do you find you’re actually able to go to sleep because you had an hour to read that novel that you’ve been meaning to read for five years, instead of reading some type of how-to article on a problem that you have to jump on first thing next morning, all because you outsourced it to a virtual assistant who is now handling all of it. Once you start experimenting with it, as I say in the book, “once you go down the rabbit hole,” and you see how far it goes and how interesting it is, you never go back.

Chris: I want to get away from the book for a second, and talk about the fair amount of interviews you’ve done over the past 18 months. What’s the most common misinterpretation, in your opinion, of your message here?

Tim: The most common misinterpretation is that the book advocates laziness or idleness, which is not at all the case, but I understand how people would have that misconception if they’re just reading the title.

Chris: [Laughing] You do a lot for four hours, whether it’s press interviews or whatnot.

Tim: It’s not about being active for four hours and then staring at a wall or laying on a beach for the rest of your life. It’s really about increasing your output for whatever time you choose to use, and it’s also about reclaiming time and allocating it to the things that are most important to you.

I have this show that just came out on the History Channel called “Trial By Fire,” and I spent a week in Japan training 24/7 on horseback archery. Someone might say, “Well that didn’t take four hours.” Well, it’s true, but I had the time of my life doing that. So it’s really about making time for some of those crazy things… making time for family, making time for creative expression and everything else that gets lost if you’re constantly just putting out fires and stuck in the inbox.

Chris: Right. I’m a big believer that the teacher generally learns more than the students, so what are you seeing that you think is applicable or ought to be applicable to the sphere of entrepreneurship out here?

Tim: I think one of the most important principles that I’ve seen is recognizing that it is impossible to make everyone happy, so don’t try to make everyone happy.

Chris: Right. It’s a very difficult lesson, of course.

Tim: Oh absolutely. If you look at anything that I think most people would see as an obvious success, like anything from the iPod to the Model T… I mean Henry Ford is famous for saying, “If you asked people what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse, not a car.” If you look at his policy of “they can have any color as long as it’s black,” it’s actually very similar to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs and Henry Ford are very similar in their approaches to both managing people and producing product, and those certainly aren’t the only two examples. If you look at any of the innovations that we take for granted now as being no-brainers, they almost all met with extreme resistance when they first came out… and it’s not like that resistance passed quickly either.

I don’t believe that the customer is always right, by the way. I did for a long time and it created a lot of the stress in my life that was unnecessary. The best companies out there will certainly try to solve problems for customers and recognize that sometimes customers have bad days, and they might be a little unreasonable, but if you have people who are consistently just a thorn in your side, get rid of them. Fire them.

Also another thing I’ve realized is the assumption for many people, that you have to learn to deal with abrasive assholes, basically. Like dealing with assholes is part of doing business.

No. Don’t settle for that. I think the bar is being set too low. I would have very high standards and wait until you’re able to find the right person to do business with.

Chris: What’s next after all of this?

Tim: I have a new book that’ll probably come out in middle of 2010. That’s still very much under wraps, so I can’t talk too much about that, but the TV show with the History Channel that just debuted last night. That’s been fun. They might be doing additional airings called “Trial By Fire.” If that is picked up in a series, then I’ll probably be focusing on that.

Chris: What is that exactly?

Tim: It’s a 60-minute show shot in high definition, which basically shows me trying to master a skill in five to seven days that generally takes 10 to 20 years to master. I have access to the best teachers in the world. I find the teachers that I want to work with, and then I use orthodox training methods and then very, very experimental training methods to try and hack the learning curve. In this first episode, it was horseback archery so a full gallop with no hands, no safety gear. If you fall off, you get trampled or hit these poles on either side of the horse. Future episodes could be trying to pull off a museum heist (from training from criminals) to trying to break land speed records to trying to become a chess master within one week, to any number of things that I might do otherwise.

Chris: All right, Tim. Thanks for taking this time with me today your book is terrific, and it’s a quick read. People can get the book The Four-Hour Work Week at any bookstore or visit 4hourblog.com for more information.

Chris Hurn is currently President, CEO, Cofounder and Board member of Mercantile Commercial Capital (MCC). His company was recently added to the 2007 Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing companies in America, number 245 with 951% growth over the past 3 years. Chris is well-known for his innovative marketing achievements and continues to coach and consult with various business owners and entrepreneurs. To date, MCC has closed commercial loans in 31 states for over $350 million in total project costs – one business owner at a time, and has been voted “Best Place to Work” by the Orlando Business Journal for 3 years running.

A few other business achievements Chris has received:

• Reader’s Choice Award for “Most Respected Executive in Central Florida” and “Best Small Company in Central Florida.”
• “SBA Marketing Guru of the Year.”
• NADCO’s Banker of the Year.
• SBA Financial Services Champion.
• Top Twenty Most Influential People in Small Business lending.
• Hallmark Award for Top Producer in Mortgage Lending.
• “Top Male, 40 Under 40″ in Orlando.
• One of the “100 Most Influential People” in Orlando.

Throughout his career, Chris has been in various leadership positions, including his background as business consultant and financier with GE Capital and as CFO for the NAI RealVest group of companies. Chris’ educational achievements are equally impressive. He graduated from Loyola University with two magna cum laude Bachelor Degrees; earned a Master’s Degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Center (formerly at the Wharton School of Business); and only spent one year at Georgetown University Law Center before wising-up about becoming an attorney. Chris is a frequent speaker and writer and has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, LA Times, the Sacramento Bee, the Orlando Sentinel, Scotsman Guide and many other regional and nationally-recognized trade publications. He maintains a busy civic calendar as a Board member with the Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Board and the Florida Hospital Foundation Board, as well his involvement with many other esteemed community organizations. Chris is married to his wife of 12 years, Shannon, and has two children, Reilly and Julianna.

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