The 4 Hour Work Week Experiment

I’ve pretty much kept to my 4 hours per day. In fact on quite a few days I’ve managed to keep it as low as two hours per day.
What I have noticed is a big change in focus. Where before I would often spend my time performing various daily tasks, I now spend around 50% of my time writing out procedures on how to perform those same tasks, so that some one else can actually perform them for me.
As I Mentioned in some earlier blog posts, my initial focus when I started this experiment was on marketing.
As a result of that, I’ve created a number of marketing procedures that now literally account for over 50% of our monthly turnover. The beauty of the new marketing procedures is that I only need to dedicate around 30min per month to them. The rest is taken care of by my fantastic marketing assistant.
The next step is to create a range of lead generating procedures, to ensure a steady flow of new leads to the business.

Two months have passed now, it’s new years eve and I’ve decided to re-write the goals for the experiment.

I have totally convinced myself that my level of income is NOT directly related to the hours I work.

As you probably know, one of the reasons I began this experiment was because I was working between 10 -12 hours per day 6 days a week. A habit that had already caused me a lot of grief in the past.  The 4 hour work week experiment was a way for me to get that under control.

The original goal was to work only 4 hours per week. whether that was one hour per day, 4 days a week or 4 hours, one day a week. The goal was a grand total of 4 hours per week.  My focus on setting the goal was predominantly the number of hours that I worked.

I started the experiment by going cold turkey and cutting down my hours from 12 hours per day to 4 – a pretty big step, and I wasn’t really sure whether it would work…

… to my surprise it did! I was able to work only 4 hours day 6 days a week without any negative impact on my income. In fact what I observed was actually in slight increase in income…

The next step was to start cutting down those hours to 3 hours per day. That’s when I began to notice a change within myself. I started feeling unhappy, unsatisfied and a bit bored. At first I didn’t know why, but as I explored my feelings further it suddenly became clear to me. I was feeling unhappy because I was denying myself something that I enjoyed.

I began to appreciate just how much I enjoy my work, and here I was purposefully limiting the amount of time I allowed myself that enjoyment. You see I would happily do my work even without getting paid simply because I LOVE DOING IT.

So why should I take that away from myself?

This led me to re-consider the goals of this experiment, to re-write exactly what is it I wanted to achieve and then set new parameters for the experiment.

Here’s the result and the goals for the new year…

My Goals

• To Keep work FUN – I want to enjoy what I do ( and I do enjoy it) while at the same time making sure that work doesn’t take over my life and become a burden on myself and my family
• Have both the time and money to do more of the things I want to do on a daily basis – This would mean working between 2-4 hours per day on average (and some days not working at all). Leaving plenty of time to for personal activities. What I really want is flexibility and freedom to enjoy life even more.
• Be able to take more regular holidays and travel while only having to ‘check in’ a couple of hours per week
• Generate enough income form my business to support my family on an ongoing basis.
• Continue to provide great products that really HELP our customers.
• See the business continue to grow as we continue to provide products that bring value to our customers and really contribute to them realizing their online dreams through their websites.

These are the goals for the new year. Perhaps they aren’t as well defined as “work 4 hours per week” but as I’ve discovered it’s not just about the hours but more about how I feel.

This week went a lot better than the last.

I was back into the 4 hours a day. In fact there were quite a few days were I worked less than 4 hours per day – 2 days of 3 hours and one day of 2 hours.

I’ve developed a bit of a system that really works for me.

Basically before I sit a my desk each day, I have a think about what I can do today that will really impact the business, what will move the business forward the most, then I write down those things on my white board, a bit like a ‘to-do’ list.

The biggest difference from a regular ‘to-do’ list, is that I am not focusing on what tasks in general need to be done. I can always think of lots of things to do. The problem is that many of them are either insignificant when it comes to actually moving the business forward OR affecting the bottom line.

So what I’m actually doing is filtering those insignificant tasks by asking myself the question “What can I do today that will really impact my business” and then making sure that I only write down the things I believe I can do within my 4 hours.

I notice that when I do this, I FEEL as though my time has been effective, I FEEL as though I’ve achieved a lot in my allocated time, and I’ve observed that the business continues to grow.

Strangely though, even though I KNOW this works for me I don’t always do it, and when I don’t I can almost guarantee that I end up feeling frustrated, and unfulfilled with my days achievements.

Being aware of this is a start, the next step is to make sure I stick to this little strategy each and every day.

Well this week was a complete shambles.

I worked a total of 15 hours today, 12 hours yesterday and 9 1/2 hours the day before. That’s a total of 36 hours in just 3 days, not to mention the days before.

For some reason this week I just can’t seem to keep the hours down. Looking back at the week I recognise a couple of reasons for the extra hours.

I was working on an important customer project that needed my personal attention. The project is for a good friend of mine and I really needed to make sure all the i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed. That’s pretty much done now.

I also noticed that I wasn’t feeling that ’secure’ – it seems each time I get concerned about money my immediate response is to simply throw myself into work, work as many hours as I can, becuase somewhere deep inside I have this belief that if I work hard then everything will be OK. It’s something I want to work on within myself.

And lastly I’ve observed that I often work simply becuase I’m bored. I don’t really have anything else I want to do so I work.

Let’s see if I can pull myself out of this rut next week and get back on track.

I Didn’t realy feel like doing much work today, so I only worked a total of two and half hours all day.

Not much else to report. I’m still amazed that even though I’m working a fraction of the hours I was before, income hasn’t dropped at all.

Just checking in with a short update before I go on leave.

So far,  I”ve pretty much managed to keep on track with the 4 hours per day 6 days a week. Gong over twice only. Once by fifteen minutes simply becuase I wanted to finish a specific task, the other was around 1hr extra becuase I was dealing with some important customer issues that needed to be resolved.

I’m on leave now for 2 weeks so not really doing any sort of work, but when I get back I’ll be cutting my time back to 4 hrs / 5 days only.

I’ve really noticed a BIG change in my mindset and thought processes. Instead of thinking what more work I can do, I’m thinking about what tasks can be done to increase income (specifically marketing tasks).

I’ve been focusing on creating marketing system – which my team can easily carry out without me being around. So far it’s working quite well, I’m working less and believe it or not, turnover is actually increasing.

Well, I’m at singapore airport right now, and time is running out for my internet access so I’ll say good bye for now…

I’m now entering my second week of the experiment and I have to say the results are quite literally amazing!

There is no doubt in my mind that I am now achieving MORE working 4 hrs a day 6 days a week then when I was working 10-15 hrs a day. Yes, I’m doing less work, but the work I am doing is FAR more productive.

I’ve turned my focus to income producing tasks such as marketing campaigns, and have delegated as many of the tasks as possible.  So far the result is that I’m working considerably less than before and we’re actually ahead of budget.

I am also working on some other tasks in the business (such as tutorial creation) which are shared between myself and our other writers and video producers. The reason I’m doing this is that the tutorial I’m working on (www.buildingwebsitesmadesimple.com) is very much about my own personal experiences and web development systems, so it’s not really the sort of things I can outsource.

All in all the result so far are very promising, although I’m still a fare way off the 4hours work week going from 72 hours a week to 24 hours a week in one hit is a pretty big step.

Next I’ll be cutting it down from 4 hours, 6 days a week to 4 hours 5 days a week. I’ll probably do the change around late december early January, depending on how things pan out.

Hours worked: 3hrs 30 min

Comments:

I’ve been getting up nice and early lately (around 5:30 -6:00 am) with the aim of getting a few hours of work in before the rest of the family wakes up. This way I can have my work finished by between 10-11 am and the rest of my day is free to do what I please.

This morning I was creating a some new video tutorials for my website – www.buildingwebsitesmadesimple.com which is a relatively new site that we recently launched that teaches people how to make a website of their own.

After I had written the script, created the powerpoint, and recorded the video it came time to edit and produce the video. Editing and producing these videos can often take longer than creating the scripts and recording them, and I thought to myself “this is really a job some one else could be doing” (I’ve been very ‘aware’ lately about what tasks I could be outsourcing instead of doing them myself) and that’s when I started thinking about the cash v’s time balance.

Basically – in order to cut down my work hours I need “buy time”. In other words, in order for me to work less, someone else needs to work more, and that of course means I need to buy their time.

There’s a fine balance here between the cash that’s available to buy time with and the cash that I take as a wage.  Without an increase in profits buying someone elses time mean a reduction in my own income. Basically in order to buy more time – I need to increase turnover / profits – the higher the turnover the more time I can buy.

I’m all for outsourcing, BUT I’m also VERY big on making sure I can maintain a certain level of income. Finding that balance is something I’m working on at the moment.

As a result of this, I’m paying closer attention to my cash flow, seeing where I can cut back on un-necessary spending and re-allocate those funds to ‘buy time’ that will be spent on income producing activities.

In the short term I’ll continue editing and producing the video’s myself, but this is definitely one area that I will be outsourcing in the near future.

Hours worked: 4

Comments:

While I was sitting back reflecting on the on the experiment and my reaction and attitudes towards it I noticed some interesting changes in my beliefs about work.

So far each day I have gotten ALL my important tasks done, and my income hasn’t suffered one single bit. Sure it’s early days but I’m feeling VERY confident that the shift from 12-15 hours per day to 4 will NOT have a negative impact on my earnings.

In fact I’m quite surprised to find my self doing a total 360 degree shift on the subject  – my wife will tell you, one of my main arguments for working those long hours was that if I didn’t “put in the hours” we wouldn’t be able to keep up our level of income – in other words I believed I HAD to work 12-15 hours a day simply to maintain a certain level of income.

My belief on that subject has completely changed.

There is however another belief that I haven’t yet been able to shift – that is that in order to INCREASE my income I still have to work ‘harder’ (which translates to more hours for me). for some reason, I still can’t come to grips with the possibility of increasing my income without putting in more effort on my part. To me, income (or rewards) only come with greater effort (more working hours).

I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to change this belief if this experiment is going to succeed.

Hours worked: 3

comments:

Here’s my pattern so far – first thing I do each day is ask myself – what is most important today? – what actions will contribute to the highest income production?

I make a list, choose one and see how much of it I can delegate, then I allocate the tasks in our project management system.

Next I’ll perform any tasks I need to do to get the activity going. Today that involved creating a system so that in the future this entire task can be performed without my intervention and to the same standard.  So that took care of the business side of things.

On a personal level I noticed 3 particular points today:

1. I really love my work – I mean – I get such a buzz out of it. I’m almost fanatical about it. yes there are some tasks I don’t enjoy that much but overall – the work I do is also one of my major interests – that makes it a bit hard when I’m sitting around thinking what would I enjoying doing right now and the answer I get is – get on the computer and do xyz…
2. Working so many hours has become such a habit that I don’t really know what else to do if I have the time. That coupled with the fact the I’m finding more time = more money to be spent – brings me to the my last point.
3. It seems I’m going to have to increase my income if I have more time on my hands.