By Tom Ryan
Described as the "pet guru of Silicon Valley," Timothy Ferriss has come out with a bestseller railing against cubicle workplace habits such as multitasking, constant checking of email and news services, and general internet addiction.
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (currently ranked 15 on Amazon's best sellers list) is a semi-autobiographical self-help book recounting the 29-year old entrepreneur's journey from his ten-hour days launching a successful vitamin supplements company to a workload-lite yet successful life.
His theories rely on an extreme take on the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule. Not only should clients not paying enough be eliminated, but all menial chores should be outsourced. In Mr. Ferriss's case, according to The New York Times, he reduced and outsourced his staff from 250 down to fewer than 15. He's instructed underlings to deal with all but the biggest emergencies themselves.
But the deeper chord striking Silicon Valley are his theories around maintaining a "low information diet."
"BlackBerrys and e-mail aren't inherently bad," he writes. "It's just like medicine: it's the dose that makes the poison."
His methods include practicing "selective ignorance" - tuning out pointless conversations, blog updates, and even world affairs (Mr. Ferriss claims to get most of his news by asking waiters). Just for e-mail, he hired personal assistants in India and the Philippines to sort through and respond to most of it.
Mr. Ferris claims his free time has enabled him to become a competitive kick boxer, a tango champion and a recurring actor in a Hong Kong TV series - all while running a multi-national firm from his laptop. While many of his fans question his conquests and doubt it's possible to work a four-hour week, they are wildly embracing his ideas around information management.
"Tim basically takes all of the time management and personal productivity theories of the last 20 to 30 years and pushes them to 11, to paraphrase ‘Spinal Tap,'" Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape Communications and more recently Ning, told the Times.
"Our lives are just getting busier, the world is starting to throw more stuff at us," Robert Scoble, a writer for the tech blog Scobleizer, told the Times. "Five years ago it was still pretty rare to have relatives sending you IMs. No one had Flickr feeds or Twitter. YouTube, Facebook and MySpace didn't exist."
After reading The 4-Hour Workweek, Jason Hoffman, a founder of software provider Joyent urged his employees to cut out instant-messaging and multitasking, severely restrict e-mail use and work via telephone.
"All of a sudden," Mr. Hoffman said of the results, "their evenings are free. All of a sudden Monday doesn't feel so overwhelming."
Discussion Question: What do you think of Timothy Ferriss's ideas on improving productivity and time management? Are there steps you are personally taking to reduce e-clutter and get yourself on a "low information diet?"