Jul 10The Tim Ferriss Follow Up

• By Dan Griffey in News,
• No Tags

Regular blog readers will remember that I was lucky enough to get to meet Tim Ferriss a few months back. Tim is the author of the best-selling book ‘The 4-hour work week‘ that has recently been ‘officially’ published in the UK. His book and website cover the value of time management, outsourcing and ‘escaping the 9 - 5′.

It’s an excellent book and a must read, and meeting him really adds to the whole understanding. He’s a great guy.

I should have written a blog about how great the dinner was (thanks to Ryan Carson for the invite), but things have been busy here with the launch of www.divvoted.com and some great client sites.

However, yesterday Mr. Ferriss turned up in a video interview with Robert Scoble, and reaffirmed how key some of his principles are to the ways in which we run our businesses.

At the core of his thoughts, is the measurement of the value for the work you put in. Being an agency, this is key. We measure, and bill, time from our creatives and developers, and have fixed a value for this.
This value reflects not only on our work, but also on the way our clients work with us, and there are some key points that could help in the saving of time. The problem of course, is how to educate, but hey, that is why we have a blog(!!).

You can watch the full video below the jump, but here are the key points:

• Make things better. Decrease the inputs and improve the quality of the outputs. Simplify (and in his case outsource) the objectives and the ways that they are delivered.
• Clearly define the objectives. Spend more time on this and the whole process will be much much quicker. In his words: “Massive action without clearly defined objectives is a form of laziness.”
• Email. Use it wisely. Learn how to use email effectively and for the correct purposes. Do not generate email for the sake of it. Restrict it, and value each email, thus making each email really matter. The same goes for checking / acting on email. Don’t sit at your desk checking email simply to ’simulate forward motion’; if you are doing this, you are treading water.

There is so much more in the book and the video. Check it out yourself, we’ll be thinking more about the purposeful use of time, and the tools (email / IM / Basecamp) we use with our clients.

Here is the full video from FastCompany.tv