Book claims working week could be 4 hours

Answering your emails only once a day and keeping phone calls to a bare minimum can slash your working week to only four hours, according to a book that has caught the imagination of overworked America.

The claim is made by Timothy Ferriss, a 30-year-old American who sells dietary supplements. In his book, The 4-hour Workweek, which is to be published in Britain next year, he prescribes a ruthless "low-information diet" founded on such tenets as conducting business by the old-fashioned medium of the telephone and ending multi-tasking.

He outlines his strategy under the acronym DEAL. The first stage is definition of the new rules of work. Then comes elimination - a ruthless policy of dumping clients and activities, including most online distractions, emails and phone calls, which eat up the unproductive 80 per cent of work time, and knowing when to say "no".



The next stage, especially if you are the boss, is automation, or "outsourcing life". The key to this process is learning to delegate tasks to "virtual assistants" through companies based in India and the Philippines that specialise in handling executive work online.

Virtual assistants can do everything from researching rival businesses to making travel arrangements to ordering rubbish bins for the home, for prices ranging from $4 to $14 an hour, he says.

The final step is liberation - escaping the office and using the newly discovered spare time for a "mobile lifestyle", or "mini-retirement" breaks. Although Ferriss insists that a four-hour week is an achievable goal, he also offers the less ambitious prediction that readers could slash hours from their professional schedule by following his advice.