I have to confess.. I don’t read non-fiction books, except for –of course– books for the courses that I attend. Those books about self-help or self improvement or time management never attract me. Well, I read Chicken Soup for the Soul a long long time ago, perhaps they could be considered as non-fiction? Oh, and I also did read these books as a child, did you? Or Seri Tokoh Dunia? :).
Anyway, I stumbled upon this book, titled The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss. Not a recent book, published 6 years ago, so maybe you knew and read it already. The only reason why I read it was because.. that is the only book in English among those German books that I found during my last vacation ;). However, it turns out that the book is quite interesting, the author is pretty skillful in writing the methods he proposes not in the boring way.
I haven’t finished the book, but I really like the last 2 chapters that I read: The End of Time Management and The Low-Information Diet. Both of them are about how to increase productivity, something that I really need right now.
The first one focuses on tasks and time. Of course you have to focus on important tasks to shorten work time. However, there is this weird phenomenon, that you usually perform well, or maybe best, during the minutes before deadline. That is the magic of deadline, because the time pressure forces you to focus on the tasks at hand. The idea is to use both: identify the important tasks, then set for them very short and clear deadlines. Self discipline is a must have in this case ;).
The second chapter focuses on limiting your access to information because most of them are really unimportant. Can you imagine how much time you waste on reading emails, or browsing the timeline of Facebook, Twitter ..or 9GAG? ;). The author even suggests to not spending time reading news, giving you the opportunity to ask people “So, what’s new in this world?” then having a small talk.
Last week I was offline for exactly one week, no internet at all, I even set my mobile network to flight mode the whole week. After I came back to the ‘world’, browsed through my social networks, I realized that.. nothing much happened. Well, I got almost 100 unread emails, but only 2 important things happened: my master thesis’ supervisor’s baby girl was finally born 🙂 and I need to do Skype call on Monday morning. So there’s really no need to check your email every hour, except if you’re really expecting something important.
The author set some rules for this information diet thing, one of them that I found funny is: No reading books, except for this book and one hour of fiction pleasure reading prior to bed :D. The thing is.. one hour fiction rule won’t work on me, because one hour engaged in an interesting story is enough to make me finish the book, however long it may take ;p.
So.. since it’s snowing outside, now is the perfect time to finish this book *or writing another posts, let’s see which wins, reading mood or writing mood* ^^ Ciao!