The Lifestyle Architect - Timothy Ferriss

An architect is someone who plans, designs and manages the construction of a physical structure. In the New York Times best selling business book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss takes these concepts and applies them to his individual life - encouraging you the reader to do so too. Tim has created a lifestyle of minimizing his work time yet maximizing the work products created and marketed via his companies - which has translated into huge successes for this entrepreneur and best selling author.

A speaker, dancer, actor, writer, entrepreneur and angel investor, Tim Ferriss has created his life to fulfill his dreams and desires. From working almost 80 hours a week in a corporate job, Tim realized that he wasn't in control of his time, he was selling it - cheaply.

He talks about joining the New Rich who are: "The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility."

After a long-term girlfriend broke up with him, he set about consciously redesigning his career and personal life and engaged in multi step processes similar to the our abbreviated process below:

Step 1) Planing

Planning your life is the act of deliberately understanding your needs, strengths, weaknesses and goals. Define measurable objectives and set about to accomplish them using your time and other peoples time.

This entails specifically writing down things like your income goals, your personal time goals, the amount of hours you want to spend a week to achieve to your goals and the type of tasks you excel at or struggle doing.

Step 2) Designing

From these goals, you want to figure out what it will take to achieve them? Do you need training to become more productive? Are there tools that can make you more efficient - save you time? Can you find other people to do the work tasks at a rate cheaper than if you were to do them yourself? Will this save you time?

At a high level write down the start to end process to getting to where the goal is now to where it will be when fully accomplished. Chart out the various roles and high level processes necessary to achieving the goal.

Step 3) Managing

For each goal and its' high level processes, work from the bottom up to define all of the steps and activities necessary to accomplish the processes and collectively the goal. Group related tasks and activities together and outsource this mini project! Hire a virtual assistant to manage your mini projects (e.g. using asksunday.com) and outsource the projects or tasks using sites like elance.com or odesk.com to find freelancers willing to do the work (or even find workers in your local newspaper).

Author Bio: For more information about these and other concepts from Tim Ferriss, visit www.ferrissmashup.com and peruse the various sections to see the products and services he talks about in The 4-hour workweek book, along with blog posts and interviews of Tim Ferriss by people who are championing his methods.