The 4-Hour Work Week

Timothy Ferriss' bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, is by no means a book grounded in the gospel. That's not why I read the book. I read this book because I've found that many secular writers who write within this growing genre of time efficiency/best practices for navigating a non-stop information overload culture, have some helpful things to say.Our world has rapidly changed this past decade with the emergence of instant information transfer and access. Many of us don't know how to navigate this instant information world, a world that's different from the one we grew up in. When I was a young teenager I connected with people in person and over the phone. I gathered information through books and my local library. As a 13 year old I knew nothing about the devices I use today to connect with people and gather information: the internet, the cell phone, email, blogs, etc.There's very little Christian literature that deals with these themes. Richard Swenson's, Margin, is a good read on time management/technology boundaries from a Christian perspective, but it was written before the advent of most of the technologies listed above.  And so I've sought to listen to what several secular authors have to say about these matters. David Allen and his GTD method has proved helpful in my own life. Thomas Friedman's analysis of our flat world was insightful and equipping. And now Timothy Ferriss has added another voice to the conversation with his insistence that many of us need to work smarter, not harder, and need to cut out the excess information and belongings that clutter our lives.Ferriss' book is by no means a great book and so I don't commend it to you as a great book. But this is a helpful book. Scattered throughout its pages are a few nuggets of wisdom that are worth considering. My biggest takeaway from the book is Ferriss' notion of "a low information diet," a practice of being more discerning in how much information and what information you digest on a daily basis. And my favorite quote from the book, a quote that certainly squares with the Scriptures:"Pride is stupid."