Freedom

I am excited like I have not been for a very long time. I bounce out of bed (well small exaggeration as my bouncing is usually my top half responding to any kind of movement) after 4-5 hours sleep and I cannot wait to sit down and wrestle with the next things on my to-do list. Every day brings more frustrations, making change is like swirling water, the deeper you dip the harder the resistance. You move enough water deeply enough and massive unforeseen change just happens (and often long after you stopped applying force). I love this life

When I started this blog it was called the Four Hour Work Week Project. Firstly to grab visits from people looking for examples of Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week in practice, and also because the one underlying message from that book was reduce the things you don’t like doing by creating something that allows you to have time to do the things you do like doing. Even Merlin Mann got this point wrong recently (and I would perform any sexual act he would care to choose because I think he is that awesome ) by intimating that was all about the laying about in hammocks. No sir! If volunteering to help little brown babies in a far off country makes you all squishy then that’s your hammock. If like me, you dream of creating useful  Software as a Service for people to use to make their online business life easier then that’s your hammock.

In a week or so I move to an energy self sufficient mud-brick house in the middle of 700 acres of trees and wildlife and beautiful scenery. Every time I think about the 3-4 days that I won’t be able to do what I love makes me sad. The effort of packing and driving and unpacking doesn’t phase me, the lost time to do what I want, does.

So this is freedom;  it took 3 years of work and planning to get here, and I would not change it for the world. If you are reading this and are wishing you could do the same thing then it’s time to put your hands deep into the water and start pushing as much of it around as you can manage.

swirling water

Image courtesy of everhalle

4 Hour Work Week Free Audiobook

Always wondered about the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss but haven’t had time to read the book? Try downloading the free Audible audiobook version from this link.

Requires Audible player, download at same time.

Enjoy!

Why Work Sucks

Title – Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It

Media – Book

Authors: Cali Ressler & Jody Thompson

I had been waiting for this book to be released after reading about it on Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week Blog. As a manager in a corporate environment I have been been slowly subverting the usual ways of looking at “work”.

Think about it. (some sweeping generalisations coming but stick with me)

Offices work using the same tools, hierarchies and focus that have been in place for hundreds of years. When people moved from the land to centralised industrial work places (and we can go back further to serfdom and slavery) the fact that work was a) dangerous, b) unpleasant and c) allocated to people as young as 7, meant the need to have a supervisor standing over the worker (with a stick) to ensure they worked. Work hours were dictated by how much light was needed to complete the task, light was dictated by sunlight hours, and time suddenly became the focus of work rather than the task at hand.

No one wanted to work, they had to work.

Things have changed. The majority of tasks are no longer life threatening; technology has simplified and eased the burden of most of us. We have electric light! Telephones! Internet!

Yet we still work to the clock with a supervisor standing over us with a stick….

Why Work Sucks touches on a new way of thinking about work. ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) is the goal and using the example of Best Buy who implemented ROWE over a period of years the book covers views and ideas that came out of that change.

Despite working in a corporate environment, the idea of a ROWE is not alien to me. In fact, it seems absolutely logical, let’s see if you think the same way.

Workers in a ROWE do not work to the clock. They have very clear tasks with very clear deadlines and work they way they want to work to complete those tasks.

Using a non-work example that everyone should be able to identify with.

Remember back to high school or university when you were given a period of time to write and essay. You knew what the essay had to be about and you knew when you had to hand it in, everything else was up to you.

Knowing how you worked best, you may have knocked that essay over in the first day at the library and used the rest of your time to go out with friends. Or you may have done a little a day at a time at a coffee shop, or you may have left it all to the last minute and did it from home. If the essay was of a good enough standard then you received a good mark, it didn’t matter or depend on when or where you performed the task.

Now apply this to the work environment.

Employees are given very clear tasks with very clear expectations for what the result should be. There are no core hours, no need for desk time, no schedules.

Now I know that there will be many of you that will shake your head and say this just won’t work in your area/industry. And in some it won’t, a nurse can’t just look after her patients whenever she feels like it for example. Yet there will be parts of her job that she will be able to move to ROWE. Look at HR and performance reviews, expense paperwork, ordering of supplies etc etc….

Back to the book.

The first thing that struck me was that it is only around 200 pages long…in biggish print. Do not expect depth as the view in most parts is from several thousand feet. If you are looking at instructions on how exactly to implement you will not find it here. As a worker you might have been looking for how to create groundswell to bring this into your company, this is not covered either.

In fact it is not until the last page in the book that all becomes clear (internet marketers take note). The last page includes a link to, surprise surprise, the authors’ company CultureRX (they have become consultants) who will help you bring ROWE to your work place. I just read the longest sales letter I have ever read ….without realising it till the very end. Nice work ladies!

As an idea generator and a look at what future work places will be I heartily recommend the book. My imagination ran wild and I have left the book laying around “seductively” so my fellow managers are now discussing the ideas inside. If you an employee this would make a great gift for your manager (if they are open minded) or for a colleague (if your manager is not open minded) so you can start a movement within your workplace to a more logical way of working.

Managing a Four Hour Work Week

The Way Of The CubicleFor those of you that follow me on Twitter, or check out the distractions section of this blog, will know already that today was the first day of my being outsourced to AT&T from IBM.

My role in AT&T will be managing a team of about 24 people. Almost twice as big as the team I managed before.  This will mean I need to  lay the ground rules early to ensure no-one is wasting my time or theirs. Some classics from Tim Ferriss will be implemented as office policy.

The issue that many people have trying to work the 4HWW is that their manager is stuck in what I call the “Way of the Cubicle“. The Way of the Cubicle is the ancient art of believing that you are most productive at your desk, phone glued to one ear, typing on a keyboard with one hand and shoving your lunch in your gob with the other. Way of the Cubicle devotees are often late middle aged, who seek ways of proving that you, their minion, are doing “work”.

An example that was passed on to me by a friend was their Way of The Cubicle boss not being a big fan of work-from-home type arrangements. He was paranoid that all that would happen is the worker would watch Oprah all day and basically bugger about doing nothing. So he proposed (as they were all programmers) that he would write a program that would take a screenshot of the worker’s screen randomly,  several times an hour.

It might be just me, but doesn’t that just smack of wasted productivity doing something like that?

Anyway back to the office where I am the boss. The new “rules” that I will be implementing are

  • Meetings are a last resort
  • If you cannot avoid convening a meeting ensure the agenda with planned outcomes is in the invitation or I will not accept
  • Meetings should be between 1pm and 3pm
  • All staff will block out lunch time and eat somewhere away from the desk/floor

My last team were technical implementors and so I abolished strict starting and finishing times and allowed the team to set them themselves. Unfortunately my new team are a couple of operational support teams that have specific hours and SLAs to meet so I can’t really allow that.

I can however, empower the team to start making decisions that they have not been permitted to in the past.

The goal of all this is to actually keep my team away form me while I do the mundane work that needs to be done without interruption and thinking/strategy time.

More on this subject after implementation.