Alternatively, I do think generally decreasing your e-mail diet is a great time saving tip.

That said, I think Ferriss operates on a number of assumptions, which should be addressed:
- no administrative overhead: outsourcing activities requires management and trust, as, incidentally, does teleworking from home. How can you be sure that your personal assistant is doing his/her job correctly, not to mention what jobs he/she should be doing? I’m sure Ferriss addresses this in some way in the book, but everybody has a different system and lifestyle and there will certainly be a warming-up period before all works optimally, which comes at a cost.
- from what I read on Ferris’s website, outsourcing also depends on cheap labour . When everyone outsources to India, I expect costs to go up. It’s a simple issue of supply/demand.
- is IT always going to be fairyland material? I understand the whole creativity-burst theory very well, I experience it everyday. But I believe that as certain knowledge shifts from the tacit to the explicit, that there are also ways to measure output, i.e. in lines of code, etc. As IT becomes more mature, so should methods of measuring it, and I’m sure it’s already happening in many companies.
- are all IT-people/knowledge-workers equal? Ignoring for a second that Ferriss appears to have become successful before he found his system, does that mean that unsuccessful people can implement the same system as easily? Not only are, in my view, learning costs ignored, but not everyone operates equally. Some knowledge-work, e.g. research, will depend on widget-output, as does IT-work, e.g. filling code vs. design.
- what are the consequences on society? I love how guru’s promote the individualistic lifestyle, but what are the effects of billions of people working only 4 hours/week, really? First of all, there is still widget-work to be done and who will do it? Prominent forecasters like Paul Saffo are predicting that the era for robots is still decades away, perhaps 30-50 years. I already mentioned the effects of shifting outsourcing abroad in the long-term.

That and many more are questions that I have about Ferriss’s work.

I actually disagree with your theory: I see work as blessing.

By the way, good organizations don’t account working hours but results. I work at Microsoft and no matter if I work from home or the Carribeans as long as I meet my commitments: some people arrive at 7am and leave early, some arrive at 10:30am and leave early, most people work normal hours + 1 day / week from home. I believe most great organizations don’t give a damn about working hours: what matters most is to get the job done.

Last thing, about commuting: the average commuting time worldwide is 40 minutes. 40 minutes x 2= 1 hour 20 minutes per day. Multiply by 5 or 6 (Asia) and you get around 7 hours per worker lost every week. Hence my call: teleworking is a real issue and enhances workers productivity. Imagine that people worked more instead of waisting time in public transportation and traffic! That would urge a 15% increase in productivity at no cost.