In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss explains how to avoid working 8 hours a day for 40 years for a small income, and instead enjoy small mini-retirements and make lots of money.

While his approach might be difficult to implement for us scientists who are stuck doing experiments for the rest of our lives, the book gives great tips that can be used by everyone, even lab rats like us. Maybe it can even help you make extra money on the side during your free time. So which tips could you apply right now to your life as a scientist?

1. Apply the Pareto Principle
This is my favorite one. Tim suggests using Pareto’s 80/20 Principle, which states that 20% of the things you do produce 80% of your results. In other words, you are probably wasting a lot of your time not working on the 20% you should really focus on. So if you don’t have time to do everything and you have to choose, make sure the tasks you eliminate are not part of that 20%. Similarly, you can identify the friends that bring 80% of your happiness, the employees who produce 80% of the results, the clients who provide 80% of your income and the tasks that result in 80% of your productivity.

2. Understand the Parkinson’s Law
Whether you’re a lab manager, a PhD student or a technician, productivity is critical to your success. Tim explains in his book that according to the Parkinson’s Law, the activities you do expand to fill the time allotted, which can considerably reduce your productivity. For example, if you have to work 8 hours a day at your job, you’ll expand your activities to fill that time. However, if you were given only 4 hours per day to do your job, you would focus on the most important activities and complete them in that time. So to increase productivity, concentrate on the most important activities and set a timeframe to complete them. You can start with the target of completing two significant activities each day.

3. Limit distractions
Do not multitask. As mentioned above, and according to Tim, it is more productive to pick the two most important activities you should do each day, and do one at a time. Also, avoid interruptions from colleagues and friends, by telling them you’re busy with something urgent, turn off your phone, check your email trice a day, etc. Try to limit as much as possible the number of distractions. Finally, automate as much as you can, by empowering your employees and colleagues or by removing yourself from experiments that can be performed without you.

4. Take mini-retirements
If you’re a PhD student or a technician, explain to your boss that you can work better from home – no noise, no interruption, no meeting – no distraction. If you’re a lab manager, your lab will survive even if you work part time, or if you take mini-retirements from time to time. Use Internet technology do what only you can do in an hour or two a week.

Now what should you do with the extra time you get from this burst of productivity? Tim suggests finding your life purpose by asking yourself what it is really that excites you and focusing on doing just that. Oh! one final tip from the book: don’t accumulate, eliminate. Most of the stuff that we accumulate does not bring happiness. Instead, it causes additional burdens of time, money and energy.

So are you ready to try these tips? Have you read the book? What did you think about it? Let me know in the comments below!

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