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I've long been a fan of Tim Ferriss and his best-selling book The Four Hour Work Week. The book describes several methods to minimize and optimize life activities in order to create free time, although sometimes you have to deal with ...

The “Art of Speed” panel at SXSW: Evan Williams, Cali Lewis, Mike Cassidy, Tim Ferriss (Photo: vantan)

I had a blast organizing and moderating the “Art of Speed” panel at the incredible SXSW conference a few months ago. It was standing room only (at least from what I could see), and I learned a ton from some of the best at creating monster hits.

Here is the recording for those of you who missed it. It’s about 60 minutes total but can be listened to comfortably in little chunks.

The description:

The Art of Speed: Conversations with Monster Makers

This session will focus on how to accomplish huge things in little time. From near-overnight IPOs and massive cult followings, to instant NY Times bestsellers and runaway viral campaigns, learn tricks from those who have created monsters of buzz, fame, and fortune…

The panelists:

Evan Williams - co-founder Twitter/Obvious
Evan is the founder of Obvious Corp, a San Francisco-based web product development company and co-founder of Twitter (my Twitter here — full post on uses/abuses of Twitter coming soon), a micro-blogging and social networking site. He was also a co-creator of the software used as the basis for Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing blogs. Blogger was acquired by Google.

Mike Cassidy - Benchmark Capital (Name unfamiliar? Click here.)
Mike has been the Co-Founder and CEO of three start-ups: Xfire (acquired by MTV for $110M), Direct Hit (acquired by Ask.com for $500M), and Stylus Innovation (acquired by Artisoft for $13M). Mike has a BS and MS in Aerospace Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Cali Lewis - host and producer of GeekBrief.TV
Cali is the host of GeekBrief.TV, a three to five minute video podcast, covering new technologies, consumer electronics, and Web 2.0 projects. Along with her husband, Neal Campbell, they started GeekBrief.TV on December 23rd, 2005. Five months later, they began producing the show full time with support from PodShow Network and advertisers. Cali has co-hosted Call For Help with Leo Laporte, and appears regularly on MSNBC and The Lab with Leo Laporte.

Tim Ferriss (that’s me)
Please note that I was asked to also be a panelist and not just the moderator, so I’m participating in the discussion, not being a mic hog :)

Hope you enjoy it!

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Confession: I Outsourced My Life
Forbes, NY - 14 hours ago
The term "outsourcing your life" has come into common currency of late, since so much attention has been paid to the likes of Tim Ferriss and his ...

Yes, The World's Still Round
Forbes, NY - 14 hours ago
The world is not flat, and (apologies to The 4-Hour Work Week author Tim Ferriss) an assistant in India is not going to reduce your work week that much ...

Confession: I Outsourced My Life
Forbes, NY - 10 hours ago
The term "outsourcing your life" has come into common currency of late, since so much attention has been paid to the likes of Tim Ferriss and his ...

Yes, The World's Still Round
Forbes, NY - 14 hours ago
The world is not flat, and (apologies to The 4-Hour Work Week author Tim Ferriss) an assistant in India is not going to reduce your work week that much ...

... information about time management and making money as possible. The reading list: Jim Cramer - Real Money (currently reading) Robert Kiyosaki - Who Took My Money Robert Kiyosaki - Choose to Be Rich Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Work Week.

Book Review "The Four Hour Work Week" > >* FileMaker Book Give Away > >The Newsletter will be Released this afternoon, so be sure to subscribe! > > >In Kindness >Stephen Knight >http://www.fmwebschool.com >800.353.7950 ...

I read a blog post by Tim Ferriss - author of the excellent book The Four Hour Work Week (4HWW) - about Ferriss’ reactions to comments by fellow personal productivity author Mark Hurst that criticise his methods and those of David ...

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

I once asked Po Bronson how he beats writer’s block. His answer was “write about what makes you angry.” It works like a charm.

If I had writer’s block, this quote from a recent Entrepreneur magazine blog post would surely make the words flow like water. What follows is an example of guru fatigue and an overview of some misconceptions and principles of Bit Literacy vs. Getting Things Done (GTD) vs. 4-Hour Workweek (4HWW)…

“Timothy Ferriss is focused on outsourcing and not checking e-mail so often. The last time I checked, the amount of e-mail you get is not a function of how often you check e-mail,” [Mark] Hurst says. “David Allen’s approach is a bit of a throwback to a pre-internet age when having complex flowcharts, filing papers and creating tickler items was relevant…”

“People need to learn how to let the bits go and do a better job of managing their to-do lists. Digital overload isn’t a function of too much e-mail; it’s a product of not managing your action items appropriately,” Hurst says.

Fortunately, I speak fluent sarcarm (“Last time I checked…”), but I’ll respond to the above without it to spare us all the irritation.

First, I’d like to observe four facts

-I know Mark is highly intelligent, hence my surprise and disappointment.

-Mark is the author of a book called Bit Literacy, which also serves as a sales tool for his paid web-based to-do list software. Much of his advice depends on its use.

-I have read both David’s GTD and Mark’s book in detail. For those of you familiar with how I index books and take notes, below is the one-pager from the 180 pages of Bit Literacy. It’s worth the read if you are an avid Mac user, enjoy reading about things like file extensions (I do), and are willing to use his software subscription.

Index and references from Bit Literacy

-Despite the disproportionate attention paid to them, personal outsourcing and selective ignorance are just two chapters out of 16 in 4HWW. There is a lot more to information management and intake control in 4HWW (interruption prevention, internal policies, scripts with superiors, etc.) than “batching” e-mail.

Second, in defense of GTD

I’ve had a number of dialogues with David Allen. I do not view his approach as an outdated “throwback to a pre-internet age.”

Though David refers to desk-based inboxes, tickler files, etc. in certain parts of GTD, the broader concepts are frameworks for proper filtering of inputs (“open loops”) and definition of outputs (“next actions”), regardless of technologies used.

Let us remember that good technology is a practical solution to a real problem, not a collection of whiz-bang features. The tech references in Bit Literacy have fewer applications and less shelf-life than GTD principles, which sometimes (but not always) manifest with paper and file tools.

GTD is, however, a bottom-up approach to time management that — used in isolation — can lead to becoming very efficient (doing things well) but decreasingly effective (not doing the right things). Readers on this blog have suggested reading 4HWW and 7 Habits prior to implementing GTD. The results and approaches are complementary rather than conflicting, but order is important.

Eliminate before you optimize.

(Credit: Whereswilliam)

E-mail: Why Frequency Begets Single Points of Failure

Now, a few theories with supporting evidence to refute Hurst’s assertion that “the amount of e-mail you get is not a function of how often you check e-mail”:

-The more you check e-mail, the more e-mail you send. This is the reason some investment banks (I was introduced to one of largest at the Web 2.0 conference in 2007), as well as forward-thinking tech companies, have policies — complete with punishments for non-compliance — limiting inbox checking to 2-3 times daily. Do people send more or fewer e-mail once adopting Blackberries or iPhones? Even the smartest users will abuse tools to the extent that immediate self-validation is possible.

-The more e-mail you send, the more e-mail you receive. Robert Scoble has told me, as have other digerati, that he receives an average of 1.75-2 messages in return for each single e-mail he sends. This does not scale. The more often you respond to e-mail, and the faster you do so, the more the volume of e-mail compounds. E-mail becomes IM and, using a medium designed for one-to-one communication, processing bottlenecks are inevitable.

The interviewer observes of Mark in the same piece:

Hurst must be doing something right. When I sent him an e-mail about being interviewed for this article, he responded within 20 minutes.

Is responding to all inquiries on a moment’s notice really success? I would argue it is a reactive mode that precludes life, at least the type of life I want to have.

Watts Humphrey, who retired from IBM in 1980, once led Big Blue’s software development. His group “who had never before made a delivery schedule, did not miss a date for the next two and a half years.” Here is a persuasive list of bullet points from one of his presentations (courtesy of Scott Rosenberg, founder of Salon):

-Unless you are independently wealthy, you must work to a schedule
-If you don’t make your own schedule, someone else will.
-Then that person will control your work.

Mark is highly intelligent and I’m sure he’s a nice person. I just take offense at his tone and blanket statements about people who are attempting to do the same thing as he: help others overcome digital overload. In the end, I think his comments come from a mistaken view that there is only room for one version of what is inherently “personal” productivity.

To all readers, I thank you for allowing a self-indulgent rant, but there is one overarching point to this little diatribe:

Remember to think twice before not being nice. Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

###

Did you enjoy this little dittie? If so, please click “buzz up” or digg below for good karma and stronger fingers. Be like Bruce.

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Faydra Rector-Sargent: Stay motivated and educated
Red Bluff Daily News, CA - May 28, 2008
Some of my favorites are The Science of Success by James Ray, The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris and anything on the planet by Abraham-Hicks Publications ...

Boy, there's a lot of work involved in getting a new live video show going. Robert and I are fortunate to be working with Revision 3, a team that's proving to be real pros up and down. Their overwhelming lesson to us is to keep simple and focused. So many new features that we are itching to start, will be started over the next few months. Meanwhile, between assembling bar chars for our set, Robert and I have very much focused on content. We are trying to bring you guest who can give you action

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With all the hoopla around “outsourcing your life” started by Tim Ferriss (author of The Four Hour Work Week), I came across another post on wisebread.com along the same lines. But what about outsourcing as a business? It’s pure art in the making. Artists by nature are rarely business-minded people. Entrepreneurial talent and artistic talent utilize different parts of the brain. I wonder if it is one of the reasons you see talented artists (be they visual artists, musicians, or –ahem – wri

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i read the last chapter of the four hour work week...and decide there and then that i am going on a mini retirement trip...i'm going to owu falls in kwara state,atleast i get to go to ilorin for the 1st time, see the highest waterfall ...

There is something mischievously satisfying about mixing a Fight Club quote about consumerism with a statement about your own market. Now I have finished congratulating myself on how clever I am, let's consider what the implications are ...

In this continuation from Part 1, Josh Waitzkin further explores the “multi-tasking virus” and learning. At the end of this post, he also responds to readers’ comments and elaborates on his own experience.

Bio: Josh was the subject of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer and an eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth. He also holds a combined 21 National titles in addition to several World Championships in martial arts, and now trains hedge funds and other companies in high-end learning and performance psychology. I became friends with Josh after reading his book, The Art of Learning, which presents his learning strategies and approach to skill acquisition.

###

I know what it is like to be disengaged. In fact, the crisis that played a large role in ending my chess career was rooted in becoming disconnected from my natural love for learning.

Throughout my youth, I had been a creative, aggressive chess player. I loved the battle, and wild, dynamic chess felt like an extension of my being. Then, in my late teens a coach urged me to play in the opposite style, his style of quiet, positional, cold-blooded prophylaxis. Instead of cultivating my natural strengths, he boxed me into the cookie cutter mold he knew. In time, I lost touch with my intuitive feeling for chess, and without an internal compass I foundered in the swells of fame and high-pressure competition.

I see myself in the eyes of so many kids today. Too many primary, elementary, and high schoolers are being boxed into the mold of conformity required by big classes, competition for grades, tests with multiple-choice questions.

The first grader who leaps to his feet when he figures out the math problem is diagnosed as ADHD and medicated to sit quietly with the class. Young learners have immense pressure to perform, to get good grades, but no one is listening to the nuance of their minds. They feel suppressed, they are suppressed, and by the time students get to college, they have become disconnected from the love of learning. Then they are asked to read 1000 pages in a week and skimming is the only solution. Many of the students who actually were engaged in the Gandhi lecture, the ones who wanted to learn more than to shop, were taking notes on their computers in a frenzy, researching events online while Dalton described them, typing every last word of the lecture. But Dalton had already supplied them with a detailed course packet with all the relevant dates and facts. His classroom is an environment for reflection, introspection, and letting resonant themes sink into your being. Unfortunately, to these college students, the notion of delighting in the subtle ripples of learning is almost laughable. Who has the time?

The societal implications of this educational crisis are huge and the issue must be addressed creatively.

We cannot afford to lose a generation to apathetic disengagement. Part of the responsibility lies in public policies like No Child Left Behind, the standardized tests that are turning education into a forced march, and a culture that bombards us with so much stimulation that it is difficult to know what to focus on. But part of the burden also lies with parents, teachers and coaches, and with students themselves. I recently tried to persuade two smart 11-year-olds to give up video games for three weeks. One agreed to the experiment and also agreed to send me a description of how the process felt. The other simply couldn’t imagine life without the PSP, even for a day. Here was an eleven-year-old self-proclaimed incorrigible video game addict!

This story has a happy ending. In the final month of classes, Dennis Dalton discussed the issues of multi-tasking with his students, and many responded. Last week when I went back to hear the final lecture of Dalton’s Barnard career, there were only a few kids surfing the internet—nearly all the students seemed riveted. Many told me they were relieved to have turned off their computers and relaxed into listening. A number of my old classmates came, and afterwards we threw a party for our teacher. After four decades inspiring college minds, he has decided to nip apathy in the bud by teaching younger kids. He will start with high school, but Dennis Dalton, one of our culture’s greatest minds, dreams of teaching kindergarten.

Afterword from Josh:

Thanks to all of you for the powerful responses. I want to address a couple of the issues raised.

We obviously live in a world that bombards us with information, and we feel the need to respond to stimulus as it comes in. The problem with this is that we get stretched along the superficial outer layers of many things. I believe in depth over breadth in the learning process. Let’s say we have three skills to learn. The typical approach is to take them all on at once. It is much more effective to plunge deeply into one, touch Quality, and then transfer that feeling of Quality over to the others. A martial artist, for example, should internalize one technique very deeply instead of trying to learn 10 or 15 superficially.

This approach engages the unconscious, creative aspects of our minds, and we start making thematic connections which greatly accelerate growth. It is also important to point out that deep presence is required for a state of neural plasticity to be triggered—our brain does not re-map effectively when we are skipping along the surface.

As for Jose’s question—“How do you remain focused all the time?”—you don’t. It’s useful to build triggers for the zone, so you can slip into it at will. Then, once we know we can attain a state of intense concentration, we are free to let it go and recover.

I learned this lesson in my late teens/early twenties trying to stay concentrated for 8 hours a day, two weeks at a time in world chess championships—I would burn out. When I started taking mini breaks, my endurance and quality of focus surged. Stress and recovery should be our rhythms, and physical interval training can be an excellent tool for improving mental recovery. One of many problems with multi-tasking is that the frenetic skipping leaves little room for relaxation, and thus our reservoir for energetic presence is constantly depleted.

Tim, now I think it’s important for us to home in on the root of the problem. Multi-tasking, in my opinion, is just a symptom of a broader cultural disconnect that emerges from too much rigidity and too little creativity in our educational and corporate worlds. If we love what we are doing, odds are we will want to focus on it. So the solution is two pronged—help people discover the love, and arm them with strategies to zone in when they want to. The second I addressed above. The first, I will tackle below:

The path to mastery and to engagement is highly individualized—this is a truism that much of our educational system ignores. Those who succeed at the elite levels of any discipline have built relationships to learning around subtle introspective sensitivity. They understand how their minds work, and both cultivate strengths and take on weaknesses through their unique natural voice. They have learned to open communication between their conscious and unconscious minds, and construct repertoires around moments of creative inspiration. They have built triggers for their peak performance state, learned how to funnel emotion into deep focus, turned adversity to their advantage as a way of life—and they have done all of this in a manner and language that feels natural to them. That is how they seem so unobstructed, so fluid…they are just being themselves. Like children.

My road from innocence to alienation to a renewed childlike love for learning is the catalyst for my writing, my educational nonprofit, and my commitment to helping kids shine. As parents, teachers, and coaches, we must reach children when they are young, nurture their natural curiosity, help them understand their minds. Teachers have a responsibility to listen first—is a child auditory, kinesthetic, or visual? Are they naturally extroverted or introverted? What excites them? What gets their creative juices flowing? How can we take that unique potential and help it grow? How can we help our child enjoy learning instead of being paralyzed by external pressures?

In my case, I had to let go of a life’s work and start over. It wasn’t until I left chess behind and became a beginner again, meditating, studying philosophy and psychology, and ultimately taking on my second discipline, Tai Chi Chuan, that I began to regain a feel for the art within the learning process. I had to release myself from the desperate need to live up to the expectations of others, and in its place grew presence to a natural creativity that had been smothered by baggage. I started discovering connections again, chess and the martial arts became one in my mind, and I could transfer my ideas, my feeling of Quality from one to the other. Learning became an expression of my being. After years of slogging, I was being true to myself once more. Hopefully, the lessons gleaned from the painful end of my chess career can help others avoid similar pitfalls—and perhaps my rediscovery of a passion for learning holds some solutions to the crisis we face in our schools.

A note for teachers and parents: I am researching the effect of video games on young minds. If you think it might be a healthy experience for your kids, please ask them to give up video games for two or three weeks, and write me about the experience at TheArtofLearning(at)gmail(dot)com.

Thank you!

-Josh Waitzkin

For more: Josh at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Length: 50 minutes

• The Multitasking Virus and the End of Learning? Part 1