Tim Ferriss’s Most Neglected (But Powerful) Advice
I’ve been following Tim Ferriss since 2008, when a friend turned me on to The 4 Hour Workweek. At the time, I was a recent college graduate who didn’t know what to do with my life. Tim had only recently stopped being a stressed out, overcaffeinated supplement bro and become a semi-enlightened bestselling author.
Although the title of his first book sounded like a scam, I devoured it. There was an authenticity there, in that first book, that promised much more than an easy life, sipping caipirinhas on a beach while occasionally checking your bank account. On a deeper level, Tim was writing about the same question I was obsessed with: the question of how to live.
I’ll admit it: I never achieved the four hour workweek. My first attempt at an online business was a flop. I ended up taking a very different path: I followed my interest in psychology to attend grad school and become a therapist. I now have a 20 hour workweek and in my spare time, write about mindfulness and personal development.
At the same time, I’ve watched over the years as Tim has gotten interested in many of the same things I was: meditation, psychedelics, trauma therapy. I’ve cheered Tim on as he’s done his own healing work and shared about it with the world.
When I talk to friends about Tim Ferriss, or read discussions of his work online, I sense that people tend to focus on the shiny, sexy aspects of his work, things like psychedelics, crypto, and the ketogenic diet. But as a long-time reader and fan, I believe that some of Tim’s most important tools and techniques are chronically neglected. In this article, I hope to bring them out of the shadows so you can start putting them to use.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Past Year Review
Okay, most people in the personal development space have heard of annual reviews by now, but as far as I can tell, it was Tim who first popularized this idea.
Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, which usually fail, the idea is to go back over your past year and look at what worked and what didn’t. What can you learn from your experiences? What could you do more or less of, in order to be happier, healthier, and more successful?
Here’s Tim’s format:
On paper or in your note taking software of choice, create two columns: “positive” and “negative.”
Go through your calendar for the past year, week by week. (Chris: I use Apple Calendar for this. I’m a visual person, so I like being able to see my weeks at a glance and I use different colors for work, personal, and “highlight” activities. If you don’t have a calendar, you could also go through your journal for the year. If you don’t keep a calendar or journal, it’s kind of hard to do a past year review, and also—how on earth do you manage your life?)
For each week, note the people, activities, and commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month, and put them in their respective columns.
Once you’ve gone through the whole year, look at your two columns and do an 80/20 analysis. What 20% of each column produced the most powerful or reliable emotional peaks—positive or negative?
Take the most powerful positives and schedule more of them for your next year. That means putting them on your calendar, booking tickets, making plans with people, and prepaying for activities. As Tim says, “It’s not real until it’s in the calendar.” Then take your most powerful negatives and put them on a “Not To Do” list somewhere where you can see them for the first few weeks of the year.
I’ve done Past Year Reviews (PYRs) for the last 5 years now. They’ve given me increased clarity about what aspects of my life are working (contributing to my happiness) and which are not. Sometimes the answers are surprising. In fact, those are my favorites: the counterintuitive insights I would not have anticipated before putting them down on paper.
Those insights have also led me to make major life decisions, including everything from quitting my job and going to India and Nepal for 3 months in 2018, to starting my private practice in 2021. I’ve had a number of friends ask me about those decisions and the insights that led to them, and I always point them to Tim’s PYR practice.
Fear Setting
What are you putting off out of fear?
First introduced in The 4-Hour Workweek, Fear Setting (as opposed to goal setting) is Tim’s take on an ancient Stoic exercise called premeditatio malorum, or premeditation of evils. I like to call it “The Power of Negative Thinking.”
In Fear Setting, you focus on a decision or course of action that you want to take, but are putting off out of fear. Then, you imagine your worst case scenario, the things you’re afraid will happen, in excruciating detail. Finally, you ask yourself what you could do to prevent those worst outcomes from happening, or to mitigate them if they do come to pass.
To this, Tim adds two more questions: What might be the benefits of a partial success, or even an attempt? Many times, even if we fail to achieve our goals, there are worthwhile outcomes that can come with trying. For example, if I had failed at starting my private practice, I would still have learned a great deal about entrepreneurship and running a small business. I could have learned from my mistakes and used those lessons to make my next venture more successful.
The final question is, what is the cost of inaction? Often, we focus on the worst imaginable outcomes of taking action, while ignoring the cost of failing to take action, of staying in place. In this step, Tim asks us to consider the consequences (financial, emotional, etc) of taking action 1, 3, and 5 years into the future. For example, what would have happened if I had stayed in a stressful job where I was burned out and starting to have health problems? At one year I might have been fine, but at 5 years? It would not have been pretty.
You can watch Tim’s TED Talk about Fear Setting here. And here are Tim’s slides for working through this exercise.
Low Information Diet
“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, as quoted in The 4-Hour Workweek
Tim writes: “Lifestyle design is based on massive action—output. Increased output necessitates decreased input. Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside your influence.”
If this was true in 2007, when 4HWW was published, how much more so is it now, in 2022? Since then, we’ve seen the rise of smartphones, social media, “fake news,” and bots, not to mention the attention-devouring monstrosity that is TikTok.
But the principles of the Low Information Diet (LID) are timeless. When I first read 4HWW in 2008, I tried the one-week media fast and had one of the most productive weeks of my young, slackerful life. Today, though I’m not on a strict media fast at the moment, I still incorporate the same basic principles, for example by distraction-proofing my phone.
Here are the official steps of Tim’s Low Information Diet (LID):
An immediate one-week media fast: no news, magazines, audiobooks, podcasts, or talk radio. Music is allowed at all times. You get one hour of TV (pleasure viewing) and one hour of fiction (pleasure reading) before bed. In the original version, no non-fiction books are allowed except 4HWW, which you would presumably be reading as you did the fast.
Start asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” Tim recommends focusing on “just in time” vs. “just in case” information.
“Practice the art of non finishing.” Just because something is worth starting, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worth finishing. Quit things that aren’t moving you toward your goals.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can’t possibly do that, I need to keep up with the news/post on Instagram/maintain my Snapchat streak” remember that this exercise is supposed to challenge your assumptions. Are those activities really as vital to your life or your business as you think they are? I challenge you to try the LID it for a week and find out.
Productivity for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy
In 2013, Tim posted an article on his blog entitled “Productivity Tips for the Neurotic, Manic Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me).” It’s my single favorite thing he’s written. It’s also the best productivity advice I’ve ever read, especially as someone who’s struggled with anxiety and depression. I made a shortened version that I printed out and keep on my refrigerator door to this day, and I’ve given copies of the same handout to my therapy clients who struggle to get things done.
As Tim mentioned in his TED Talk, he’s suffered from bipolar depression throughout his life. It runs in his family. At one point, he even contemplated (and planned) suicide. More recently, Tim revealed that he experienced trauma from sexual abuse in his childhood. But Tim has also managed to become a famously productive, prolific, and generative individual. How has he managed to accomplish so much? This simple routine is the answer:
Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. (Chris’s note: this includes your phone. Consider using Airplane Mode at night so that you don’t wake up to a dozen notifications first thing in the morning).
Make a cup of tea and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Tim recommends pu-erh tea and I have to agree, although any kind of tea is wonderful.
Write down the 3-5 things that are making you most anxious or uncomfortable.
For each of the 3-5 items, ask yourself “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day? “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?” (Note: Tim seems to have drawn these questions from The ONE Thing, an excellent productivity book by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.)
Only consider the items you’ve answered yes to for at least one of these two questions. Choose ONE.
Block out 2-3 hours on your calendar to focus on that one item for today. Let everything else slide.
“TO BE CLEAR” (Tim’s caps) this is one, uninterrupted block of time to focus on your most important item for the day.
If you get distracted or side tracked, don’t beat yourself up. Just come back to this one task. I like to think of it like a mindfulness meditation, where whenever you get distracted, you just gently come back to your one focus.
Physically move for at least 20 minutes per day, outdoors if possible.
Follow a diet that prevents wild blood sugar swings. Tim still follows the Slow Carb Diet he introduced in The Four Hour Body back in 2010. (Chris’s Note: if you or a loved one have a mental illness and are interested in how a nutritional approach might help, check out Tim’s recent interview with Chris Palmer, MD of Harvard Medical School).
Schedule at least one group dinner per week (ideally with at least three people) by 5 PM on Monday.
Every day, take a minute to call or email someone and express gratitude. This can be a quick text or voicemail. (Chris: As noted in Andrew Huberman, PhD’s podcast episode on gratitude, the strongest happiness benefits actually come from receiving or witnessing gratitude, not just making a list in your journal. So Tim’s recommendation has strong benefits, though perhaps mainly for others).
Note: Items 9-12 are from a different blog post, Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide. Tim added these to the productive routine above to help anyone struggling with depression or other mental health issues. I’m including them both because they represent a more complete version of the routine above, and because I think everyone would benefit from incorporating them.
Although this system may seem simplistic to the productivity fetishists out there, it encapsulates the most important and effective advice from all the best productivity and time management books I’ve read over the years.
More importantly, this routine works. The reason it works is because it’s not in denial about human nature. Human nature is to get distracted, procrastinate, and avoid working on things that are important but uncomfortable. Tim’s advice takes our human frailties into account and prescribes the remedy.
Full Stack Ferriss
I’m about to tell you how to combine all the tools in this article into a super-effective protocol for changing your life. If that sounds hyperbolic, it’s meant to :) But I’m also not kidding. If you follow this protocol, you have a high likelihood of making significant life changes that will have a positive influence on both your productivity and your wellbeing.
Start with a Past Year Review. If you’re reading this article on the day I publish it, you have about 4 weeks left in the year. Now is the perfect time to reflect back on your year, run an 80/20 analysis, and identify some actionable changes you’d like to make. If you’re reading this at another time, it’s not too late. There’s no reason you can’t reflect on your past year now.
Pick a big change you’re thinking of making, but afraid to take action on, and run it through the Fear Setting exercise. What’s the worst thing that could happen? What could you do to prevent or mitigate those risks? And what are the consequences of not taking action?
Immediately go on a Low Information Diet-style media fast for at least one week. This will give you the focus you need to start taking action.
During your media fast, start using the daily productivity routine “for the neurotic, manic-depressive, and crazy.” Get up at least an hour before you have to look at a screen, have a cup of tea, and use pen and paper to identify your 3-5 most important tasks for the day. Pick ONE, and block out 2-3 hours of undistracted focus time to work on it. If you do this every day for a week (or even 5 days), don’t be surprised if you make more progress than you have in months, or possibly all year.
If you find this article helpful, don’t thank me, thank Tim. But if you want to read more content like this, you can follow me on Twitter @chriscordry and subscribe to my free, weekly newsletter, Mindful Mondays.
Cheers,
Chris
