Organize IT Recap: My New eBook, Four Hour Work Week In The Real World And Is Depression Actually Good For You?
Organize IT recap for 16th January 2009.
- On Monday I plan to release my next ebook. In a similar vein to my Clutter 101 book, this will be a radically updated and expanded collection of my productivity tips series to date. I plan to do several more ebooks as that series grows. There will be a small price to pay but I hope you find it’s more than worth it. The link to purchase it will be released to my RSS subscribers first so be sure to join in to stay in the loop!
- In typical Daily Mail fashion the headline is slightly misleading, but apparently scientists say depression is good for you. There is quite a difference between depression and just having the blues, but the point is embracing our miserable side rather than medicating it can leave us more motivated to improve our lives when we come through the other side. This is something I’ve considered for a while. Whenever I’ve had a rough few days or weeks I always find myself much more motivated when things start to pick up. What are your thoughts on this contentious issue?
- Gone are the days when I’d simply bookmark sites in the browser itself. Now I use Delicious and because I can tag all my links it makes things much more organized. With this in mind, Ken Clark has several clever ways for using Delicious to get things done. For instance, you can keep a list of books to read by bookmarking the relevant pages at Amazon.
- The Four Hour Work Week is one of my favorite productivity books, nearly up there with GTD. The parts about the 80/20 rule and Parkinson’s law, while fairly simply, have made a big difference to me. However, the rest of the book is a bit patchy. Trying to achieve an exciting, alternative lifestyle is great until the day-to-day practicalities start to kick in. Katy at Flipping Heck! brings up one such example regarding using email autoresponders. What is your take on The Four Hour Work Week?
7 Comments
Congrats on the new ebook! My take on the T4HWW is that it looks like a great system for somebody that spends a few years building a mailorder business then turns it all over to supervisors. I am not in the mailorder business, and do not believe that most of the book applies to the average working people. I mean, seriously, how does a carpenter outsource his carpentry? I am looking forward to seeing how you apply it to the real world.
Congrats on your ebook. As one with depression, I wish it were that easy to motivate myself to work on it and get well. I think you can help yourself to make it better but depending on the level of your depression, you probably won’t be able to cure yourself completely just with motivation and willpower. And isn’t motivation the biggest thing that is lacking with depression?
Thanks for the comments. Stephen, you make a good point about T4HWW and it only being suitable for particular people in particular businesses. I suppose the same can be said of GTD focusing on office workers. I guess if you don’t take the outsourcing point the book makes literally, the whole principle of delegating/automating work does still apply.
Sharon, you make a good point about depression. I’m sure most people have their ups and downs. We come through the downs naturally without medication feeling more motivated and I guess our ups plummet when that motivation wanes. Of course, there is a difference between just having a low period and something more serious like depression.
For me, GTD is much more actionable than T4HWW. That having been said, there are some nice tips and tricks in it.
Many thanks for the link! The more I look around the web, the more people I seem to find that are dissatisfied with T4HWW. I think the book was released at a particularly apt time with a lot of people unhappy with their working hours and work/life balance in general. With the proliferation of blogging I think a lot of people saw it as an easy way to make a quick buck and Ferris tapped into that with the whole “You can do everything on the Internet – I did!” attitude. However in the real world – as Stephen pointed out – it just doesn’t work that way.
I work as a physician. There is absolutely no way that a four hour work week would be good for me or my patients.
Aha, Jessica. I can imagine how difficult that would make things. Maybe I should compile a list of jobs a four hour work week wouldn’t apply to…