Our 4-Hour Workweek

Can you imagine banning email at work for an entire day? What would be the impact to the company? My hunch, and I think Tim Ferriss would agree with me, is people would get more done. The company's bottom line would improve.

Stop email for a day? Call me crazy! Throw rotten tomatoes at me. I know - I'm about ready to be barraged with emails complaining what a bad idea it is.

Well just try it. Try it like Intel.

Engineers at Intel in Santa Clara, California, recently announced a "Zero Email Friday" initiative, according to Jennifer Chamberlain of the Dallas Morning News.

Full story.

Pierre Cutler
Our 4-Hour Workweek

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Tim Ferriss on innovation:

"Lack of resources is often your greatest strength. How? It forces you to use new methods and test the options incumbents wouldn’t consider. It forces innovation. You have no other choice. Naivete, paired with unfounded optimism and complete ignorance, often helps here."

Startup entrepreneurs take heed!

Pierre Cutler
Our 4-Hour Workweek

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Brian Lash on Tim Ferriss:

"I became a fan of Tim Ferriss' philosophy a few months ago when I read his controversial bestseller, “The 4-Hour Workweek”. It's full of tips and tools for those among us looking to dive headlong into an automated lifestyle.

Here's what I believe to be his most important discovery: The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals. [emphasis added]

That's an important message for any entrepreneur."

Pierre Cutler
Our 4-Hour Workweek

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Today''s cover story in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times features Tim Ferriss.

After reading Mr. Ferriss's recent best seller, "The 4-Hour Workweek" (Crown), Jason Hoffman, a founder of Joyent, which designs Web-based software for small businesses, urged his employees to cut out the instant-messaging and swear off multitasking. From now on, he told them, severely restrict e-mail use and conduct business the old-fashioned way, by telephone.

"All of a sudden," Mr. Hoffman said of the results, "their evenings are free. All of a sudden Monday doesn't feel so overwhelming."

Pierre Cutler
Our 4-Hour Workweek

Illustration by Joe Zeff Design Inc.
Photo by Jodi Hilton

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Darren Rowse at Problogger.net offers tips on increasing your traffic through commenting on other blogs.

Click here for the details.

Pierre Cutler
Our 4-HourWorkweek

Posted by Pierre Cutler at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

While browsing on Get Rich Slowly today, I found a link to The Simple Dollar where Trent Hamm wrote a great post "The Ten Most Important Things I’ve Learned About Money and Life In The Last Year". Here are Trent's highlights:

1. Time is the one thing you can’t ever get more of.
2. Every time you spend a dollar, you sacrifice a bit of your future.
3. The simpler you make your investments, the better.
4. Finding ways to better manage your time is always worthwhile, but don’t make it an obsession.
5. Automate as much as you possibly can.
6. Find time to recharge.
7. The best way I’ve found to save money is to prepare all my food at home.
8. Keep track of things.
9. Connect with as many people as you can.
10. Forget the paycheck - do what you’re passionate about.

Simple, but useful advice, and a lot of Tim Ferriss leanings. Click here for the entire post.

Pierre Cutler
Our 4-Hour Workweek

Posted by Pierre Cutler at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This past Monday after the bell on Wall Street, I published an article on VMware Inc. (NYSE symbol VMW) on our sister site www.SacramentoExecutive.com. The essence of the article was the 316% gain in the stock price since the August IPO of VMware and the fact the company is led by a woman, Diane Greene. I tied in the Power Women 50 Index, a feature of another of our sites www.SacWomen.com, hoping to get to readers to the site.

Well it worked. Better than I thought it would. Within a few minutes of publishing the article, I noticed a spike in readership on both Sacramento Executive and SacWomen. Through our tracking software SiteMeter.com, I found we were getting several readers from the VMware stock page on www.finance.google.com.

After a brief investigation, I realized that the Google Finance service has a blog roll of recent postings, unique to each stock symbol. It so happened that my VMware posting made it to the top of the blog roll. What a nice surprise. The link stayed on the first page for over 24 hours and during that time traffic doubled from the normal daily volume.

Nice find. I plan to try it again with a few more articles featuring stocks from the Power Women 50 Index.

Pierre Cutler
Our 4-Hour Workweek

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