4-Hour Workday

Good morning from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. This morning I am in the Starbucks in downtown Stroudsburg. The sun is shining and the beauty of the sun shining downing the street, with the green on the trees is such a nice sight. Wish you could be here with me. I’m listening to some good ‘90s tunes. They are playing old school Beck, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. Life is good. I am going to talk to day about a simple way of life.

A few years back, Tim Ferris came out with a book called “The 4-Hour Work Week.” It was a great read; I love the concept. I don’t think all of us could get to a 4-hour work week, but I do think that we could get more done with less time. As I stated above, I’m at Starbucks, and a few years ago I worked for this company. They actually trained us employees to make use of every step we took. Now you know the secret of how a person at the coffee shop can get so many things done so fast. We were all trained to take fewer steps to get to our goal. That is what today’s post is about: being able to accomplish more in less time.

I personally have been working to improve this area in my life, to be able to get more things done with my busy days. Think about your day today. How many things are you going to get done? Think about how much less time would be needed if you were to cut out the useless things that you do? In reading Tim Ferris’ book, this is one of the biggest things that I got out of it. I waste too many parts of my day actually doing things that are useless to my purpose, that are not needed to reach my goals. If I wanted to have an ideal life I would be working towards that with every step I could.

Think again about your day. How many trips did you take to the coffee pot today at work? How long did that take from your actual day? We all need breaks, I understand that. Our jobs could be too mundane if we did not break things up. So now let’s step out of work and think about when you are done with your job for the day. You get home. Now how many steps do you take that could be eliminated to make your evening go smoothly?

Think about this in light of Monday’s post about what we do with our spare time. If you are really working towards changing your life, you want to move from the place you are now and towards the goals or the purpose or passion in your life. And if you are wasting your valuable time doing things that are unnecessary, how much longer will it be till you reach that goal? As I stated earlier, working at Starbucks taught us to use less steps to reach an end goal. In your life, it’s time to remove those steps that are keeping you from your ideal life.

So how are you going to reach your ideal? How can you determine if you are wasting your valuable time? Here are three things that you can do to help you get rid of things that are holding you back and will help you achieve goals faster.

1.  Divide our day into three parts and make lists of unnecessary things. The three parts are Before Work, During Work, and After Work. In each of the three parts, write down what things you typically do that you could eliminate to help you reach your goals in that part of the day. Let’s take for example the Before Work section. You know the things you must do before work each day: get up, get ready, eat breakfast, drink coffee, get dressed. You know the things. Think through those things that you do and write down those that you would eliminate if you were headed out to do something different that day. For me, on the days that I get up early for a motorcycle ride, I lay out what I’m going to wear the night before so I don’t have to think about it in the morning. I eat a smaller, quicker breakfast and don’t linger over an extra cup of coffee. Those are things I can eliminate from a normal day because they just are not needed.

2.  Rearrange your day to work like a factory assembly line. If you have the list of things that you do regularly but don’t always need to do, see if they are things that could be moved to a different time of day to make them more efficient. If they are not needed, get yourself programmed to eliminate those things from your day. In the movie the “Pursuit of Happiness,” the main character, Chris, had very limited time each day. He would do things to make himself more productive. For example, when he finished making a phone call, he didn’t actually hang the handset up; he just pushed the “hang-up” switch so he could immediately start dialing the next call. He realized just this time saver saved him so many minutes each day. It was just a few seconds between calls he saved, but by end of day it was a chunk of time. He had an end goal, and getting there faster was what he wanted to do.

3.  Live this new process to make your day work for you. So you’ve identified ways to improve the processes in your life. Your idea is to change your personal time. But imagine if you make your time away from work more efficient then make yourself get your job done faster, using the extra time to make yourself better at what you do. If you could make yourself better and faster at each part of your life, word would soon get out, as we mentioned yesterday you are a get-it-done person. They’ll be asking you how you do it. This is one of the reasons many people call and email me. They want to know how they can improve their lives like I improved mine. Or they want to be faster at achieving their goals, want to know how I do it. Soon you will become the expert, the leader, and people will be looking up to you.

As we wrap up today, I hope you are seeing that many of the things we are covering are simple tasks that, when put together, make life great. People ask me all the time, “How did you do that?” It was small steps along the way to get there. My goal is to share these tips with you and help others have an awesome, productive life. Hearing your stories of how you made small changes that made a big difference is what gives me joy.

I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s your time to Live the life you always wanted, Love what you do and those you spend your life with, and let me know how can we help you become a RockStar in the world you live in.