Strive Notes

What a great headline! How could I not be enticed into reading on?

High on most people’s wish list, I imagine, would be a minimum effort maximum reward work day. The Times’s Sathnam Sanghera goes on to explain how entrepreneur Tim Ferriss increased business revenue when he cut his working week from 40 hours to just four by cutting out customer facing activities and limiting all communications.

He has stopped answering the phone and only picks up emails and messages once a week. Oh and most importantly, he spent more time indulging in leisure interests.

In reality we all know you never actually get anything for nothing; it certainly sounds a little doubtful to me anyway. Having been involved in several business start-ups over the years I;ve seen the eye bags developing as working days morph into nights.

Surely the idea of limiting our communications goes against the grain of what we have all learned over the years — people buy people. An image of Tim Ferris was growing in my mind, and I decided to see if I could find out anything more about him. It was quiet easy.

It seems the very guy who is telling us not to get bogged down with communication is actually well documented all over the Internet with numerous up-to-date blog posts. He’s a speaker at technology summits on subjects including web 2.0 exploration and has several books and published articles in media. It seems he’s a far cry from the vision I’d had of a ‘laid-back’ adrenalin junkie.

So reading back the post by Sathnam Sanghera, I pick up on the comment about spurious attempts by PR consultants to get the names of obscure clients into the papers.

I can’t help but wonder if perhaps Tim Ferriss and his fourhourweek could be simply just yet another of these clever, spurious PR attempts to get another obscure name out there?

Filed under: public relations