Interview with Promod Sharma -Four Hour Work Week part 4
Monty Loree: So I signed up to tons and tons of those and so basically I went through all of my email accounts and I unsubscribed from everything. I kept doing it for months until I had nothing. So now basically in the one where I used to get maybe 15 or 20 emails a day, now I get maybe 1 or 2 and that’s from Facebook, Twitter or something.
Promod Sharma: I’ve done something similar. So what I’ve done, I mean I’ve stopped getting a lot of things that I never bothered reading, but what I do is I use a separate email account for things that are basically reading related. So I have my main email account for business related things, and I have another one for family related things and I have one for just stuff to read at some point and that makes it easier too.
Monty Loree: Right, something I just want to talk about. I guess I should say again here that I am talking here with Promod Sharma who is the blogger over at Riscario Insider and that’s blog.riscario.com. The question that I wanted to ask you is do you think that a 4 hour work is practical? I mean is it good for anybody to do? It seems there’s a bit of a learning curve that you need to do in order to make it work.
Promod Sharma: Well it depends on the kind of work you’re doing. The reason that Timothy Ferriss can follow that is he makes a lot of money by selling, I think it’s vitamins online and with that kind of business you don’t really need to be around. Most of us don’t have that kind of opportunity. We’re doing work where maybe we don’t have to be in the office to do it but we need to be reasonably available. If you’re off for a month, then things are going to suffer during that time. So I think it depends on the kind of work you’re doing but I think if you take the philosophy of what he’s saying, and you’re not in a factory type job where you’re paid by the hour and you physically have to be there. I think there are things that we can do to use our time more effectively.
Monty Loree: Agreed. For example, I was mentioning earlier that a lot of times where – I’m in the internet business, so I outsource quite a bit. I spent 1 year learning how to outsource. People need to know that. When I first started out sourcing, I had no experience whatsoever. For heaven’s sake, it’s like architect, engineering. It’s a whole new skill set that you need to do. The first thing that I did was I said I am going to ask a fellow to do a web page for me. So I sent over the specs of what I thought, and he did exactly what I did. But because the web page needed to be - it was not a static page. It was dynamic, point from data bases and so on. He built a static page for me. It looked good, everything was nice and well. It’s got to move, it’s got to do stuff. It’s got to update. So then I spent the better part of a couple of weeks writing the specs and how to get this page built by somebody else. The point I’m making is, from my experience, either you have the experience or you have to outsource the people that have the experience that can anticipate the problems that you are going to run into.
Promod Sharma: Yes. I think that make sense. One of the things I did which I normally would have not done before the 4 hour kind of thinking is, in December basically I took a sabbatical where we spend a month in India. Normally I would only take a couple of weeks off which isn’t really enough time and I wouldn’t go that far away. Basically that was a good break of the month. One of the things I noticed is in India, like the people we know as relatives because you basically stay with them, are fairly well off by Indian standards. So they all have servants. It might range from one or two to about six or so. But what I noticed, because on the surface here, like in Canada or in the US you’ve got to do everything yourself – laundry, dishes and all those things. We’ve got appliances to help but basically we do the things ourselves. So I was thinking it must be like heaven to have all these people around you. But what I saw is there’s a lot of effort in managing them. So when you tell a servant to do something, they’ll do exactly that. But they won’t do anything extra. So you have to tell them every little thing. It’s almost easier to do certain things yourself. So I can see learning to outsource would take some learning. On the surface it just seems trivial. You tell someone to do this, but maybe that’s what they will do – is exactly what you told them, not really adding any value.
See part one of this interview: interview with promod sharma four hour work week part 1
See part two of this interview: interview with promod sharma four hour work week part 2
See part three of this interview: interview with promod sharma four hour work week part 3
