The 4 Hours Work Week by Tim Ferriss is a book about entrepreneurship, productivity, making money, enjoy the life of your dream, and have a lot of free time: everything that is so much needed by the moms.
Here some interesting tips that will make you a super mom.
The book was first published in 2007 and I read it in 2014 when I moved to New York City (actually I technically listened to it through Audible). I was not a mom at the moment and the book resonated a lot with what I wanted for my future. Of course, as in many times of our life, we get caught in our daily lives and we forget about the “paradise”. Luckily, the”paradise” didn’t forget about me, and The 4 Hours Work Week got back in my hands. So I decided to read it again, now with the perspective of a mom.
Reading time: 9 minutes
Financial skills level: intermediate
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure.
Table of Contents
4 Hours Work Week tip for moms # 1 – Definition: What are your dreams and goals?
In this stage, you will envision the fundamentals of your entirely new life.
Tim talks about 3 currencies: the “New Rich lifestyle” is not only about money/income, but there are also time and energies into the equation.
To him, it makes no sense to become old, have time and money but don’t have the energy and the health to enjoy it. Wouldn’t you like to have money, time, and energy, altogether?
In addition to the 3 currencies, another good tip is to define goals about “having”, “being”, and “doing” and always put emotions into consideration because they will keep you focused. For example, you might want to visit your family’s country of origin and immerse yourself and your children in the heritage of their grandparents or you might want to learn the piano because you love Bach and you would like to be able to play it.
With all these premises in mind, define your goals, and evaluate their cost.
Get some inspiration…
We love dreams but when it comes to goals, we know that we need to set them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely).
In the book, most of the goals are short term (6 months) like for example:
buy a new car, get a virtual assistant, become a good cook, visit another country. For each of these wishes, you need to calculate the monthly cost. Of course, besides your goals, you always need to cover your monthly expenses, so in total, your target monthly income is the monthly cost of the goals + (monthly expenses x 1,3)
1,3 is to include a 30% buffer monthly for savings or emergencies.
Now let’s do some examples that are good for moms:
– a home (i.e. house, apartment, boat, tent, whatever you call home)
– a loving caregiver for your children when they are not with you
– some long term investments
– a family vacation + a romantic weekend with the hubby
– learning a language (maybe the one of your husband and your kids if they are bilingual)
– and many more
What about the cost?
I will give you my experience when I started the blog. My salary was a little less than $3,750 net a month.
Unconsciously, I somehow did a reverse calculation.
Monthly expenses: $ 1,400 (this is my 50% share of the expenses)
Monthly buffer: $420
The result was that I had $1,930 for my goals.
With my calculations, to reach my financial goals in 18 years, I allocated
-$916 for Maria’s investments
-$250 for my retirement investments
Leaving me with $750 for some real estate investments
This made me understand that I needed at least $1,000-1,500 more a month to be able to afford a real estate investment without too much stress.
Plan your best outcome
Tim’s plan is for the reader to become an entrepreneur. Yes, he gives the option to remain an employee but in the end, also the employee becomes more freelance and therefore still needs to act as an entrepreneur.
In any case, the book’s purpose is for you to be positive and keep in your mind how much better your life will be when you succeed.
Consider the results in case you fail
What is the worst that can happen if you fail?
If you think about it, most of the times nothing irreverseble happens.
You may lose the business you started, and you might go back to work as an employee… Basically, most of the time you go back to the starting point, or a slightly negative situation, but not much worse than that.
4 Hours Work Week tip for moms # 2 – Elimination: do what is stricly necessary
Mom, meet your next BFF: Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto is an Italian economist who is famous for the law of the 80/20. This guy really went deep in your study and in late 1800 he was mainly talking about income and wealth distribution. However, his concept seems to be applicable to almost every situation in life and it can be summarized as 80% of results are produced by 20% of causes.
Here some examples of Pareto’s Law:
– You wear 20% of your clothes are used 80% of the time
– 20% of the tasks are getting 80% of the work done
– 20% of your clients provide 80% of your revenue
– You kids play 80% of the time with 20% of their toys
– You spend 80% of your time with 20% of your friends
– 20% of ingredients make 80% of your meals
Do you understand how important is this principle to you? In essence, from now on, you need to find your 20% to focus and forget about the rest.
Is this task really worthy to spend time on?
This is the question you need to ask yourself before you put any item on your to-do list. Seriously, remember your BFF: only 20% !!!
Work just on critical tasks and cut out all the things that consume time but don’t provide a benefit or an income. Very few things matter.
To keep myself focused on the tasks, I use an extension for the browser called Momentum: every time you open a new tab in the browser you get an amazing picture with the actual time of the day and your to-do list. This extension is precious because it avoids useless online surfing.
Cultivate selective ignorance: how many times does it happen that you take the phone to make a phone call and then you check Social media, and e-mails, watch a YouTube video, surf online, and then forget to make the phone call?!?
Being “ignorant” can actually be very useful to keep yourself focused: in this knowledge society, we receive so many inputs that our brain can’t even process them all. The result of this is that we somehow go to a blackout and we don’t take action. Too many inputs = no outputs.
We don’t need to know everything every time: just learn things when you need them. In case you really can’t give up to know what’s going on around you, select just a few sources of news that you trust and dedicate 10-15 minutes per day to keep you updated.
But in case you want to go fully in the communication diet, don’t go online at all. I do it most of the time and, believe me, I am happier. Nothing from the outside influences my mood and I am more productive because I have fewer distractions.
Compress your productivity time
Find inefficiencies in order to eliminate them and find your strengths in order to multiply them.
Tim Ferris gives a lot of examples that apply to the office work and moms can have some differences in where they “waste” time. However, we do lose our concentration sometimes. I suggest reading also Stephen Covey’s 7 habits of highly effective people.
What are the inefficiencies? E-mails, phone calls, daydreaming, cheat chatting, gossip, internet surfing… As moms, we are sometimes very good re-inventing the wheel: we decide to make the same task in many different ways… That closet can be tidy up just once per season!
Please stop doing things that are useless!
One of the most important 4 Hours Work Week tips for moms is that “You should be able to work 4 hours!
You need to compress your productivity time. Be honest with yourself: you only have a few hours in your day when you can really focus and work to achieve your goals. Become aware of how much time you really have available and plan it in detail: you want to have every single moment destined to a specific action. You won’t have time for inefficiencies.
Batch tasks
Tim Ferriss talks about hiring virtual assistants: maybe we don’t need to go that far, especially if we are staying home mom without an income. Nonetheless, I suggest considering help in the housekeeping if you can use your time to work on a small side hustle or just even to spend more quality time with your kids. Remember the time is very valuable and you could pay somebody else to earn some free time for yourself and your family.
In any case, in order to optimize time, get things done, and create more opportunities to stay with your loved ones, batching is an amazing tool.
Things that you can batch:
Once a week:
– Food shopping (if you are good at planning you can do every 2 weeks)
– Meal cooking
– Laundry and ironing (if you master the minimalistic closet)
– Outfit selection (you plan all that you and the children are going to wear for the week)
Once a month:
– Bill payments (but your goal is to automate them, see below)
– Purchase of diapers, house supplies, vitamins (but your goal is to automate them, see below)
Once every season or once a year:
– Closet cleaning, seasonal clothes change
– Cloth purchase (for Maria I do it online and I plan to continue at least until she is 6. Take a peek on how I do in this post)
– Gifts purchase (birthdays, Christmas, holidays, altogether): my secret here is Amazon gift cards and the sample sales
– Medical visits (I chose our pediatrician in a clinic with other many specialists doctors. I book Maria’s check-ups on Fridays afternoon around 4-4.30 pm and I schedule my ob gun, dermatologist, or any other specialists for me between 2 and 4 pm. By doing this, I only take a few hours off of my 9 to 5 job and I take care of all our visits)
No meetings without an agenda ??
I couldn’t keep myself not to put this suggestion here. It is kind of funny also because in the book, Tim literally tells you how to make people stop to bother you and he says: avoid with all your energy to have meetings and never ever have meetings without knowing an agenda on what you will be talking about.
I guess that moms would like sometimes not to have “meetings’ with their kids, especially when they go to the restrooms ?
During the COVID lockdown, however, it became a little more “acceptable” to give some rules to kids (and even spouses sometimes) to be able to have some time to work for example, and not being stopped every 5 minutes…
Go minimal
Remember Pareto? Why don’t we find 20% of our possessions that give us 80% of our joy?
Introducing you to the Japanese woman version and now your new BFF Marie Kondo, the queen of decluttering. She wrote few books (I suggest The Book Collection: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy, but if you want to be cool and faster you can read the manga version) and she has a show in Netflix (even faster than the manga).
Donate, sell, get rid of the 80% you don’t need. Less work to maintain the house clean and tidied up.
4 Hours Work Week tip for moms # 3 – Automation: Mom, you don’t always have to do it yourself!
You can’t believe how many things you can put in autopilot nowadays!
I love apps and websites that make life easier. Automation has a great purpose that you need to keep in mind to be effective: automation brings you out of the equation and it frees you. Here is things that you can automate (and you don’t need to know about coding!):
Bills payment
There are no excuses: every bank allows you to automate the payment of your bills. I personally love the cash back of my credit card.
For this reason, I made sure that all the utilities, phone, etc are paid with my credit card. After that, I automated the payments of my credit card once a month. Easy peasy. In addition, you want to pay the full amount every time so you won’t affect your credit score.
Diapers, house supplies, vitamins
One amazing tool is Amazon’s Subscribe & Save service that allows you to choose from thousands of products and select your delivery frequency. So you can buy your favorite and never run out of them. You will receive a reminder email before each delivery, and you can skip deliveries if you don’t need one that day or week.
If you are a prime member, if you enroll for FREE, to the Amazon family which gives your coupons and suggestions based on the age of your children. And if you are not prime member yet, you can a FREE 30-days trial by clicking HERE
Wishes ??
Are you known as the one that always remember birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations? Good for you! You are the nice mom!
I am a mess and I am always days late, if I remember at all.
If you are like me (or if you want to keep your nice score without investing time) you can download in your phone the Scheduled app. The app allows you to schedule messages on iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Twitter, and traditional SMS messages. It also has some handy features, such as the ability to import birthdays from your contacts list or Facebook friends.
Kids?
Can we automate our children? Well, not in the sense of turning them into robots ?
Children love routines and I guess that’s what we can automate. It will help them develop also auto-discipline.
I suggest you write the process together with your children and that, of course, you make them feel like it is a kind of game/challenge.
Some examples:
– small chores
– pet caregiving
Finances
Actually, automating your finances is essential but I left it at the end on purpose. I believe that you need to be very well aware of your financial routines before you put them in the autopilot.
Why? Because when you automate you tend to forget about that task and you can allow yourself to “forget” about your finances only when you are very good at managing your money.
I personally watched at my bank account and at my investments for at least one year before I automate. In essence, you need to know all the dates when there are movements in your account. Of course, if you are an employee, it can be somewhat easy: you receive your salary on regular dates, therefore you can set the operation just after that date. The goal is if to keep on your checking account just enough money for the monthly expenses and allocate the rest to different accounts (for example, CDs, High-yield account, brokerage accounts to invest in stocks, mortgage if you have one, etc…). As you can imagine, the calculation needs to be precise otherwise you risk being charged with an overdraft fee for example.
Even if I automated the whole process, every month I always check that everything went through smoothly and, of course, I keep an eye on my investments in the stock exchange every few days, in case I want to buy or sell some stocks and gain some appreciation.
4 Hours Work Week tip for moms # 4 – Liberation
This is the final jump. You already learnt how to eliminate, how to delegate some tasks and how to automate. Aren’t you feeling already a bit free?
The world is not longer waiting for you to save it.
Work Remotely
Shift presence to performance, make your boss understand that you “produce” more at home and get out of that office!
Why don’t pick a new home… in a new country?
I did it, but I actually did the opposite of what Tim Ferriss is saying ?
The concept here is “earn in a strong currency and then look for a paradise on earth where the cost of living is much lower”. In other words, you don’t need to have a 6-digit income to live fully: $3,000 in Asia or South America can buy much more than in the USA.
It can sound difficult, and it is when you think of family relationships.
But for the rest, it is not so much: kids can go to a private school or they can do homeschooling online, you need an internet connection and that’s pretty much it. With the money you save, you can travel back to your enlarged family when you feel homesick. However, if you choose wisely, you can “risk” that your family and friends will come to visit you even too often… Can you believe that you can live in a 3 bedroom apartment for $1,000 a month on this gorgeous island?
Conclusions
There are many reasons why you should read 4 Hours Work Week yourself and find many other tips.
The DEAL (Definition-Elimination-Automation-Liberation) that I summarized in this post is only part of what Tim Ferriss can teach you. The book is full of examples and resources, and I left out the whole part that talks about how to create your own business from scratch.
It is self-improvement classic. Best Selling since it came out.
Recap of links/resources – 4 Hours Work Week tips for moms
Books
4 Hours Work Week
Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy
Marie Kondo’s manga version
Audible membership – 2 Books for FREE trial
Kindle Unlimited membership – FREE 2 Months trial
Apps
Scheduled for iOS or Schedule SMS: Send it later for Android
Momentum
Shopping
Amazon family membership
Amazon Prime Free Trial
For my Italian and International friends,
you can find all the relevant links here.
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