While aimed mainly at online entrepreneurs, as Timothy Ferriss, the author, developed his career, 4 Hour Workweek is a must read book for people wanting to advance in their jobs alike, especially for folks in middle management and above.
First half – general advice
The first half of the book brings a series of advices and techniques for time management that you should seriously consider. While some may look offensive and may turn people down, like techniques to avoid interruptions, there are some that are really productive and will probably lead to better relationships and outcomes.
For example, reading e-mails twice a day is a technique that I adopted myself and works very well. Unless you work directly with customers in a position where it is important to reply soon, there is hardly anything that requires our immediate attention in any e-mail. It is much more productive to stop one or two times per day to read and reply to them. If anything is urgent, a phone call or instant message would be enough.
Another technique deals with meeting arrangements, like previously stating the reason and subject of the meeting and telling participants that you have another appointment a few minutes later. That way, everyone should be concise and straight to the point, leaving further discussions for follow up e-mails.
Plus, there are strong networking tips and techniques very useful to reach out to important people and celebrities. Such techniques will sure work if you need to contact someone not so famous in a potential client or provider, like correct time to call to get directly to people who decide and ways to present yourself.
Online businesses
In the second half of the book, you’ll get a more in-depth approach to online businesses. But even so, as most businesses are conducted online today, you’ll get many valuable tips that will sure make a difference for your employer, and potentially, to how you are perceived in your organization and your salary, such as online advertising techniques and ways to calculate costs and revenue associated with each sales channel.
The list in the second half of the book goes much further and is very extensive. It gives you dozens of different tools to run a completely automated online business, ranging from picking suppliers, to hiring people, to payment processing to marketing.
And I give you a warning: the tips are actually feasible and there are dozens of online businesses operating without employees. You should definitely take the tips and consider how businesses are developing nowadays and what impact will that have on your career and employability.