Can You Make the 4-Hour Workweek a Reality?

By Rebeldad Brian Reid

My secret vice is reading about productivity, so much so that whatever gains in efficiency I've seen are probably swamped by the sheer amount of time spent thinking about efficiency. So, I just couldn't resist the hype around the current hot productivity tome, The 4-Hour Workweek, which posits that anyone can work extremely short weeks while scooting around the globe.

From what I can tell, the book is aimed at a rather narrow subset of people who have jobs that can be done from anywhere, who don't need to be immediately available to anyone at work, and who have limited personal obligations (like, say, family).

Still, there appears to be plenty of food for thought, including this step-by-step plan for working from the road. The plan, essentially, involves coming up with an excuse to be out of the office for a couple weeks but volunteering to keep working (at the risk of a pay cut) from home. You then work your tail off out of the office, present the results and start slowly but surely arguing that you can work more permanently from home, a couple days at first, full-time later on.

It's not the most above-board technique -- it also involves purposely slacking off when you are in the office -- but it is an intriguing way to make headway in an office culture that is not entirely on-board with flexibility. Of course, author Timothy Ferriss makes a couple of assumptions about the workplace that may not be entirely representative of employers in general, namely that an employee can persuade a supervisor to judge them by their output rather than their hours. As I've said before, if businesses actually bought into that concept, it would be a very different world.

In addition, Ferriss' plan assumes that employees really do work as hard as possible when they're out of the office. But not everyone does their best work untethered, and almost every HR person seems to have a tale of a remote employee who simply disappeared. When I've written about these issues before, there has been a lot of pushback, and commenters have raised a question that I just can't answer: How can you tell the slackers from those that will thrive in a more flexible environment?

Still, I am in favor of people being allowed to work in the way that they work best. That doesn't mean remote will work for everyone, but it ought to be more of an option for more people. In an ideal world, it would be great if diligent would-be offsite workers didn't have to go through an extensive, mildly manipulative plan to get the chance.

Brian Reid writes about parenting and work-family balance. You can read his blog at rebeldad.com.

By Brian Reid |  May 17, 2007; 6:30 AM ET  | Category:  Flexibility
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