Free The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss Page A

one eye and be sure to blink occasionally so you don’t look like a psychopath or get your ass kicked.
    In conversation, maintain eye contact when you are speaking. It’s easy to do while listening.
    Practice with people bigger or more confident than yourself. If a passerby asks you what the hell you’re staring at, just smile and respond, “Sorry about that. I thought you were an old friend of mine.”
Step II:
E is for Elimination
    One does not accumulate but eliminate.
    It is not daily increase but daily
    decrease. The height of cultivation
    always runs to simplicity.
    —BRUCE LEE
The End of Time Management
    ILLUSIONS AND ITALIANS
    Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.
    —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, pioneer of international postal flight and author of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince)
    It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.
    —WILLIAM OF OCCAM (1300–1350), originator of “Occam’s Razor”
    Just a few words on time management: Forget all about it.
    In the strictest sense, you shouldn’t be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type. It took me a long time to figure this out. I used to be very fond of the results-by-volume approach.
    Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. The options are almost limitless for creating “busyness”: You could call a few hundred unqualified sales leads, reorganize your Outlook contacts, walk across the office to request documents you don’t really need, or fuss with your BlackBerry for a few hours when you should be prioritizing.
    In fact, if you want to move up the ladder in most of corporate America, and assuming they don’t really check what you are doing (let’s be honest), just run around the office holding a cell phone to your head and carrying papers. Now, that is one busy employee! Give them a raise. Unfortunately for the NR, this behavior won’t get you out of the office or put you on an airplane to Brazil. Bad dog. Hit yourself with a newspaper and cut it out.
    After all, there is a far better option, and it will do more than simply increase your results—it will multiply them. Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.
    Enter the world of elimination.
    How You Will Use Productivity
    Now that you have defined what you want to do with your time, you have to free that time. The trick, of course, is to do so while maintaining or increasing your income.
    The intention of this chapter, and what you will experience if you follow the instructions, is an increase in personal productivity between 100 and 500%. The principles are the same for both employees and entrepreneurs, but the purpose of this increased productivity is completely different.
    First, the employee. The employee is increasing productivity to increase negotiating leverage for two simultaneous objectives: pay raises and a remote working arrangement.
    Recall that, as indicated in the first chapter of this book, the general process of joining the New Rich is D-E-A-L, in that order, but that employees intent on remaining employees for now need to implement the process as D-E-L-A. The reason relates to environment. They need to Liberate themselves from the office environment before they can work ten hours a week, for example, because the expectation in that environment is that you will be in constant motion from 9–5. Even if you produce twice the results you had in the past, if you’re working a quarter of the hours of your colleagues, there is a good chance of receiving a pink slip. Even if you work 10 hours a week and produce twice the results of people working 40, the collective request will be, “Work 40 hours a week and produce 8 times the results.” This is an endless game and one you want to avoid. Hence the need for Liberation first.
    If you’re an employee, this chapter will