What ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ Means for Musicians

Hey all,

So I recently finished reading Tim Ferris’ awesome bestselling book ‘The Four Hour Work Week‘ and I now feel obliged to share this with you all – as not only has it been incredibly inspiring for me, I think that the lessons to be learnt in this book are highly valuable to musicians.

My Summary of The Four Hour Work Week

1. Have a Low Information Diet- Tim argues that we are all taking in far too much information than we need to be – the news we watch, magazines we read, and many of the people we speak to will never benefit us in life and so it is just wasting our time. He applies an 80:20 rule where 20% of the information we take is useful, where as 80% is not, the key is to identify that 80% and remove it completely.

This is as applicable to musicians as anyone, but I think noticing the 20% of valuable information is certainly the key here – instead of looking at fancy new gear, checking out music videos, and browsing Facebook, invest your time learning and actioning the things that will help you to succeed as a musician.

2. Outsource Your Work – In reality, we as musicians spend so much time doing things that we don’t need to be doing. I know I have spent days in the past putting together spreadsheets of music industry contacts, sending demos, and designing artwork when I could have just paid someone else to do it at a cost that is less than what the final product (or my time) was worth. A good example would be the list of UK music venues on our music resources page – if you tried to manually collect the location and contact details for all of the music venues n the UK it would take forever, whereas you can download them here for £8.99!

The point is that you only have so many hours in a day, and there are only so many tasks that you NEED to do, many of the task you do do someone else could be doing for you, so free up your time by outsourcing them and only doing what you need to do.

I would recommend websites like Fiverr for outsourcing small tasks like artwork generation, video editing, data mining, amongst other things. For outsourcing web projects I recommend oDesk, and for large scale data mining I recommend Mechanical Turk (although it is only available in the US).

3. Improve Your Productivity – It’s a common misconception that if you work more then you get more results. Tim urges that we focus on effectiveness over efficiency, why sit at a desk for 5 hours getting gigs when you could get more gigs in less time by being more productive.

The trick to becoming more productive is to limit distractions, increase motivation and work in short bursts. I recommend writing on a post it note every time you go to work on your music what it is you plan to do – maybe it’s ‘contact 20 music promoters, film a video interview and get some new artwork made’, then reduce every potential distraction you can, remind yourself why you’re doing it (I find having a collage of pictures of things you want to achieve by your computer helps) and finally give yourself a short amount of time to do it – you’re more likely to get all of the above done in 2 hours, than say 6 because you will force yourself to be productive.

4. Create a Passive Income – Tim states in his book that you need the freedom and independence of an information business to be truly free and able to enjoy the four hour work week lifestlye. This is totally possible for musicians – create a product range that you can sell online and leave breadcrumbs in the form of videos, articles, and die hard fans driving people to your products so that even if you do take a two week vacation to the Bahamas, you’ll still wake up in your hammock every morning with a nice little wake up message from Paypal!

Tim Ferriss has trouble defining what he does for a living. Depending on when you ask this controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer: ‘I race motorcycles in Europe’, ‘I ski in the Andes’, ‘I scuba dive in Panama’, ‘I dance tango in Buenos Aires’. He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the ‘New Rich’, a fast-growing subculture that has abandoned the ‘deferred-life plan’ and instead mastered the new currencies – time and mobility – to create a new way of living. Why wait a lifetime for your retirement when you can enjoy luxury now?

I hope this has been as useful to you as it has been to me. Feel free to drop me any questions in the comments below. Also, for a list of other books I recommend reading for musicians checkout this page on recommended music books.

Marcus

Image Credit: Practicalowl

Tags:4 hour work week, Musician motivation, Musician Productivity, Tim Ferris