The 4 Hour Work Week Experiment

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.