I read 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and it's helping me work less and find more time in my day for living. Here are my 4 biggest takeaways.

• Alli Hoff Kosik is a freelance writer who recently read "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss.
• She said the book recommends mini retirements as opposed to never taking big breaks in your career.
• The author is also a big fan of Parkinson's law — schedule how much time something should take.

I haven't had the opportunity to speak with author Timothy Ferriss one-on-one, but I can only imagine that when he landed on the name for his 2007 book "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich," he suspected that the title alone would be enough to tempt overworked readers to grab a copy. 

It worked on me. As a freelance writer, editor, and podcaster, I often feel as though I'm trying to make time work for me, to create more of it, and to make it make sense. 

When I left my corporate job in 2016 to see if I could make it freelancing full time, I thought it would open up my days. I failed to account for the fact that I would find myself coordinating multiple employers and deadlines. While I love my work most of the time, the magic formula for maximizing my income per hour is still elusive. 

It turns out that Ferriss isn't just trying to sell books with a snappy title: He really does lay out a series of helpful principles and steps that enable readers to cut back their weekly hours to — yes, that's right — four, while still bringing in substantial cash. 

Having read Ferriss' book only recently, I don't feel quite ready to begin cutting my work hours way down. Still, I found the book helped me reframe my own (at times martyr-adjacent) perspective on my work.

Perhaps cutting back on my seemingly boundaryless working hours is not as impossible as it often seems in my most exasperated moments of self-employment. Using the principles from the book, I hope to cut back over the next six months — if not to four hours a week, then at least to four hours a day.

I especially appreciated the following takeaways from "The 4-Hour Workweek."

Periodic 'mini retirements' are a worthwhile alternative to a single retirement later in life 

In his book, Ferriss lays out a bleak reality in plain terms: When you hoard all of your joy for the end of your career, you run the risk of not being able to enjoy the fruits of your labor. In other words, people are often too old or tired to engage in travel and other activities by the time they hit retirement age.

Instead, he recommends taking "mini retirements": short breaks of three to six months throughout your career during which you relocate or otherwise take your pedal off the proverbial gas of the daily grind. By building mini retirements into your schedule, he argues, you eliminate the desperate need for vacations and the depressing longing so many of us feel for a retirement that's decades away. 

While mini retirements aren't practical for everyone — because of financial constraints or caretaking responsibilities, among other things — I think they're more doable for most people than we may think, especially as so many industries are transitioning into remote and hybrid models.

This concept was a good reminder for me of the importance of allowing for real breaks, which feels easier to wrap my head around than working just four hours a week. I'm teaching a college course this semester, and I'd like to make it a goal to take a full week or two off when the course is over, even though it will mean stepping away from all of my client work. I wouldn't have had the foresight to prioritize this kind of break so far in advance without Ferriss' advice.

You decide how much time something takes

Ferriss says we're conditioned to pack increasingly more tasks into our days to feel more productive. But this isn't helping us get any closer to the ultimate goal he's set out for us: to work less and live more. 

Alternatively, Ferriss suggests that we build our work time around Parkinson's law: This theory states that a task increases or decreases in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to how long we plan for it to take. To put it simply, a project will require exactly the amount of time you schedule for it. 

Thinking in terms of Parkinson's law forced me to turn what I know about time management completely inside out by letting the number of hours I want to work dictate how things get done — rather than the things I need to accomplish dictating the number of hours I work.

I've started assigning specific time blocks to tasks on my to-do list and giving myself an artificial deadline for each one. This has helped me maintain focus and block out the time wasters that tempt me when my schedule feels more open-ended. When stacked back-to-back, these blocks of time save me cumulative hours.

Notifications aren't the only distractions out there

I know that phone notifications distract me from the (read: any) task at hand. Like everyone else (or so it seems), I've been working hard to recalibrate my relationship with my phone so that it doesn't occupy hours of my time every day. 

"The 4-Hour Workweek" brought to light many other consistent distractions that drain me of valuable time that I hadn't thought of, such as the setup time that's required for most tasks. To that end, Ferris suggests batching similar types of work to limit multiple setup periods. 

For example, since reading "The 4-Hour Workweek," I've observed that calling up and organizing the dozen-or-so tabs I might need to complete any given project can be sneakily time-consuming. As an alternative, I've been making an effort to think through the tabs and screens I'll need for a task, then grouping like tasks to streamline things.

He also argues that our interactions with other people can slow us down. While I'm hesitant to write off the humans in my life as distractions, I did take to heart his recommendations about how to teach others to engage with you in an efficient manner. If a friend or family member — or even a coworker — wants to have a conversation during working hours, Ferriss encourages us to eliminate all nonwork topics. Even the shortest of irrelevant digressions can spiral into something bigger and more time-consuming.

By being clear with the people around us about what we will and won't talk about while we're on the job, we can condition them to curtail distracting interactions on their own.

Add life after subtracting work 

If the primary goal of Ferriss' book is to teach readers to limit the number of hours they spend on work, its secondary goal is to encourage them to increase the number of hours they spend doing things they absolutely love.

This model doesn't suggest that you take all of the time you used to spend in front of your computer and redirect them to the couch: Ferriss prompts his audience to think intentionally about the things that bring them joy — travel, passion projects, exploring new experiences, etc. — and fill the void they experience without work and deadlines with them. 

This is a good-mood and mental-health booster in the short term, but in my personal experience, it has the secondary effect of starting a positive cycle of sorts. The more I feel that bump in my mood and mental health, the more I see the value of cutting back on my work hours to get a little closer to that four-hour benchmark, which creates more free time for energizing, affirming activities like spending quality time with loved ones, restful travel, and bucket-list-caliber experiences.