Do you wish you had more time for your passions, self-care, and spending time with the people that you love?

Today I'm going to share with you the book that showed me that the capitalistic grind is not always the answer, and the steps you can take to actually increase your financial freedom while working way less.

All right. So I'm going to reveal the book to you.

Are you ready?

Drumroll.

The book is The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.

Now, if you've previously heard of or read this book. I love that! But today, I'm going to focus on the key lessons I took away from this book—lessons that are still relevant today and that you should be aware of for your business.

6 Key Lessons from The 4-Hour Workweek

1. Getting more done in less time

This is what’s going to give you more financial freedom and more time freedom.

So one of the things I learned from this book is that if you give yourself 8 hours to do something or you give yourself 16 hours to do something, that's exactly how long it's going to take you to get that thing done. Versus if you give yourself 2 hours or 3 hours, you'd be really surprised that you can get that same thing done in those amount of hours if you just set that time limit for yourself. Not only did this book teach that to me, but I've seen this firsthand

So, for example, in my late twenties, a lot of my friends started having kids and they were also business owners. And I kept thinking, man, how are they ever going to run their businesses while having kids? Like they're going to have no time to do that. They're going to have to get a full-time nanny. And to my surprise, they had one, maybe two, maybe three kids, and yet they still found the time to grow their businesses exponentially.

And this is when I realized that you can get more done in less amount of time when you just set that timeframe for yourself.

2. Automation

Automation is what’s going to give you more financial freedom and more time freedom. It is actually bigger now than ever before because of AI and all the new stuff rolling out.

But it's crazy to me how many business owners are not fully utilizing automation. It's still great, of course, to have employees and people who specialize in things. But if you can automate something in your business, why wouldn't you do that?

So maybe it's automating:

-Canned responses

-Sales through an automated sales funnel

-Using AI to do some of your copywriting

There are so many different things and it really depends on your business. However, begin by asking yourself, "Can this be automated?’’ You wouldn't believe how much work you're going to get done in your business if you can automate things.

You don’t need to fire your people. However, there are some aspects of their work that can be automated. As a result, they have more time to do even more tasks for you. So just ask yourself, what can you automate in your business? It's only going to help you expand your business, expand your financial freedom, and of course, expand your time freedom as well.

3. Hiring Overseas Virtual Assistants

Tim Ferris talks about hiring overseas virtual assistants for a very affordable rate. He talks a lot about hiring like, affordable overseas VAs in India. But for me, the website that helped me the most, to find the best VAs I've ever worked with is called PHJobs, which stands for the Philippines.

So this is actually where you would hire virtual assistants in the Philippines. And it's not just somebody who would do like random tasks for you. You can hire really any job. So I hired a graphic designer, I've hired a copywriter, I've hired a video editor, and a virtual assistant, all from this website. And the cool thing is, every single person that we've hired was the first hire that we made, and they still work for us today.

I really cannot recommend this job site highly enough. The price that we pay is usually somewhere between eight and $10 an hour, which is still an insanely great price because of the exchange rate between the United States and the Philippines.

Here are some of the steps I used to hire VAs on the site:

1. Pay a monthly fee (the site is paid, you can cancel at any time)

2. Come up with the job description, and do give one piece of homework

3. Post the job description on the site

4. Wait for the applicants to send their application

5. Review their homework and do the necessary interview

6. Hire the best VA

I have noticed that this is what finds us the best match people and again, these are my first hires. They still work for me. They're very happy. I'm very happy. So the strategy does work very well.

So what I do is let's say I'm hiring for a video editor. I would just find like a 1 to 2 minute video and say, “Hey, if you want to apply for this job, edit this video and then submit it here.” Those are just some quick steps and I hope you'll check it out.

4. Focus

Another thing that I learned from this book is—focus.

I realize that sounds quite broad, but as we previously discussed. If you give yourself an 8-hour window or a 4-hour window, no matter what the window is, you're going to get it done in that amount of time because that's the time that you have.

Some of the things that I use for focus:

Timer Cube

I got it on Amazon and it has 60 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes.

Basically what you do is just set it on your desk. Let's say you want to write an Instagram caption and you think that'll maybe take you about 15 minutes. You just flip the timer to the 15 minutes is up and then it'll go off after 15 minutes.

I find that this not only helps my focus but it actually kind of makes it a competitive thing for me to actually get it done in that amount of time, which is super cool as well.

Asana

Using task management software is another thing that truly helps me with focus. Now we use Asana at my business.

What's so cool is when you come to work, you already know what task you should be working on for that day. You're not just showing up to work, being like, What should I work on today?

Because if you don't know what you're going to work on before you show up to work, you're most likely not going to be focused and as productive as you could be versus coming in and knowing, okay,

“I need to get this done, this done, this done, this done,”

“This is going to take 60 minutes, this is going to take 15 minutes.”

And you're really making it sort of like a fun competition to get things done.

5. Reward

This is another trick that you can use to help with focus—reward yourself.

For me what I do is, if there's like a task that I really don't want to do or I'm dreading not looking forward to, I'll say, “Well, if I can get that done in 60 minutes, then I can watch this show.” “Or if I get this done in 60 minutes, then I get to go have a coffee at the coffee shop or whatever the thing is that I want to do.” Or maybe it's, “if I get this done in 1 hour versus 6 hours, then I get to leave work early and go on a hike for the day.”

And that really helps my focus as well.

6. Vacations and Sabbaticals

The last main point that I learned from this book is vacations and sabbaticals.

When you actually take dedicated time off—whether it's a vacation or a sabbatical—you'll return to work much more refreshed and focused. It's absurd. Like how much more you accomplish when you actually take time off and then return because you are rested. You've gotten some rest, had some fun, and are eager to get back to work.

In addition, Tim talks about how making yourself available 24/7 to your employees actually just makes them like reach out to you more and take up more of your time. If they know that you're going to be gone on vacation, they will like to consolidate all their questions or things that they need before you go on vacation.

In our business, we make sure that every process is documented. That way if somebody needs to jump in and do something, they won't bother you while you're on vacation because they may simply do the task for you by accessing the SOP which stands for Standard Operating Procedure.

You want every process in your business documented because maybe you need to bring on a new employee or maybe need to promote someone and they need to now learn the tasks. It is just very helpful.

Final Thoughts

All right. So just to summarize, we talked about getting more done in less time. We talked about automation.

We talked about virtual assistants, focus and vacations, and sabbaticals. So I hope you'll consider adding these into your strategy for your business this year.

Now, overall, in this book, what I've learned is, it is very important to always be questioning what's happening in the mainstream and asking, is this working for me? Is this working for my business? How can I do things better? How could I do things better for my particular business?

We really need to be just trusting our gut and really thinking outside the box on how to make things work for us.