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WINTER: Is a hard day's work just a waste of time?

By Mary Winter, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 17, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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It's an age-old formula: Work hard for 50 years, save, move to Florida.

If you're lucky, you'll squeeze in 20 years of shuffleboard and soft foods before you drop dead.

Is that any way to live?

Not for Tim Ferriss.

Ferriss, author of the best- selling The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, believes it's criminal to wait until you're 65 to enjoy life.

At age 30, Ferriss says he has it all - freedom, money, a fulfilling life - and the good news is, so can you.

I've not quite finished the book, but I can tell you it's done a number on my head regarding work. My starting point has always been a hard day's work never hurt anyone and, in most cases, cured whatever ailed them. But I might as well be driving a horse and buggy, according to Ferriss.

The legendary American work ethic, he implies, is an instrument of slavery.

Here's his better way: Take regular, planned mini-retirements throughout your entire adult life, and answer to no one but yourself.

To do this, you need to toss your old assumptions that working long hours is good and reaps big rewards. You've heard it before: Work smarter, not harder. Today, that means outsourcing your work - including your personal-assistant positions - to countries like India.

You also have to be ruthless about managing e-gadgets, things and people who waste your time.

Ferriss says his wisdom springs from experience. The Long Island native and Princeton graduate made his fortune in his mid-20s creating a business that sells nutritional supplements to athletes. But 80-hour workweeks took a huge personal toll and led to a nervous breakdown.

That's when he determined to change. The breakthrough, he writes, was learning the 8 0/20 rule: Eighty percent of your results come from 20 percent of your effort and time.

In other words, do the most important things. Bag the rest.

Ferriss embraced this principal with a vengeance. He pared his customer base from 120 to eight, but they were his eight best customers. By concentrating on these eight, he says, his monthly income went from $30,000 to $60,000 in four weeks and his hours went from 80 to 15.

He also developed total intolerance for "busy" work. "This is hard for most people to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity," he writes.

Ferriss credits his work style with allowing him to pursue his dreams. He travels extensively, speaks several languages and indulges his muses: He won the national Chinese kickboxing championship, he became the first American to hold a world record in tango and he's hosted a Chinese TV show.

My main reservation about trying Ferriss' approach is that I'm in my 50s, not my 20s, and my energy level has definitely tapered off.

I'm weighing whether to give the book to my kids, however. Half of me says Ferriss is the wave of the future. Half of me says he's just another clever self-help author whose work, in the wrong hands, could become a manifesto for a generation of slackers.

Time management, tweaked

BlackBerries, Treos, iPhones and e-mail are dangerous in high doses because of the time they can consume, says entrepreneur Tim Ferriss. He suggests the following:

* Never check e-mail first thing in the morning. It's a big excuse to waste time.

* Check e-mail twice a day, at noon and 4 p.m.

* Create a polite auto-e-mail response informing your e-mail senders of this.

* Move to once-a-day e-mail checks as soon as practical.

* Have at most two critical tasks to complete every day.

* Do not multitask. You'll get distracted, lose focus and invite interruptions.

* Give yourself impossibly short deadlines. It forces you to focus and ignore minutiae, and do better work.

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