“The 4 Hour Work Week!”

No, I’m not doing a review of Tim Ferris’ “The 4 Hour Work Week,” 17 years after it’s original publication. But if you haven’t read it, it’s a fascinating read.

I’m imagining the end game of all the productivity and efficiency hacks I see filling my feeds. My feeds are filled with expert advice about how we become much more efficient, how we get more done in the same amount of time or less.

For years, there have been hints, tips, technologies. How we can launch 1000s of “hyper personalized emails” in 15 minutes or less. How we leverage dialers to make 100s of dials a day. How we reduce our selling cycle. How we leverage technologies to reduce the time we spend on administrative tasks. How we reduce the time we need to spend doing research on our customers. Closing techniques, discovery hacks, objection handling gimmicks, proposal generation in 5 minutes, and more.

There are 1000s of technologies offering ways to cut the time we had to spend in doing our work.

And AI has amped it up to another level. Not only does it help us save huge amounts of time, it can actually take over lots of our work, so we don’t have to do it anymore. It will send emails to customers and manage the responses. It will schedule a meeting for us and provide us the notes before we go into the meeting. We are even seeing AI Agents conducting the meetings for us, so we don’t even have to show up.

It’s stunning how much time we free up!

But then, I pose the question, “What are you doing with that time?”

When I do this, I get blank stares. I used to think they were reacting to a silly question. But I’m now discovering, the stares are blank because they don’t know.

I suggest, “Are you spending more time with customers? Are you able to see more customers? Are you able to pursue more qualified opportunities? Are you able to dig deeper into the problems with the customer? Are you helping them more effectively navigate the buying process? Are you selling more?”

I get blank stares. Sometimes there is a lot of hand waving. Sometimes, they are doing more of the things they had hoped the automation and AI would do—“I’m sending more emails, I’m on social, I’m doing more outreach…..”

But then I ask, “Are you producing more business?”

My thinking is that if they are getting all this time freed up, they ought to be producing more business.

Then I look at the data. At whatever volume we produce, the outreach continues to produce less. Win rates continue to plummet, the percent of people achieving their goals continues to decline, now less than 40%.  Customers don’t want to meet.

So I’m perplexed!

If we are freeing up so much time and these technologies do more for us, wouldn’t that suggest we are producing better and better results. More people should be achieving their goals. Our people should be able to sell more. We should be able to grow our revenue and our business. We should be able to drive our profitability.

And while some organizations are doing this, the data continues to show fewer and fewer individuals and organizations are doing more or doing better.

So it seems, that all that’s happening is that we are saving time.

Maybe the 4 hour work week will become a reality!

 

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  I tried retraining the model about 3 times.  It’s OK, I’ve discovered when I start introducing external references like the book, it gets distracted.  Enjoy