UX Design - Mentor & Author.
10 Dec, 2022
Tim Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, a self-help book that suggests ways to streamline your work week so that you have more time for leisure activities.
Ferriss’s book has some useful information for UX designers who want to make the most of their time and be more productive. This book has become more relevant during the post-pandemic times. By using the concepts in this book, a UX designer can design a rich and rewarding lifestyle.
The 4-Hour Work Week Approach
Through this book, Tim promotes a mobile lifestyle and advocates for the “80/20 principle” in business and life. He also explores the idea of “lifestyle design” which is designing your life to be the way you want it to be.
His approach is a sharp contrast to how most of us live our lives. Most of us are born in a small town or village, and we move to the nearest city for employment. There we spend the rest of our careers and make it our home. Once a year or so, you travel to new places for about a week or two. That’s where our exploration of the world ends.
Tim challenges us to design a life where we not just travel for a few weeks, but live in foreign places for months together, without disrupting our work lives.
Again, he asks us if we can eliminate office commute and avoid all the politics that come because of going to an office everyday. Imagine how much time and money we can save if we eliminate the need for travel within the city for work.
The work-from-home (WFH) culture that has been speeding up during the pandemic has made the principles that Ferriss advocates even more relevant. And he championed the then radical ideas more than 12 years ago.
The 4-Hour Work Week – For UX Designers
So, why I’m suggesting this lifestyle design for UX designers?
UX designing is one area that’s become highly remote worker friendly. All the UX tools are now cloud-based. By reading this book, you’ll learn how to combine creativity, productivity and lifestyle design together.
Do you see where we’re getting with this?
You don’t have to sit in your hometown and work for your employer remotely. You can go beyond. You can travel to different places, live there for a few months and still be delivering your work responsibilities.
This can give you immense freedom. You can see new places, enjoy local food, experience new cultures, immerse your self in nature and work on your own projects. A balance between work and leisure this is the ultimate goal.
As a UX designer, your work will improve when you understand the behaviour of different people, learn their culture, grapple with different languages.
Become a Better UX Designer
In this work from home environment, the need for the ideas in this book is more important than ever.
While you travel to fresh places and take in their culture, you can still deliver your work responsibilities with ease. You’ll be able to work smarter and make more of your free time.
There’s another aspect to this. Many companies around the world are hiring remote UX designers. So, you can live in Chennai or India and work for a company in London or the US. It’s the gig economy, and a lot of UX designers are getting hired without having to move out of their hometown.
When you get the freedom of location, you experience the freedom of time. You no longer have to built your life around a 9-5 job. You can design your own lifestyle and create meaningful work.
You’ll also learn new things naturally and this fuels your design work.
In the book, Tim proposes the acronym DEAL to capsule his ideas.
- D stands for Definition: Clearly state what you want.
- E stands for Elimination: Cut out the non-essentials.
- A stands for Automation: Rely on technology and tools.
- L stands for Liberation: Explore the world, live in foreign places.
So, if you’re a UX designer, The 4-Hour Work Week is a must-read book. It will not only make you look at life differently and challenge some of your beliefs, but also help you design a lifestyle of freedom.
This is why I highly recommend Tim’s book to UX designers. Read it, follow the principles and you’ll be able to design a lifestyle that is both productive and a joy to live.
