How Much Are You Willing to Work?
Striking a work-life balance was once an American obsession. Now all we want is work. Be careful what you wish for.
With the unemployment rate stuck in the double digits and with roughly 15 million Americans out of work, job security has become one of our most pressing concerns. Given this poor economic climate, workers need to find a way to become entrepreneurial and tweak the structure of their professional lives now more than ever. So says entrepreneur and author Timothy Ferriss in the expanded and updated 2009 version of his 2007 book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich.
In his book, Ferriss urges readers to check e-mail once a week, shun meetings, skip phone calls, and work remotely as much as possible. This ruthless management of one's schedule ultimately gives one time to travel and pursue hobbies, he says. When the book first came out in 2007, it became a bestseller, in part, because overworked Americans loved the idea of unplugging the treadmill of their jobs and finding a better balance between work and life. After the recession, things have clearly changed for the millions of Americans who are desperately looking for work of any kind. Ferriss recently spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nancy Cook about his mantra of the shorter workweek and its place in the new economy. Excerpts:
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Nancy Cook is a staff writer for Newsweek and Newsweek.com, covering business and economics. In 2010, she and a team of two editors won the New York Press Club Award for Best Business Reporting on the Internet for their seven-month multimedia project called “Jobbed: How America Works Now,” which examined the future of work, careers and the labor market as the country emerged from the recession.
Cook has written about the way the stimulus money affected a single neighborhood to luxury retailers thrilled by record Wall Street bonuses to accounts of rank-and-file employees whose careers were turned upside down by Lehman Brothers’ collapse. She also has reported on politics and economic policy for Newsweek.com’s national affairs blog, focusing on the intersection between Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
Prior to coming to Newsweek, she worked as a producer on the 2008 presidential campaign at National Public Radio and as an on-air reporter for WRNI, the Rhode Island NPR affiliate. There, her enterprise and feature reporting on a lackluster urban school system and a federal lawsuit against the state child welfare agency earned her two regional Associated Press awards. She graduated from Carleton College and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she now teaches as an adjunct professor.
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