Monday By Noon » personal

• The Four Hour Workweek Book Review and Giveaway

Jonathan Christopher — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:04:40 +0000

My fiancée Carrie and I returned from our first ‘official’ vacation in about three years this past Friday. It was fantastic attempting to simply forget about everything that has to do with anything. Regular readers may have noticed that I’ve missed a few publications over recent months, and I feel that has to do with a bit of burn out coming on. What better time to have a vacation kick in!

I decided that I was going to do my best to truly unplug for the week, and although I did a decent job, I must admit that I did check email from time to time (a true curse). That said, I’ve had a few non-Web books to read that were long overdue, and I decided that the vacation would be the perfect time.

I’ve always had an underlying interest in business. I really enjoy reading about business strategy alongside best practices and my business law courses in college were probably some of my favorite. That’s not to say I consider myself anywhere knowledgeable of business, simply intrigued. I think it ties closely with my pursuit of process and personal productivity on a very low level.

This generic interest in business and personal productivity, alongside an abundance of chatter, lead me to snag a copy of The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. It’s one of those books you’ve heard mentioned often, and can’t help but give a bit more attention. To be honest, however, my first reaction to the title and brief summaries included a blend of the following:

… huh
Get rich quick scam
SPAM
Yeah right.
pfffffffft

I summary, I was turned off by the one-liners describing what you’ll get from the book. I tend to be skeptical when it comes to just about anything, until I’m proven otherwise. I don’t consider myself a pessimist, simply thorough. When it comes to The Four Hour Workweek it came down to consistently hearing good things about the book from friends (not press) and seeing references to Timothy Ferriss on a fairly consistent basis. The book sat in my case for months, but I’ve finally had a chance to read it cover to cover.

About The Four Hour Workweek

The Four Hour Workweek is labeled as a self-help, personal productivity, business, lifestyle book. I haven’t read too many self-help books, so I wasn’t sure what to expect with something labeled as such. Timothy Ferriss describes what inspired him to turn his life upside down and go completely against the grain of the “old rich”, instead taking cues from the New Rich.

The New Rich (NR) are identified as such based on three key factors: time, income, and mobility. Naturally, income is unavoidable when it comes to classification, but I was interested to see that both time and mobility were included as well. After all, what good is making lots of money if you can never go anywhere or have time to do anything? Living a luxurious lifestyle that consists of working from the time you wake until you go to bed doesn’t sound very enthralling.

The book goes into great detail outlining what Timothy did to escape a life he discovered undesirable. He describes starting his own business, become overworked and burnt out with it, and what he did to step back and rework everything from the ground up. Much of the book focuses on the Pareto principle (the 80-20 rule), something I find to be more true every day. The rule states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This can be applied to life, business, finances, and just about any aspect of everything. As generic as it sounds, recognizing the principle and acting on it can really change things for yourself, specifically in business.

The Four Hour Workweek also focuses on task management, time management, empowerment, and effectiveness to name a few things. The entire premise of the book is to recognize what takes away from your “wealth” and focuses on the ways to remedy each of those causes (continually referencing the 80-20 rule).

What I liked about the book

Timothy Ferriss’ writing style is terribly easy to read. It’s as though he were sitting across the dinner table from you, dishing out the secrets to his success over the course of a few hours. I never tired of reading the book, and read it from cover to cover in just a few sittings as a result.

The book goes into an extraordinary amount of detail. At the end of each chapter, Timothy gives a summary of points discussed by providing links, addresses, phone numbers, or other associated contact information for companies/people/websites referenced in the current chapter. It’s very conclusive and helpful should you be so inspired to take action straight away.

Timothy does a great job of explaining what he learned from changing many aspects of his life, and why it worked. He takes you through his life journey, and the realizations he found along the way. It’s as much a story as it is a learning experience, and I think that helps to convey his message in a more effective way.

What I didn’t like about the book

From a very high level, this book is geared toward a very specific person. Someone who simply isn’t happy with their current work situation, looking for big changes because of that unhappiness. I, on the other hand, am very happy with my job, and I’m not looking to flip things upside down because of my unhappiness.

With this book, I had to put that aside and take the advice for what it’s worth; and that’s when I began soaking things in. Unless you’re really looking for something different, you’ll need to abstract yourself when reading the book to get any advice from it, else you’ll be telling yourself “this doesn’t apply to me in the least” many times while reading the book.

Additionally, to really get a lot from the book, in essence you need to have the same goals as Timothy. That includes consistent travel, mobility to do so, and a fairly specific lifestyle. I, on the other hand, find comfort in different things and have different end goals, but do recognize the value in a new way of living described in The Four Hour Workweek.

It’s an absolute personal opinion, and I have no idea whether or not you’ll find the note useful, but it’s the only negative I found from the book.

Conclusion and giveaway details

Overall, I’m very glad to have read The Four Hour Workweek. I’ve been meaning to read the book for months and I’m glad I finally took the time to do so. I definitely got a few reminders from Timothy Ferriss as well as a number of new ideas to kick around. I can definitely see why he’s getting so much press and praise for the publication, as it definitely shakes things up a bit. The book isn’t for everyone though, and I can see many people pushing it aside as an impossible feat or otherwise. However, if you follow Timothy Ferriss through his many postings, appearances, and otherwise, you’ll see that he does in fact live his life quite a bit differently than ‘the norm’.

While I’m not looking to “get rich” and travel the world as a lifestyle, I am looking to get the most out of what I can, and this book does indeed offer tips to accomplish such a task, even if your goals don’t run completely parallel with Timothy’s. The biggest take home message I got from the book was to stop working for some sort of unattainable goal to be reached in 45 years. Instead, giving yourself periodic shorter term goals with associated personal rewards attached to each. I can completely understand the lack of stability in working your entire life for a single gargantuan, globally completing goal.

The advice given in the book, while eccentric, has some backing, and I really enjoy reading about people approaching things differently, and documenting both their successes and failures throughout.

I liked the way things turned out with the last giveaway so I’m going for it again with The Four Hour Workweek! If you’ve been a bit skeptical on this book, enough so to prevent you from forking over the cash, leave a comment below to be entered in a drawing for my copy. Good luck!

Follow me on Twitter to find out if you’ve won the book!

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• How I Use OmniFocus to Help Get Things Done

Jonathan Christopher — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:14:31 +0000

Over the past year or so, personal time management has become a large topic of conversation throughout the community. Much of the talking came about as a result of a particular book being published; Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen definitely got the ball rolling. This particular book got the GTD mentality in the heads of many, and numerous designers/developers are picking up on it, myself included.

While the principles of GTD are in no way tied directly to Web design, the approach can be applied to all aspects of life, regardless of profession or lifestyle. The great thing about being a Web designer is the constant attachment to a computer, creating the ability for an application to help out with Getting Things Done. Over the past year, a multitude of applications have been built specifically for this purpose. Not all retain the jargon of GTD, but the same goal is at hand: effective completion of tasks.

Why I chose OmniFocus

I’ve been using OmniFocus since it was released as a private alpha. I had no idea what GTD was all about, and I had never heard of David Allen. I was able to pick up the application fairly quickly, albeit in the most basic sense. I watched the OmniFocus Basics screencast and became more comfortable with the software.

For me, the most difficult part about OmniFocus had nothing to do with the application itself. Instead, I had the most trouble with integrating task collection into my workflow. It honestly took a couple weeks to force the action of entering a task, but it’s now second nature. I was very impressed with OmniFocus, and new alpha releases were being released at a constant rate, including new little features that helped me to better manage what I needed to get done.

Then came Things. Things is a terribly pretty application, and I decided that I’d give it a trial run for two weeks, to see which application I preferred. Things was in public beta at the time, and it was a terrific application in which to work. I liked the tagging approach, and I definitely took a liking to the methods Cultured Code included. One of the features that stuck out to me was the ability to assign tasks to people. I work among a team, and it’s very helpful for me to jot down what other people are doing to make sure the team has all of our bases covered. It was also neat that the icons in People section of the sidebar let me know who was on AIM at the time in case I needed to touch base on a particular task while I was reviewing. There are a number of little touches like that throughout Things that raise the bar.

I went back and forth between Things and OmniFocus for at least two months. OmniFocus was being developed at an astounding rate, and was much more feature rich in comparison to Things. From what I’ve seen, the community speaks about Things quite a bit more, so I feared I was missing out on some features which other designers found so attractive. I became more attached to certain features of OmniFocus, and came to realize that a preference between the two is simply of a personal nature from designer to designer. I’m a huge fan of the OmniFocus interface design, and truly believe it doesn’t receive enough credit. I don’t think the design is overshadowed by Things in many aspects at all. Of course there are little details about the OmniFocus interface I might change, but for me, the same goes for Things. I don’t mean to turn this article into a comparison of the two; it’s definitely not. I’d simply like to share why I’ve made my choice.

Killer features I depend on in OmniFocus

The features of OmniFocus are what helped make the decision for me. I quickly started to feel a bit overwhelmed when it came to using Things with a few dozen projects each with quite a few tasks to be completed. There are certain features in OmniFocus which help me to tackle that issue directly, and I feel in more control with OmniFocus.

Project Status: OmniFocus lets me mark each project with a status; Active, On hold, Completed, and dropped. I’m not sure about your workload, but my projects have a tendency to change status from time to time. OmniFocus lets me filter projects based on status, and it’s very helpful for me to review only Remaining (Active and On hold) projects constantly, while reviewing all projects (any status) on a weekly basis. Additionally, OmniFocus project icons reflect the status of the project so it’s easy to get a quick overview of what is a priority (and what’s not) at any particular time.
Parallel vs. Sequential tasks: OmniFocus lets me define how I plan to approach a project in many ways. One way is to set the order in which tasks should be completed. Some tasks can be completed in any order, while others require sequential completion. This small feature comes in very handy when automating the order in which you plan to complete your tasks.
Task and project grouping: I often have multiple projects for the same client, and it’s very helpful to have the ability to group those projects within a folder. OmniFocus also lets me group tasks into groups within projects. I’m able to fold these groups to prevent information overload and quickly target what needs to be taken care of next. Additionally, I can mark task groups as parallel or sequential on a per-group basis. This level of control has come in very handy a number of times over the past year.
Task group duplication: I create a task group for each page of a website I work on. Within a task group there are a number of tasks; markup, style, JavaScript, CMS integration, etc. I’ve found it very helpful to be able to simply create one task group and duplicate it for each page of the website, instead of manually creating tasks for each page. I’m able to set up a basic website project with detailed tasks in just a few minutes using OmniFocus.; Task Grouping in OmniFocus on Viddler
Perspectives: I’ve only recently rediscovered Perspectives, but I’m in love. The best way to explain perspectives is via the four minute screencast provided by Omni. You’ll find the link to the screencast in the Resources section. Basically, perspectives lets me change the OmniFocus interface completely with the click of a button. When I’m at work, I switch to my ‘Office’ perspective and work away. When I get home, I’ll move to the ‘Home’ perspective and all of my work tasks are hidden until I get back to the office the next day. This feature has become very valuable to me, and I’m very excited to have stumbled upon it again a few weeks ago.
Clippings: Clippings are probably my favorite feature of OmniFocus. Clippings don’t seem to get much press, but I hope OmniFocus does a feature screencast much like they did for Perspectives. Using Clippings, I’m able to hit a key combination to instantly add an email as a task in my inbox. Links are included to the original message (to allow for a quick reply) as well as links to any attachments in the email. Clippings are also available for any WebKit-based browser. I’m currently using Fluid to power my company’s project management software, and creating Clippings from messages is something I do consistently. It’s much faster than invoking the Quick Entry dialog and manually entering the information. I will use Clippings for hours at a time, and simply filter my inbox periodically throughout the day. Losing Clippings would slow me down quite a bit at this point.
iPhone support: OmniFocus for iPhone was a no-brainer purchase for me. The implementation is terrific, and I use it all the time, especially at status meetings. I’m able to quickly dump tasks into the inbox, and organize them once I sit back down at my desk. The syncing via MobileMe is awesome and I’d be sync-less without automation.

One feature I definitely did miss in OmniFocus was the ability to assign tasks to particular people. There was a solution I was simply overlooking, however. When I need to remember a task that is to be completed by someone else, I simply use a context of their name. If a project needs to be completed by John Smith, that’s the context. I like the solution because I’m able to filter tasks based on context, and can quickly oversee what tasks remain for certain individuals if need be.

How do you manage?

I can’t emphasize enough how I don’t mean to turn this article into a comparison of OmniFocus and Things. It’s a challenge, however, because I battled between the two for quite some time before making my final decision. I do feel that I’ve given both applications a strong trial, and the features I’ve outlined are absolutely what solidified my choice. That said, I’m curious as to which application you’re using (if any) and maybe a little bit about why.

Additional Reading

Shawn Blanc recently posted the latest in his impressive series of software reviews, and Things was the topic. A Review of Two Things definitely deserves your attention if you’re interested in Things. His extensive review discusses many of the fantastic features of Things from top to bottom.

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