At last year's RailsConf, one of the keynote speakers was Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4-hour Workweek. While I really didn't enjoy Tim as a keynote speaker, I was intrigued enough to pick up his book and I'm happy I did. While I'm not enjoying 4-hour work weeks just yet (nor do I aspire to), there were a lot of useful lessons in the book that I've been able to put into practical use.

Let me start off by saying I'm not looking to fully automate or outsource my career in the hopes of working 4 hours a week - I really like what I do and the people that I work with. That being said, I did appreciate many of the lessons with respect to efficiency that the author preaches.

I now find myself trying to automate or outsource more of my routine tasks, things I plainly don't like to do and that I'm not uniquely talented at, and that affords me me more time to concentrate on the things that I like doing and that I'm particularly good at. It sounds simple, but it's a hard lesson to actually learn. Perhaps the most relevant lesson I took from the book though revolves around e-mail and the frequency in which I'm now checking it.

Tim Ferriss checks his email once a week and for only one hour - what an absolute dream come true! When I read that, I occurred to me how much time I spent each day checking, or waiting for the next "critical" email to come in. My average daily email volume ranges between 100 and 150 non-junk emails. Of those 100 or so emails, less than 10% really need my attention. The rest tend to be emails that I'm simply copied on or made aware of. My problem is that I cannot stand inbox clutter - so I'd regularly check my email (3-4 times per hour) to weed out the emails that really didn't concern me. Sure, I was keeping my inbox clutter free, but I was constantly interrupting my actual work! This was making it impossible for me to actually focus on the what I like to do (checking email isn't what I actually like doing)! I use to get my best work done early in the morning and late and night, when I wasn't being distracted by email. What I finally realized was that it wasn't the email distracting me, but rather it was me allowing myself to be distracted by email.

Thankfully, I have a new approach to managing my email life. I now check email two times(ok, ok, sometimes I cheat and check more often!) during my work day - and I give myself 30 minutes each time to do so. I keep my email program closed now so that I don't hear the new email notification noise that had me previously trained to immediately stop what I was doing to clear out the clutter. I might not be able to send the immediate, instant reply that people have come to expect from me, but I haven't noticed any push back on this. I'm now getting more and more quality, focused work done during the typical work day - and to me that's far more valuable than an instant email reply.

So, should you buy this book? Maybe. Should you be checking your email less frequently? Definitely! Try it out, I'm convinced you'll find yourself getting more done in less time - leaving more time for the mini-retirements Timothy Ferriss so often talks about!

Bryan Mahoney - Bryan is Dynamo's Director of Technology, continually breaking new ground evaluating, developing and guiding our sites and webapps, & a pillar in Dynamo's client service front. Co-author of 2 early books on the integration of ColdFusion and Flash, he is an expert in database driven content management and design. Bryan now principally rides Ruby on Rails.