I’m reading the book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. I had seen it on the bestseller lists and wondered if it was all hype.  However, when my husband gave it to me for our anniversary this past week, I dug in. (In our family of readers, books are favorite gifts, right behind good chocolate.) The author has some good ideas.

Word of warning: Getting down to a four-hour work week requires taking those ideas to the extreme and not everyone will be comfortable with that. To the author’s credit, he has supplied exercises for the reader to expand their comfort zone. Too bad the book doesn’t come with a coach. With each exercise, I can see a mine field of Gremlins, the internal voices that keep us in the status quo.

One of the ideas I am trying out is a "low information diet." Cutting down on ezines, email subscriptions, print magazines, newspapers, television, web-surfing. As a voracious reader, this is hard for me. The engineer in me wants to know more and more. My Achilles’ Heel has been with ezines. I bit the bullet and unsubscribed to over a dozen mailing lists. What I’m noticing is that the ones that I kept in place were ones that feed my creative spirit.  The rest were oriented to "how-to" or sales pitches.

A low information diet requires me to trust that:

• I have everything I need to know to create the business and life that I want. And if I don’t, I trust that I’ll recognize that and look for the information when I need it.

• Anything that I should know about, colleagues or friends will tell me. This covers the "not knowing what you don’t know" situation, relying on a smart network that does know. For example, when the book, A WHOLE NEW MIND came out, two different friends recommended the book to me.

I’ve decided to continue reading the Wall Street Journal and books, as both of these prime the pump for my creative muse.

The second idea is called, "Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal." Reading email just twice a day, saying no more often, and limiting meetings to 30 minutes or less. This is even more difficult for me. I’m afraid I’ll miss out on an opportunity. I’m afraid of being perceived as unresponsive. I’m afraid of coming across as a hard-ass.

What I know from being unplugged over the last three weeks is this:

• There are very few emergencies in life or work that require an immediate reply. The trick is in correctly setting expectations. My out of office reply for the last three weeks has indicated that I’ll respond to email on August 20 and if a reply is needed before that, to leave voicemail. Not a single person has emailed me and then followed up with a voicemail.

• Being able to spend time exactly as I want is how I want to live my life. These last three weeks, I’ve fully experienced the concept of "Do Only What You Love, Love Everything You Do." From physical exercise, to being outdoors, to spending time with family to writing and blogging about whatever has caught my attention or tickled my funny bone.  To integrate this into my life, post-hiatus, means getting rid of the things that are of low value but maybe expected or part of past routines and taking time for activities that feed my soul, feed my bank account, and feed my body. It means saying no more often so that I can say yes to what matters.

A friend likes to quote Samuel Johnson, "People need to reminded more often than they need to be instructed."  Unplugging and The 4-Hour Workweek have reminded me of what I know to be true and how I want to live.