If you have enough of working for your boss in your corporate cubicle, this book is for you. I just finished reading Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week and I am going to share a high level summary, so you can decide if it's for you or not.

Just skim through the sections and see if you find something that piques your interest.

General Structure

This book does not contain "a little trick" to only work 4 hours per week. It literally introduces you to a whole new style of working. This is part of what Tim calls "Lifestyle Design" and it's a sustainable system that does require effort from your side.

He divides his book into 4 sections, which are Definition, Elimination, Automation and Liberation. All the sections are for optimizing your life on a different dimension.

Definition (of Your New Life)

In this chapter, you are taught the concept of New Riches. It's basically a term Tim uses for people who are not mega rich, but generate the money they need to fulfill their travel-, accommodation- and free time dreams without actively working more than a few hours a week.

This chapter effectively introduces you into the world of New Riches and sets the mood for the rest of the book. Here you also learn Dreamlining. It'll help you be more reasonable and see that you actually don't need that much revenue to live happily, whatever that means to you.

One of the hidden gems inside this chapter is the Fear Setting technique. Most people, if forced to decide, will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. Fear Settings is a technique you can use to control and correctly assess fears, especially related to things like quitting your job or risking other things.

Eliminate (Hours of Your Workday)

This chapter is probably the most information-dense, that's why I split it into many subtopics. It sets the baseline for many following techniques or methods.

Feel free to just skim the headlines if they suffice to decide if you want to read the book or not:

Eliminating Hours via Pareto's Principle

Tim uses the Pareto principle to explain how to work just a few hours in your corporate job each day while still getting results that can even surpass eight hours of an average employee.

He also applies this to good/bad customers (as a business owner). As a business owned by a New Rich, you don't want each and all customers you can get. You'd rather want less revenue, but with only the good customers. The ones that are not using up much of your time (for support, e.g.) or cheap.

This will help you get profitable without working more than a few hours each week. You could make more money, but you'd need significantly more time each week, which is a tradeoff that is not scalable.

Eliminating Physical Presence and Commute

There is also a very useful part for employees that may not want to take the leap into self-employment or founding: In this part, Tim teaches a very effective way to get your employer to allow remote work.

I can't guarantee that every boomer-conservative boss will allow it, but the odds are pretty high with his method. Especially if you use the previous chapters to outperform other people in the company.

Eliminating Hours via Awareness of Parkinson's Law

He also introduces Parkinson's Law, a law postulating that we fill 8 hours per day because there are 8 hours to fill. If there would be more, we would fill more. That doesn't mean we are working productively and on important tasks in those hours.

Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.". This is the reason why it's very important to set deadlines, even if they are only for yourself. Timebox tasks to work on them more efficiently.

The reason why it seems off to only work a few hours per day is because we usually do fell all 8 hours. Just not with important stuff.

Eliminate Hours by Checking Emails Less Frequent

Tim doesn't like emails. I don't like emails either, and I think you share our hate for emails too.

He provides templates for auto-responders and techniques to reduce email checking to a bare minimum. It's a bold move for an employee you can - at least from my point of view - only pull off after you have already shown your above-average productivity.

But if you manage to apply it, it's a game changer for many people that get pulled out of focus from emails every few minutes / hours. You will also waste less time by batching responses to emails and therefore eliminating content-switches.

Exercises and Tasks for Working Fewer Hours

I don't want to spoiler too much, so I'll only say that in the book, there are several exercises included to help you apply the above principles, together with a set of rules that will effectively disallow active but unproductive work.

Most of them I was able to apply pretty well, they do make a difference. He also compiled a set of questions you can ask yourself via an alarm clock to get focused during the day as often as you like (he recommends at least 3 times).

Other topics I left out but are worth mentioning:

• Low-Information Diet - carefully decide what information you consume
• Empowerment Failure - prevent people having to call you because they are not empowered (permission-wise, knowledge-wise, etc.)
• Eliminating-Paper-Tooling - List of Tools for managing stuff without paper

Automation and Outsourcing (of Tasks in Your Business and Life)

This chapter deals with how to reduce the few tasks that are left after elimination even further by outsourcing and automating. This is my favorite chapter, and I was really not aware outsourcing can work that well.

Outsourcing via Virtual Assistants

Tim lets a friend tell a story about how outsourcing changed his life forever. The story is largely to show off what tasks a virtual assistant is capable of doing for you.

I am not going to go into detail here because a big chunk of the story is made up of examples, but I really enjoyed reading it and was instantly inspired to outsource work (which I did and it worked quite well, but that's for another time).

It does not exactly apply much to traditional employees, but if you want to take the leap to self-employment or founding, you can use your employee-money to buy time of a virtual assistant who does tasks for you while you still have the safety of an employment.

He also has a bunch of tips included on where to find good VAs and how to choose the right one.

Automating Income Generation (mostly)

As you probably know, passive income is very rare and should not be the goal of most people. Instead, you should strive for a healthy business and then

1. Eliminate everything that's not directly beneficial for your business
2. Automate everything that can be automated
3. Outsource everything of the remaining tasks that you don't like and can outsource

In this section, the book at hand deals with what types of businesses can be a muse. A muse is a business that does not rely on you spending time to make money (like it would be the case for e.g. a consultancy).

The goal is to create "an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time". He does explain in detail how to choose, validate and build this, but it's one of the chapters you have to put a lot of your own personality and interests in.

In this part, he also touches base on basics of economy and marketing, but if you are serious about either of these two topics, I'd rather recommend you read "100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No" by Alex Hormozi. It's deceivingly low-priced at like one dollar, Alex will also explain why in his book. He's a genius, I definitely have to write about that book next.

Back to the 4-hour work week, Tim pays attention to always remind you that the goal is neither a 80h week CEO position, nor a million dollar exit. Accordingly, he will teach you "Management by Absence". This includes automating Ads, traffic, conversion to sales, payment processing and even fulfillment if you have physical products.

This will effectively remove you from the equation and you will be only required to guide the business into the right direction or make changes in the process.

Liberate (Yourself)

By liberation, Tim means being able to choose where you work from. He is talking about traveling the world, already having learned how to spend less time doing your job correctly and now being able to choose to stay near the beach/mountains/whatever you like.

He is very big on geo-arbitrage, which takes advantage of prices being different in different regions. If you believe it or not, your current income most likely will be enough to life an almost luxurious life in another country.

One part of this chapter is about how to achieve this liberation of location. The other part is really about how to spend your newly gained freetime since many people seem to get bored quickly. How to plan bigger "mini-retirements", as he calls them, and what to pay attention to.

It's inspiring. Even if you don't get much direct value out of it because you are not there yet, the possibilities are very effective for motivating yourself to master everything before and achieve liberation.

Personal Opinion

I am a full stack developer and consultant who just quit his job to work on my own stuff. This book was one of the foundations I built on, combined with 2 projects I already run and combined with some other books I'll soon recommend too.

The 4-hour work week will help get you further in life, if

• are already running a business
  as you will learn a lot about elimination, automation and outsourcing
• are thinking about switching from employment to running your own thing
  as you will learn a lot about how to make the transition smoother and with more safety before quitting (that's what I did)
• are an employee and want to stay employed.
  This category will not benefit from this book as much as the above two. But still, you'll at least learn to use your time in a way more effecient manner and save many hours of work that you can spend with friends and family.

As you can see, this book is at least moderately useful to almost anyone. Especially well suited if you are searching for a life-changing gift without knowing too much about a person.

Even though it's a pretty old book, it still did something great for me. I hope this article shed some light onto the question whether this book is worth a read or not. If you want to support me, consider buying it via my ref-link.