We’re all paying for someone else’s 4-hour work week, not ours
Someone gifted me the Tim Ferriss book this author is talking about (“The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”). It has a few potentially interesting parts about work life balance, but the majority of it is self-help pipe dreams.<p>It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. He provides scripts for asking your boss to work from home so you can secretly travel the world while collecting paychecks and doing as little work as possible. He suggests it’s simple to start a lifestyle business to sustain your lifestyle while only working a couple hours per week, using virtual assistants to do most of the work for you while you travel the world.<p>I’m sure there are some people who have used his techniques successfully, but I’ve mostly watched people become terrible coworkers after trying to implement his advice.<p>Like the author of this article says, much of his advice is about shifting your work to other people so you have more free time for yourself. That’s fine if you’re doing this as honest business transactions by hiring people, but most office workers implementing this advice just end up shifting their work to their teammates by hiding from communication and working less than everyone else. If you get a “4-Hour Work Week” believer on your team, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of their slack. At least until your manager catches on and lets them go.<p>That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack.<p>There are broader arguments about those who can afford to live off of investments, but they aren’t really addressed in the article.<p>It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.