The 4 Hour Work Week Experiment

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.

Once again, I’m finding that the personal aspect of this experiment is much more a challenge then the business side.

Logically, I guess I ‘know’ what I have to do, But doing it is an entirely different matter.

I decide to record a short video today instead of writing the whole post, so here it goes:

Thanks for all your great comments and support so far.

Wow! – What an interesting experience.

To start with I managed to keep within my first day goal of 4 hrs work – actually I totalled 3hr and 35 minutes, and I got pretty much all the important stuff done.

I did it by simply telling myself – I ONLY have 4 hrs – what are the most important things I need to get done.

Next I delegated many of the tasks I would normally do myself  to my team – which also meant I had to create some new instructions for our procedures manual (this included a short video procedure) – that has now been uploaded to our online business manual which our team can access whenever they’re not sure about something, or need help performing a certain task. Creating the video and uploading took me a total of around 15 minutes.

Interestingly enough it wasn’t actually organising my daily tasks that was my biggest challenge but rather wrestling with my own mindset.

I found myself almost panicking with the thought of not putting in a full days work – for some reason I felt as though I “Have” to work or else…

I’m not really sure what the or else is at the moment – but I can tell you I was pretty afraid of it.

I just kept thinking over and over – “this doesn’t feel right, I have to work, I have to put in the hours otherwise things just won’t work out”, “If I don’t do the work everything will just fall apart”

It was an interesting experience, I really expected that the business side of things would be the biggest challenge, instead it turns out that the biggest challenge today was a personal one.

On a side note – I noticed that I became very aware of my time, what I was doing with it and how I was spending it.

I’ve also started looking at my business in a new light, I realised in order for me to work less I’m going to need a a well organised team and that’s going to require both training and a very detailed systems manual so they all know exactly what they need to do and how they need to do it.

All in all, day one was very ‘interesting’ to say the least, I managed to reach my target goal of less than 4 hrs work and still got all the important things done. Let’s see how day 2 goes…

I finally decided to take the plunge and turn my thoughts into action – Can a normal, ordinary, everyday guy really work only 4 hours a week, provide for his family  and still live a comfortable lifestyle?

I’m going to put the notion to the test right here on this blog  – and your invited to follow!

Starting tomorrow I’m going “cold turkey” – cutting my work hours down from 12-15 hrs per day to just 4.

I have a bit of a plan about how I’m going to approach it – I’m simply going to tell myself I only have 4 hours to get my work done – so what’s the most important things I need to get done today?

One thing I should clarify here – I don’t consider the time I spend on this web site “work time” since this isn’t directly related to the every day running of my business.

The 4 hour work week applies to hours I spend working on / in my business and time I spend on any other income producing activities – eg. shares, properties etc.

I’ll be posting my strategies and ideas, how I implement them, how they worked and give a running commentary on how I’m progressing with the whole experiment.

Take a minute to leave a comment and enter your name and email address in the small form over the left and I’ll keep you udpated on how the experiment is progressing.