Four Hour Work Week?
I just finished reading the new book by Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week, where Mr. Ferriss talks about how he broke free from his job working crazy hours each day, sleeping under his cube at night, and never doing anything he wanted to the “job” of his dreams where he is able to manage a global business from anywhere in the world in less than four hours per week. Tim tells of how he was about to go crazy when he decided to drop all of his work and leave the country for a much needed break. He made a promise to himself that he would only check his e-mail once per week. The book is not a time management book, but rather it is designed to explain how you can reduce the amount of “work” that you do by having low cost help take as much away from you as possible and free you up for the important things. One of the ideas that really hit home with me was you don’t have to be at work from 8:30 to 5:30 each day if you don’t have the work to do. Do your work and get out of there. I have caught myself many times in the past thinking up crap to do just so I could stay at the office and get the full fourty hours in.
Now when I think about that and compare it to my law practice, I see many similarities to Tim’s old job. I have to work a lot of hours to make sure I get the work done, but also to stay informed, to stay on top of the law, and then to take care of the administrative office stuff. I sure spend a lot more time at the office than I do at home. When I think about how possible it would be to run a law firm working four hours per week, I have to admit that would be a daunting challenge - and nearly impossible. While it may not be totally impossible, because, hopefully, you’re spending at least four hours each week meeting with prospective clients, but there are ways to increase your productivity, decrease amount of time spent on “junk” and get paid for providing your professional service and not based on how many hours you work to complete it.
I recently read a blog post about “The 4-Hour Work Week” and another interesting series of posts about the perfect law practice over at the Lawyer Profit Systems blog. It’s my goal moving forward in my practice to define my ideal practice and develop a way to make that fit my ideal lifestyle that I want rather than let it control me. More on that to come.
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Tripp,
I like the layout of your blog. Thanks for visiting mine. I agree with you that it is incredibly important to design a practice that serves your life. That is the whole point, isn’t it? But sometimes its easy to lose sight of that.
I hope you’ll subscribe to the lawforprofit feed where I will continue to talk about these very issues. Take care.
Michael