Welcome to Chez Cliff!

Number three on my list of Self Help books that actually helped me would be “The Four Hour Work Week”.

While the book may be chucked full of great information, only a few items actually stuck with me.

Concept 1:  Automate your life.

This is cool.

Keeping my life in Quadrant 2, everything was getting taken care of except those unforeseen emergencies which life throws at you.  But some tasks are about as fun as watching paint dry.  Those tasks, Tim argues, can be assigned to a personal assistant.  I did one better: I completely automated them.

The results are incredible.  No longer am  I spending time taking care of bills each month.  Everything is automated.

A side benefit to this was discovering I could cut down on the amount of paperwork coming to me.  I hate paperwork.  My accounts are now all tracked electronically, thus eliminating the time needed to file paperwork.

Concept 2:  Hire out to freelancers

I had never heard of eLance.com or Guru.com until I read his book.  Suddenly assigning out these little tasks that I had no idea how to do made sense.  You could pay via credit card and have people carrying out these designs.

Suddenly I realized I could spend more time managing my business rather than doing all the technical aspects of it.  Those technical duties suck up a lot of time simply because I’m not great at it.

This has created a great pool of resources that I can now draw on and get results within a matter of days.  Granted, most of my resources are located on the other side of the world.  But that’s ok: I use that to my advantage.