Let’s Make a D.E.A.L. - The 4 Hour Work Week
With RRSP season in full swing and January already behind us (wow - that was quick!), I wanted to share one of my favourite life-changing books: The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris.
For those who have not read this book, the themes revolve around work, life, and changing the traditional concept of retirement. However, my impression is that it describes a personal productivity philosophy and explains how you can apply it to your business. Specifically, I thought of the platform that IPC is building for our advisors and how it could lead to that freedom we all desire.
The basic premise of the book is that the average person works about four hours of productive work a week, and if we set up our businesses correctly, we could work this much each week with the same income.
This book advocates the 80-20 rule: eliminating the 80 per cent of work that delivers only 20 per cent of the output and strengthening the 20 per cent that produces 80 per cent of your success.
The book describes four steps under the acronym D.E.A.L:
D is for Definition
Most of this section is devoted to divorcing yourself from the idea of working yourself to death versus doing what is important. Many financial advisors put many hours in the office but feel that they are accomplishing very little, while others don’t work nearly as many hours but have 10 times the results. Why is this? Successful advisors define what is important and focus exclusively on that.
"Successful advisors define what is important and focus exclusively on that."
Here is one key exercise from the book: spend about five minutes and define your dream. If it wasn’t for the things you had to do, what would you be doing with your life right now? Now, define your nightmare in as much detail as possible. What is the absolute worst thing that could happen if you followed that dream? If you compare the dream to the nightmare, is the nightmare terrible enough to abandon your dream?
E is for Elimination
In terms of techniques that you can use to improve your day-to-day life; this section of the book has the best advice. It focuses on some straightforward techniques for eliminating most of the mundane activities that pervade our professional life. Here are some examples that I particularly liked:
Make your to-do list for tomorrow before you finish the day. When you add an item to this list, ask yourself if you would view your day as productive if that was the only thing on the list that you accomplished. Then, when you start the next morning, attack that list with vigour knowing that all the material is worthwhile.
Immediately stop all multi-tasking. When you’re trying to write, close your e-mail program, your instant messenger, and your web browser and focus on the writing, nothing else. This allows you to churn out the task much more quickly.
Check email only twice a day. Combining this with the “no multi-tasking” principle allows email to eat up only a sliver of your time instead of bogging you down.
Start keeping track of everything you do for two weeks. At the end of the second week, identify and cross out every activity on the list that can be either eliminated (it adds no value to your business) or delegated to someone else. I would guess that 50% or more of your current activities are not results oriented.
"Focus on the better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair."
Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most others. It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armour.
The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on the better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
This section of the book has a lot more tips but the idea is to compress and compress, so that the unnecessary is squeezed out and you are left with more effective use of your time to produce the results you desire.
A is for Automation
To me, this section is the most valuable part of the book, but not in the way that Tim describes his version of automation. What I learned here is that with a proper business set-up, you can create a stream of income that permits you to make money with minimal effort doing the things that you like. This is an excellent quote from the book:
Henry Ford once said, referring to his Model-T the best-selling car of all time, “The customer can have any colour they want, so long as it is black.” He understood something that business people seem to have forgotten: Servicing the customer is not becoming their personal concierge and catering to their every whim and want. Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems in the fastest manner possible. That’s it.
"Focus on the better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair."
In other words, clients don’t want to buy a drill (or many drills) they only want a hole. However, there are still advisors who are still selling drills. Because of all the drills we have sold (that all make the same hole in the end), we have created so much complexity in our business, which means we need 60 hours a week to sort it out.
L is for Liberation
The final section in the book ties the pieces of the puzzle together. It takes the dreams defined in the first part, the enhanced productivity of the second part, and the consistent income stream of the third part and creates that titular four-hour work week.
What do you do with your free time? The whole point of this book is that the real asset in our lives is time, not money. Time allows you to follow your dreams, and this book’s message is about moving more time into your personal life so that you can do these things.
Even though I have read this book several times, I still find it to be inspirational. Not all the ideas were practical, but it did back up what has been my working premise for years—that we spend too much time on unproductive activities, and a process of delegating, outsourcing, and systemizing these activities will allow us to be more productive.
So why not apply these principles to the financial advice business? You too, could have a four-hour work week.
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