I lived a 4-Hour work week

As many of you know, I keep track of all my time at the computer. I use a free on-line tool called Slim Timer, that lets me track what I’m doing every second, and run reports to see where I’m spending most of my time.

I looked at my reports today, and realized that for the past few weeks, I have been living the four hour week (less actually)! I spent a total of 4 hours and 3 minutes on the computer last week, and 45 minutes of that was writing these blog posts. The week before (when we had Internet in our room), I spent 12 hours 13 minutes on the computer, 7 hours and 42 minutes of which were working on my blog. The rest, (a little more than four hours), was spent “working” on my businesses and projects.

Not that this is some great accomplishment, but it’s a milestone some people set because of Tim Ferris’ influential book, The 4-Hour Work Week. If nothing else, it’s nice to know that the money continues to come in, and things continue to run fairly smoothly with four hours of work per week. That said, it’s a bit more stressful when I sit down to work these days, because of the stacks of e-mail I have to answer, and issues that I don’t have much time to resolve. So I do wonder how long I could keep it up, mentally. While here, I’ve had desires to spend more time working – it’s fun for me to build projects and create automation, and a couple hours a week just doesn’t seem like enough. But I am on vacation, so I’m going to relax. :)

Looking back, to make things run even more smoothly, I would have built up my programming team a little larger and trained them a bit better before I left. That’s where my biggest hang-up is right now, because there is a lot of development that needs to be done, and my programmers are stuck on a side project I’m having them work on. Usually, I’d do a bit of programming throughout the week on my main sites, but because I haven’t been programming, development has been stagnant for several weeks, and customers are starting to notice the the lack of new features. So I’m trying to migrate some programmers off the side project to start working on more pressing matters.

But things are running smooth enough, and there haven’t been any major hiccups with the business. I’m very grateful for that, and to have such great teams that keep everything going. The business couldn’t run without them.

The longest I’ve done without checking e-mail, however, is three days. It’s rare to have a problem that can’t wait three days to be solved, but I wonder if things would really be that different if I waited a week, or two or more. I’d probably need to let my teams know that I wouldn’t be checking mail for a while, but I think everything would still be okay. I don’t know if I’ll try that while here, though. I didn’t prepare for that before I came, so have some deadlines in the next couple weeks that I need to be on top of.

But I’m so happy to be here, and to be spending time with my family, and enjoying the warm weather, good food, and green trees, and friendly people. Today is our last day in El Valle de Anton, and tomorrow we leave for Boquete.