aiming for a 40 hour work week

As previously proudly posted, Wieden + Kennedy was ranked number 31 in the recent Sunday Times ‘Best Companies’ survey. But, despite the fact that the ads grow out of magic beans while we lounge around sipping ambrosia, the results of the Sunday Times survey indicated that workload and long hours are becoming a concern. We’re reviewing what we can do to fix the problem in terms of resource, structure and ways of working.

In the meantime, I thought we should look to see what we can learn from outside. So, although experience tells me that 90% of business books are crap, I picked up ‘The 4-hour Work Week’ by Timothy Ferriss. My hope was that, though a 4 hour week seems unattainable, even if the book only contains a couple of good ideas, it might enable us to get the W+K work week down to more like 40 hours. Having spent a couple of my own valuable hours reading the book I thought I would save you the time and trouble of doing so by summarising the relevant bits here. If you want to buy it, here's the Amazon link.

So, does Mr Ferriss have anything to suggest that might be applied to a creative agency? He introduces himself as a drug dealer, before revealing that in reality he’s a cage fighter, tango dancer, motorcycle racer, internet entrepreneur and, er, glycemic index researcher. So he has plenty relevant experience. He often mentions his martial arts skills in the book. This may just be in order to stop his readers from punching him in the street.

The book suggests that most people in the developed world live a ‘deferred lifestyle’ of workaday drudgery, with weekends off and occasional holidays, slaving towards eventual retirement, when they can relax and enjoy the fruits of their labour. Ferriss recommends that you stop saving up for a luxury lifestyle and start living it now. He explains how to create this luxury lifestyle for yourself using the currencies of the ‘new rich’: time and mobility.

His system involves renegotiating your employment contract to allow you to do 90% of your work in 10% of the time and working remotely so that you can spend all your new-found free time in Peru learning how to fire-walk.

How is this possible? Forget time-management, the answer is prioritisation. Basing his thinking on Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fit the time available), Ferris says:

1. Limit tasks to the important in order to shorten work time
2. Shorten work time in order to limit tasks to the important
And then:
3. Cultivate ‘selective ignorance’: no newspapers, books, TV, net surfing, etc unless it’s information you will definitely need for something important.
4. Do your most important task of the day first thing
5. Only check your email twice a day – and reduce it to once a day as soon as you can.
6. Screen your incoming calls and limit your outgoing calls. Eliminate small talk from your calls. He even supplies a suggested script:

Jane: This is Jane speaking.
John. Hi, it's John
Jane: Hi John. I’m right in the middle of something. How can I help you?

7. Avoid meeting people in person. Respond to all calls and meeting requests via email.
8. When meetings are unavoidable, they must be to decide on a pre-defined issue. Insist on a fixed end-time for meetings, or just leave early.
9. ‘Batch’ activities like making calls or sending emails into fixed time slots so these activities don’t expand to fill up available time.
10. Wear headphones at your desk to stop colleagues from interrupting you.
11. Outsource your work tasks and life admin to a personal assistant based in India.

If you follow all these tips – and some others – the book argues that you’ll be able to work far more productively in an extremely short time. Then you can spend the rest of the week hang-gliding in Namibia. Ferriss then goes off into a lengthy section about how to set up an automated internet sales business that will make you enough money to quit your job but won’t actually require any of your time to run the business. You then earn your money in the western economy and spend it in the third world, taking advantage of the difference of cost of living.

There are some sensible tips on the above list. I try to employ 4 and 9 myself. But some of them (like 3) seem odd. And I can’t help thinking that in a collaborative business like ours, if you employed all of these tactics your colleagues would very quickly come to the conclusion that you were being a total cock. The second or third time you respond to someone’s question about how your weekend went with the phrase, “I’m right in the middle of something. How can I help you?” may be the occasion on which you find a tall skinny latte being emptied over your head. There’s no question that we find evidence for the truth of Parkinson’s law on a regular basis at W+K, but it’s also true – I think – that the overheard conversation, the serendipitous discoveries, and the unexpected hybrids created by the collision of different ideas are what makes work surprising and stimulating.

I can see that The 4-Hour Work Week is a great concept for a modern self-help / business book but I don’t think has too many helpful hints for us. Most of us work in this business because we find it interesting, We enjoy our jobs. And we don’t spend the day thinking, ‘If only I was cage fighting in a Bangkok cellar’. (Unless, of course, we are Paul Colman.)

OK, I've spent over an hour writing this post, which is quite enough. If you want to learn more about the book, it has its own site: www.fourhourworkweek.com

Must go now and water the magic beans...

Image courtesy of http://larrymarder.blogspot.com/

Comments

[paul]

thanks Neil for the book review. I was thinking of buying it, in the hope there was a nugget or two of interest, but will save myself the time now:)

[russell]

I thought it was Yellowhammer where the ads grew out of magic beans. Have you got some yourselves now?

[neil]

When the receivers moved in to strip the assets from Yellwhammer, I moved swiftly under cover of darkness to a secret lock-up in South Norwood, from where I liberated the last few remaining magic beans. They were on top of an old black leather sofa, in between some designer twigs and a pile of Polish fish-bubblers. I also got some Yellowhammer Delafosse branded biros.

[Sue-Anne]

I think it's doable. I'm not sure about 4 hours though. But in the creative industry, you're just incessantly thinking, no? How do we define when work kicks in? I'm buying bread but hey, that's a good idea! Is that within our pre-determined 4 hours?

Anyway, I read somewhere: If everyone who could perform a job remotely did so just 1.6 days per week, $4.5 billion worth of fuel would be spared. That would prevent the release of 26 billion pounds of CO2 each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Now that's definitely doable! :)

[Simon]

A very entertaining and informative review.

The 4 hour work week may be achievable for a solo adventurer, but I'm happy with my continual absorption of useful information.

After all, if one likes their job, why would they want to cut it down to 4 hours? And if they don't like their job, is there really nothing that can't be done to change things?

Simon

[Finchy]

C'mon your agency uses the 4 a.m. work week, Neil.

That can't be good either, can it, Neil?

[neil]

Hence the reason for this post, Finchy.

[James]

Very cockish but all fine for people who don't actually make anything but as a designer the 4 hour week is impossible and pointless. I love the craft of what I do. As some old relative would say "The trouble with people these days is they want everything for nothing"