outward not upward

Productivity expert and jet-setter extraordinaire Tim Ferriss has a proposition for you. Work four hours a week, he says, and you’ll find that you can become wealthy while still having time to do all the things you want to do.

Ferriss emphasizes the idea that (i) reducing information overload and (ii) outsourcing tasks, combined with (iii) remaining-results oriented will result in a tremendously liberating situation where the practicing individual has copious free time on a weekly basis in which they are free to travel the world, or even have multiple, parallel mini-careers. This sounds excellent, and I was enraptured by the notion at first (as were, seemingly, the millions who have firmly planted FHWW on the New York Times best-sellers list). I was especially turned on by the inspiring presentation Ferriss gave with Marci Alboher for Authors@Google.

Shortly, though, I became aware of an insidious side-effect of this kind of workload reduction, which was initially veiled by my selfishness and my entrepreneurial sympathies.

What could a person hope to achieve in four hours a week? Obviously, investments and farmed-out work done well can carry you very far. I would say, in fact, that many companies would benefit if CEOs consistently operated this way, treating their employees as investments and viewing themselves as the mouth of a river of work that flowed out and filtered through their organization while squelching the desire to become overly impressed with themselves as Lord of the Org Chart. But Ferriss does not propose we each become a CEO at the top of deep org chart - instead, his “organization” winds up looking like a very flat tree, with the FHWW practicer as taskmaster over whomever is willing to take on whatever menial money-making task the operator is farming out.

This necessarily, in my opinion, restricts the breadth of work that the Four Hour worker can achieve. Large projects take multiple layers of organization, and constant vigilance over the quality of the results of the process. Unless you’re sending billions of spam messages or operating a website that sells diet pills, or some other such principle-free and long tail-dependent proposition, you probably are working on a product about whose quality you are ultimately responsible for, and that just can’t be done by deferring your job to someone in Bangalore and jetting off to Fiji on Wednesday.

The upshot of the widespread practice of Four Hour Weeks will be an unstable inflation of menial web and errand boy tasks, which will eventually saturate the corpus of workers willing to do these jobs. Only then will we wonder why we’re having to work so hard all of a sudden for our Jamaican cruises and strawberry daiquiris.

And only then will we look with shame on the wretched decline of our ambition to achieve something great for the sake of belonging to a large human effort.