Work Daze

Guess what! I have a new hero. His name is Timothy Ferriss and I think he’s the smartest, brightest, bestest person on this planet.

The reason I worship Timothy Ferriss is because of his best-selling business book, “The Four Hour Workweek.” While the four-hour figure may be hyperbole to some, the idea behind the book is sound. According to Ferriss, if we simply cut down on all the information we receive and send, we could accomplish our 40-hour-a-week jobs in a fraction of the time – a tenth to be exact.

The 4-hour philosophy has been warmly embraced in Silicon Valley, which is rather ironic since it is the high-tech communication products produced in the digital domain that Ferriss blames for our information overload.

In other words, if you want to gain more time in your life, rid your life of the convenient communication devices that are supposed to make your life simpler. Block that Blackberry! Isolate that iPhone. Toss that Treo! Or, if you can’t stand to throw thousands of dollars of hardware down the toilet, at least, turn them off.

Ferriss, of course, has cut the cord, and more. “His methods include practicing ‘selective ignorance,’ reports reporter Alex Williams in the Sunday Style section of “The New York Times.” “Tuning out pointless communiqués, random Twitters, and even world affairs. (Mr. Ferriss says he gets most of his news by asking waiters.)”

Being generous of spirit, I am willing to give Mr. Ferriss credit for the concept of “selective ignorance,” though you and I have been practicing it for years. These days, I know so little about what I am doing at work that I need someone to remind me what I’m doing there in the first place. And my supervisor has come to the same conclusion! As for the idea of getting your news from waiters – that is genius. Who needs a Google news feed to tell you what dumb and terrible event occurred four minutes earlier? Hey, the worst news you’ll get from a waiter is that the kitchen is out of crème brulée.

Ferriss is also up on downsizing. As the former CEO of a sports nutrition company, my hero “reduced and outsourced his staff, from 250 eventually down to fewer than 15, and instructed underlings to deal with all but the biggest emergencies themselves.”

Emergencies -- like facing the wrath of 235 downsized employees as they march on company headquarters with torches in hand.

Ferriss also thinks outsourcing is in. “Pay someone else to worry about it – ideally in Bangalore,” he says in the “Times” article. “On a bet, Mr. Ferriss even hired low-paid, high-skilled workers abroad to find him dates online. (It worked.)”

Of course, there’s no need to go abroad to find low-paid, high-skilled workers. There are plenty of us right here in the good old U.S.A. Still, I do like the idea of exporting our problems to developing countries. They certainly won’t buy our cars. I’m less sanguine about outsourcing your date data mining chores. I asked my wife to do it and got a flat n-o.

The major enemy of Mr. Ferriss and his followers is email. Cut out the hours you spend reading and writing emails, it is suggested, and you truly can reduce your workweek to only four hours. Ferriss hires personal assistants in India and in the Philippines to vett his email, which he only checks once a day at 2 PM.

As people who check their email twice a minute, this kind of communication asceticism may be beyond our reach. How depressed would you be if Lindsay Lohan, having stumbled across your Face Book page, pinged you at 2:03, desperate to hook up? How awful would you feel if that big job offer came in right afterwards, at 2:04? Ferriss just doesn’t understand. It’s not because we get great news that we compulsively check out email. It’s because it gives us hope.

In conclusion, I am not 100% convinced that simply ignoring emails and information will reduce your job demands by 90%. Nor am I sure that you would want it to. Nobody wants to cut out all the productive hours we spend sharing office gossip, while grouching and complaining time is way too precious to lose. No, the best way to get yourself a four-hour workweek is simply to cut out work.

The Zero-Hour workweek. Now that’s an idea whose time has come.