4 Hour Work Week Book Review

I recently bought and read the The 4-Hour Work Week after I saw it on Top 10 Best Selling Books This Week under the business section multiple weeks in a row and it is seriously changing the way I think about life. He talks a lot about maximizing the use of your time and only doing something if it’s going to result in you making a decision, taking action or get you to your goals quicker. Consider how often you check your e-mail/facebook/blogs/news websites every single day. Now think about how productive any of it is. It was really eye opening to realize that I could get away with only checking my e-mail twice per day and still survive. In the past I have been an e-mail checking machine checking it obsessively every 30 mins or so. A lot of times I check it, see that I got an e-mail, read it and then say “meh, I’ll reply later”. This is a tremendous waste of time because later I’m just going to logon re-read the e-mail and then reply, why not just do it once?

Same thing with checking my ATMs status online. I used to check them up to 10 times a day to see how they were doing. Guess what? Waste of time. I now check them once in the morning to see if they have enough money in them to make it through the day. If not I have to go to the bank and make a withdrawal to restock them that day. Otherwise, I don’t need to check them again tomorrow because even if I do find out that one machine is empty at 8pm at night for some reason, the bank is closed by that time and I have to wait til tomorrow do anything about it anyways.

With any activity there is a required setup and unsetup time. By batching activities you eliminate all of these extra and unecessary setup/unsetup times. So all extra the logons/logouts are eliminated, double reading/prep times are eliminated. I’m pretty sure if Timothy Ferriss could batch his showers and eating habits he would (taking seven showers on Monday for the week, or eating one giant meal instead of three every day) because it would save him loads of time.

He also talks a lot about the 80/20 rule. How 80% of the productive output is a result of 20% of the input. You can apply this to virtually anything, but applied to poker I would bet that 80% of your winings come from 20% of your sessions and 80% of your losses come from 20% sessions. I haven’t done a full analysis of HEM yet which I plan to do, but if I’m pretty sure that playing less, but more often on peak times like nights and weekends, and just quitting tough games is much better in the long run than trying to play six hours a day five days a week like I have strived for. See Jason’s blog post for further proof. Right now I just feel lazy, as I haven’t been playing when games aren’t good and have just been playing less in general, but I’m going to be doing a lot of thinking in the coming weeks on how I can tweak my schedule to work smarter instead of harder in this area.

One of his applications for the 80/20 rule was customers. The general accepted philosophy is that more customers is always better, right? Wrong. He found that 80% of his profit came from 20% of his customers and 80% of his headaches came from 20% of his customers. Guess what he did? He got rid of a lot of customers that were causing him headaches and not making him much money. Is he completely maximizing his earn? No, but he’s maximizing his hourly wage and increasing his happiness EV and that’s what it’s all about. Who cares if you squeeze that last two cents out of a customer if you have to jump though hoops to get it. Forget it.

Pokerwise this month has been a big rollercoaster. I’m currently up a few k, but was up like 7k at one point and down like 7k at one point. I had a brief limit hold’em coaching session with BigBadBabar listed on the 2+2 coaching page and he’s really helped me out and for cheap too. He was only $100/hr and after answering all my questions and watching me play for an hour I’ve turned around most of my $40/$80 limit hold’em losses into wins. I think my big problem was playing too passively in general and not checkraising midpairs, not cbetting enough, and not raising the turn often enough with top pair weak kicker. I think O8 is very similar to limit hold’em and I’m hoping that since I’ve improved in the former it will help with the latter as these two games were definitely my biggest losers in the 8 game thus far.

ATM machinewise I’m also doing well this month. It’s halfway through the month and I’m on pace to clear about $400 net profit which is excellent and if this keeps up, puts me on pace to have everything paid off in less than a year. I’ve been contacting a few places to get new spots for machines but no bites so far. Gonna keep trying. Wish me luck.

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Hopkins student kills intruder with samurai sword