The author of the Four Hour Work Week mainly aims at those who still have a job that they are sick of.  However, as I have considered throughout this series, a lot of them can be applied to self-employed Internet marketers. (For example, see my previous post about virtual assistants here)  You may think I’m crazy with this next post about wasting time but the more I think about this one too, the more I feel like it could just apply to us.

There’s a huge chunk of the book dedicated to wasting time and it revolves around one method of wasting time… e-mail. I was shocked when he recommended only checking your email twice per day at 12:00 noon and 4:00 PM.  I refresh my e-mail every 15 minutes, literally.  It’s a tab in my browser that does not get exited out no matter what. The more I think of it though, from a hypothetical stance, there is nothing that I deal with on a day-to-day basis that isn’t absolutely time-sensitive.  Sure, it speeds up business when we get can get IO’s and stuff back on time so I could always make exceptions for them but those aren’t usually day-to-day.

For those of you out there who have already eliminated one lifeline to the world, instant messaging, maybe this is the next step?  I don’t think I could quit both cold turkey especially when I’m procrastinating school work but Ferriss does make some suggestions for alternatives that definitely could work.  The first suggestion he makes is having an auto-responder on your business email that gives them an alternative form of contacting that is less time-consuming.  He gives a pretty good form to fill out to develop your own auto-responder but I think you guys get the idea. He recommends phone/voicemail but I would also recommend instant messaging if you work better multi-tasking.

Harnessing the power of voicemail is something that he recommends that I already do on a daily basis.  I almost never answer a phone call that isn’t already in my phone book no matter what.  This is probably a pretty reckless habit but I can’t stand being interrupted by an affiliate manager that keeps telling me bullshit I don’t want to hear.  I can always call them back and affiliate managers or network representatives, who account for the majority of my phone calls, ALWAYS send an email summing things up that I can skim for valuable content at 12:00 noon or 4:00 PM.  Another option you can do with voicemail is getting the messages transcripted and emailed to you.  I’ve never personally used any of these so I can’t recommend any but I know some people who do use this and use it effectively.

This is yet another concept Ferriss makes that at first glance from me, didn’t seem plausible.  Has anyone else implemented any types of these restrictions on email or instant messaging?  Have you noticed it increasing your productivity or hurting/slowing your business? I know Bryn has a friendly status message on his AIM that says “Business Only Please”.  It really makes me think twice before messaging him so that I don’t waste his time, heh.

As I mentioned in my post Working From The Virgin Islands, I have started reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.  So far I’m about 175 pages in and saving the rest for the time I’m going to waste in the airport because of the “Blizzard of 2009″ that has struck the east coast.  However, I’ve already covered a vast number of concepts that I’m thinking of making series about because the question is: How do they apply to Internet Marketing as we know it?

Sure, he started his business BrainQuicken, LLC and sold male supplements online but our business models are entirely different.  Ours are ever-changing and their are an infinite number of differences between our business plans and traditional e-commerce websites.  The first idea that I’ve been thinking about is the idea of having a virtual assistant.  I remember reading a blog post a while back by Justin Dupre that talked about how he wanted to hire a VA and he had a lot of very good questions about how much a VA could actually understand about Internet marketing…

I’m going to be honest, I thought it was ridiculous before but now I really want one! I feel like I do so many tasks that waste time during the day and having someone monitor IM’s and emails would free up a lot of my time for real work.  However, there is a downside… if you want someone cheap then you have to go foreign and with that comes trust issues as well as a language barrier most of the time.  Ferris recommends two sites in particular, I won’t reveal all the sources publicly because that’s probably not legal nor is it fair but he recommends to check out these two: B2k Corp and YourManInIndia.

I wouldn’t feel 100% comfortable having a VA pause and resume my campaigns plus the training for doing something like that might be a little excessive but I could see it working. If you could just specify if the CTR does not reach this level by X amount of impressions, do so and so. Something that simple is easy if you work full-time but if you are busy travelling or whatever you could have someone monitor your campaigns and perform tasks like this as long as you gave out very detailed instructions.

Having a VA monitor instant messaging clients, emails and your campaigns to a certain degree while sending you a daily report at the end of the day could free up a considerable amount of time.  I would love them to be a buffer to affiliate managers out there that hound my screen name or phone number.

One very interesting question that Ferriss asks in his book to determine whether you could consider a VA is as follows:

Each time you are interrupted or change tasks, ask, “Could a VA do this?”

I think the aforementioned tasks definitely apply to that question.  What are some other ideas/tasks that you think a VA could handle in your day-to-day?