The Four Hour Workweek and Blogging

This week I am in Norfolk, Virginia for the last workshop on the East Coast and last night at dinner with the workshop hosts, the book The Four Hour Workweek came up in conversation.  I wanted to share a couple of my thoughts on that particular book here, because like most things in life, they're not cut and dry. 

I first read this book when it came out a couple of years ago, and it did change the way I thought about many of the processes in my business.  If this book were a wine, it would couple nicely with The E-Myth Revisited, with E-Myth being the meal (and if you are debating between the two, read that one first).  One of the important things to remember while reading The Four Hour Workweek is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  I thought about one-third to half of the book was pure nonsense (ahem, having your friends do research and tell you who and what to vote for because you can't be bothered to follow the news and issues yourself? Puh-lease.), but the valuable content in the other half made the book worth every penny. 

One of the core values of The Four Hour Workweek is that it stresses the importance of delegating so that you have time to focus on what you love to do.  Even if you have an assistant helping you for less than ten hours a week, it frees up those hours for other things.  For example, yesterday I was on a plane or in airports for most of the work day, but administrative tasks such as handling certain email correspondence and other things of that nature were still able to get done because a part-time assistant was taking care of them.

As it relates to blogging, assistants can help you manage your workflow much more efficiently. I do NOT advocate ghost-blogging, and do not think an assistant should be writing your posts as you, however, there's no reason they can't size and format photos for your blog's layout specifications, go through draft posts and add the appropriate links, schedule those posts to go live on certain dates and times, etc.  I personally have a "to-do" folder in Flickr that I upload images to, and then an assistant, who has the account password and full access, goes in and edits them and moves them to a "ready to blog" folder.  This process makes it very easy then for me to just pull the images and insert them where I need to in each post. 

Have you read The Four Hour Workweek?  What were your thoughts? Did it help you get anything off your plate that you personally didn't have to have your hand in?