HTR Research - The 4-Hour Workweek

I've started reading a book. I am sure that this comes as no surprise to any of you! However, this book is actually having a demonstrable impact on the HAVE TO reduction world, so I thought I'd share.

I have to confess that I was a bit hesitant about buying The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. I found the author's blog a bit too gung-ho markety for my taste for some reason. However, the lovely PL recommended it in the comments. So, after she and I had lunch on Saturday, we went to the bookstore. I read - and did the exercizes in - the first 89 pages by Sunday night.

The back story to this book is the tale of a successful entrepreneur who built up a business to produce a "health supplement". He worked himself into 70+ hour work weeks full of drama. He then figured out how to work himself from that extreme to the other extreme. He now works 4 (or less) hours a week. And he wrote this book to tell us how. Obviously, not everything that he says will apply to me. I am not an entrepreneur. And our small business is service oriented - we don't make widgets. However, the premise, so far, is working pretty well for me.

There are a few big ideas that I have started implementing. From his "D is for Definition" section, I spent some time writing about what I wanted and what was stopping me from doing those things. However, unlike my normal course of (in)action, I then- as directed- laid out small steps for my top 4 wants over the next 3 days. And I did them. They were little things, but doing them worked. I actually made progress on some goals!

By then I was into "E is for Elimination". There, he uses the Pareto principle (which came up in Friday's post) combined with Parkinson's law - which states that the task will swell in perceived complexity and importance in direct relation to the time available to do it. Or, as he puts it on pg 75:

"1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).
2.Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law)."

So, that is what I have been doing. I went through the exercizes and admitted to doing a number of things to kill time when I don't want to do deal with important (but usually painful) tasks. And I'm taking the week off from them. For my work life, that means curbing my obsession with hitting send/receive on my e-mail and staying off the internal IM system. It is amazing how quickly I can get my work done now! I accomplished 3 things on Monday that I successfully avoided for 5 or more business days. Not only that, but I was so energized by those accomplishments thacrossed off a list of personal and small business items AND made it to the gym! And I did the same thing today!

Now, I sincerely doubt the Tim Ferriss would agree with the things that I have prioritized. I used some of my newly recovered energy to clean house. I suspect that he would tell me to find a good maid. I went grocery shopping today. I bet he wouldn't see that as a priority. But I am using time or energy I free up from one area of my life to build systems in another area that will then free up time and energy from that part to build systems for another part that....

As you can see the Elimination phase might go on for a while. I have 20 more pages to read in the E is for Elimination section, so I'll finish those off this week - possibly tonight since hockey playoffs are on TV. I expect to work through the Elimination phases over the next 2 or 3 weeks and then I'll... oh, yeah. I'll go to Europe for 3 weeks... But the systems will be in place, and perfectly workable when I get back. Then we can move on to Mr. Ferriss' "A is for Automation" section. Won't THAT be interesting.

All in all, I suspect that this book will probably work really well for some people and not at all for others. I'm planning to blatantly use what aligns with where I'm heading and ignore the rest. I must not have ignored anything important yet, though - because I'm already getting results!

HTR Research - Spending money

As promised, I am slowly researching where my money goes. To understand what I looked at, though, you need to know a bit about how money is used in our household. HTH and I both contribute the bulk of our salaries to what we call "Family Money". That is where we pay our bills and fund most family events - including everything from travel to dinner out. However, we each have a small percentage that we reserve as "Personal Money". This gives us each an account for things that we feel are outside of the family scope - by whatever definition we choose. We both try to scold each other for spending "personal" money on things that should be family money, but the rule is that we each choose what to do with that money. So, if there is anything that should reflect my personal values, it should be this money!

There is one caveat to my analysis, however. I have only done the easy part so far. I went back over 6 months of credit card statements (December-May) and looked at those numbers. When I am at work, I keep cash on hand to buy lunch and coffee - and I'm sure that gets spent elsewhere, too. I am not really sure how to estimate that amount of money yet. And, working at home 4 days a week now, I don't spent much of that anymore, so I'm not sure how to capture that information going forward. That is a project for another day.

For now, here are the top 5 categories presented as a % of my total spending from December 06 - May 07:

Gifts	29.32%
Travel	14.96%
Whistles	14.25%
Books	13.87%
Work - clothes, makeup, etc	9.38%
Total percent accounted for:	81.78%

Some observations: Christmas, Baba's BD, and HTH's 40th all fell within this time frame. Those events impacted my personal spending in both gifts and travel. The whistle category includes all of my new whistles and the kit for building 20 more whistles. That category would not normally be a blip on the screen. I'll be happy to see that #5 category drop off. Since money that I spent on personal clothes and hair cuts only accounted for 3.6% of my spending, that will be a nice savings! Quite frankly, the biggest surprise is that books scored as low as they did after this picture! :) But, all in all, I'd say that this is consistent with where my values have been in the last 6 months.

The good news for you is that this is a fairly painless way to look at spending. Almost all credit cards have 6 months of statements on line. I just copied and pasted the details into Excel and then categorized them. A quick subtotal for each group and total spend sum, and then the % was easy to come by. I picked the 80% total spending as a focus point based, in part on the Pareto principle which basically says that 80% of the effect is created by 20% of the cause. It is a great way to draw a line under the "vital few". In this case, the numbers seemed to agree with the theory. After these top 5, the categories fell off very quickly into the 5% or less range, so the statistician in me is OK with this choice as well.

So, that is my experience so far. I guess it didn't tell me anything new, but it is good to see that what I did actually matched what I thought I had done. Anybody up for trying it yourselves? If you do, let me know what you find. I'm curious!