The Road to The Four Hour Workweek : Elimination (The Theory)
This is the second in a series of posts documenting my experiences implementing the ideas in The Four Hour Work Week. You may find it helpful to read the introduction first.
Elimination
Elimination is the first step to increasing your free time, without reducing your income. In Ferriss’ words, you need to “forget all about” time management, and focus on effectiveness over efficiency.
What this means in practise is eliminating anything that doesn’t move you closer towards your predefined goals.
The Elimination Toolkit
Ferriss lists a number of strategies for eliminating “busy work”, and focusing on only the most important “must do” tasks. The cornerstones of his approach are as follows.
Pareto’s Law
This will already be familiar to a lot of people as “the 80 / 20 principle”. Put simply, 80% of any output is caused by 20% of the input. For example:
- 80% or your profits come from 20% of your clients.
- 80% of your headaches also come from 20% of your clients (probably not the same 20%).
- You listen to 20% of your music collection 80% of the time.
Focus on the 20% that works, and forget about the 80% doesn’t.
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. The way to combat this gaseous behaviour is to shorten the time available for any given task, effectively eliminating any opportunities for faffing.
Ferriss combines Pareto and Parkinson to create an über effective approach that will sound very familiar to agile development devotees.
The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
Batching
Ferriss doesn’t include batching as a cornerstone, but it’s important enough to earn a place in my list. Batching is the practise of reducing the frequency with which essential but time consuming tasks are performed.
The theory is that these repetitive tasks all require some “setup time”, no matter how small. They also invariably interrupt more important tasks, disturbing concentration and reducing efficiency (something touched on frequently by 37signals).
Reduce the frequency of these distractions (by batching them together), and your free time and efficiency will increase accordingly.
Conclusion
That’s the theory. Next post I’ll be writing about the practise; how I’ve gone about using the principles of Elimination, and what effect (if any) they’ve had on my life.