What The 4 Hour Work Week Actually Looks Like (My Actual Life) - Practical Advice

What does the four hour work week actually look like? Hey, my name is John Jonas and I have been working the four hour work week since about 2008 and that's not true. I don't work four hours a week. I work about 17 hours a week. But I make a seven figure income and I've been doing it since about 2008. And the reason I don't work four hours a Week is because it wasn't enough for me. I was there and I was working about an hour a week and I just got bored. There was only so many times in a day I could take my kids to the golf course and like I needed something to do and so I need something to exercise my brain and I need to keep myself busy and but so I get a lot of people that ask me like what do you actually do for work? And I thought I'd tell you. First of all, the weekends are completely off. I don't do anything on the weekends, I don't respond to my emails, I don't do anything on Saturday or Sunday. So weekdays I get up at about 7 o' clock and I help get my kids to school. I make them lunches, I make them breakfast, I read my scriptures. Sometime between 7 and 9 or 9:30 I usually do some yoga. Then around 9:30 I'll come to work and I'll do an hour of work. I'll check our project management system and respond to people who need help. I will check my email maybe and respond to urgent things. And then usually I'll go for a bike ride with my wife. And so we'll be gone for a couple hours. Or in the winter I'll go skiing with my wife or I will go and do some good, go to the gym and do weights. Actually I go to the basement at my house and do weights with my wife. We have a full gym in the basement. Or I'll go trail run or whatever it is. I'll usually do a bunch of exercise in the middle of the day. And I love this because there's very few people out in the middle of the day. So if I go into the backcountry to ski, there's nobody out. If I go into a resort to ski, there's nobody there. If we go to ride mountain bikes, there's nobody there. It's really, really amazing to be out in the middle of the day. So then I come home, eat lunch, shower and then I usually go back to work for like two more hours. It's one o' clock and I go to work until three o' clock when my kids are home. And that's given me about maybe three hours of work in the day. And so now some days after my kids get home at 3 o', clock, I'll go back for another hour. Some days I won't. Some days I'll get two or three or four hours in that time. But then usually I probably average three or four days a week that I work, that I actually work. So last week we took off on Wednesday and went to Las Vegas and rode our bikes Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, the week before, we went out of town on Thursday and Friday. And so I didn't get any work done on those days. And then this week I think I'll be home all week and I'll get five days of four hours or five hours of work in each day. And typically that's what the four hour work week looks like for me. I spend a lot of time with my wife, I spend a lot of time with my kids, I spend a lot of time riding my bike, I spend a lot of time exercising, I spend a little bit of time working and the work that I do. And here's the critical piece of this. So what I figured out was if there's something that I'm going to do, I shouldn't be doing it like someone else should be doing this. And there's little exception to that. One thing is I'm standing in front of the camera right now and this is my, this is my one hour today is recording. I recorded six videos today. And so for one hour I will stand in front of a camera where I'm the only one who really can create my content. I can have someone else create content also. But creating content is a really big deal. And especially when it's personalized content that only I could create or only you can create, that's a good use of your time. What I don't do is I don't edit the content, I don't upload the content, I don't post it, I don't create videos, social media posts from it. I don't put it on YouTube, I don't get links, I don't write descriptions, I don't do any of that. I record and then I set them all to upload and I walk away and I go out and exercise. In fact, I need to go eat lunch right now because I have a trail run with my wife scheduled. So the other piece of this that I do is I think, and that's the most important part of What I think is living the four hour workweek. So if there's any process in your business that could be done by someone else, it needs to be done by someone else. If there's a process in your business that can only be done by you, I mean, I would say find another process. If the road you're going down is like, I'm going to sell coaching. Well, if that coaching involves you doing the coaching, you're trading time for money and don't do it. So it's something that I won't do. For me to do coaching, I will create a training program and I'll record the program or I'll write the content or I'll record videos and then I'll sell that recorded content as my coaching, which is what I did with one Va away, my one va away training, where I will, I'll walk you through the entire process of hiring a va. Now, I'm not going to personally talk to you as you go to hire a VA because that doesn't fit any of the four hour workweek is me talking to, I mean, thousands of people who use one VA away then I would have no time left. So I'll record it myself. And so if you're going to do a training program or a coaching program, think about how you could do it without setting yourself up. So I'll tell you one time, Russell Brunton and I went to speak in Australia together and he sold his product and he did really well. And then I sold mine. And afterwards I sold mine. I scanned all of the pieces of all the sales sheets that I had and I sent them to Dan, my business partner. And Russell was there when I did this and that was it. I was done. I didn't have anything more to fulfill. And he said he's told me since this was a really big eye opener for me, like I got to stop selling myself because I was done fulfilling and now he had months of fulfillment to go and do. And obviously he makes way more money than I do, but I work a lot less. And so that four hour work week, to me the time is more precious than the money. I make a lot, I make enough money, it's plenty. But that time, the time is more important. Anytime you may go to make a decision, and this is the key to me for working the four hour work week is when you go to make a decision about should we pursue this opportunity. Well, who's going to have to do the work? Is it you or could someone else do it? If it's you don't do it. Don't pursue that opportunity. There's plenty of opportunities where you don't have to be the one doing the work, that you can get someone else to do it and you can be the CEO. And so the most important thing that I do in my business is I think, I think through problems and I create solutions and I assign them to someone else to do. I think through processes that we want to improve or I think through things that we want not doing well, and then I create a solution to it and I talk to someone else, or maybe I ask someone else for the solution and I might tweak it. Or I'll say, yes, hey, that's great, let's go do that. Or I'll say, hey, let's do that, but let's modify it like this and yes, go do it. Or if there's something like, hey, we need to be doing this thing, well, let's hire someone else to do it. And I'm going to do it the first time with them and teach them how to do it and they're not going to do it right, they're not going to do it how I would have done it. So I'm going to do it with them again, then they're going to do it better and then I'm going to do it with them again and then they're going to do it better. And then the fourth time or fifth time or sixth time, they're going to do it right, and then I'm not going to do it ever again. And to me, that's like pretty important. If you want to live the four hour work week, you got to offload the tasks that you're doing. That's what the four hour workweek looks like for me. I have VAs who do basically everything for me. I don't post on social media, I don't look on social media. I don't have social media on my phone. I don't have Facebook or Instagram on my phone. I don't touch our websites, I don't touch videos, I don't touch YouTube, I don't touch our paid ads, I don't touch Facebook ads or Google Ads. I don't touch our customer service. I don't touch, I never see any of these things. I get a report every once in a while on each of these things. How are we doing here? What's going on there? What can we improve here? What are we doing different here? Or I'll see work that we're doing on these things. I'll see a YouTube thumbnail and say like, hey, let's do this better. But I don't create it. I don't get involved with it. I don't upload it, I don't put it on YouTube. I don't, I don't do any of that stuff. So. And obviously this doesn't happen overnight. This is a process I've been doing. I hired my first VA in 2005. So it's been a long process. And I started with one person doing one task, which is what I highly recommend you do. Start with one person. Get something off of your plate that they can do for you. Something that you do spend that costs you a couple hours a week. Get that thing off of your plate. You'll be amazed at how that frees up your time and your ability to outsource other things, to accomplish other things or to go ride your bike or whatever it is that you want to do. Go play golf in the day or go do some yoga or whatever it is. Freeing up that couple hours is really amazing. And then it'll change your perspective on like, hey, maybe I actually could get down to the four hour work week and maybe I could change the way we do things. Maybe instead of being the person that every customer that we have wants to talk to me, maybe I can hire someone else and put them in front of it and get most of the questions answered so that get some of the questions coming to me instead of every single question coming to me. So my name is John Jonas. I've been doing this for a long time and I've worked at it, I've worked hard at it. And to the point where I still work hard, I just work a lot less and I try and work smarter. I will help you do that with my book, the Outsourcing lever. It talks about my lifestyle in here and it talks about how I hire VA's to do what I do and how you can hire people to do the things that you need to get done and how, who to hire and why and why the Philippines and how to find them and how to weed them out and how to hire a great one and how to manage them. The whole process in my book is free@outroundinglever.com It's $7. You pay shipping. Pay the shipping because I already bought, I just bought a thousand copies of it to send to you and I want to send it to you. So go to OutsourcingLever.com get the book and hire a VA, start getting some of that time back so that you can work towards the four hour workweek SA.