Readers of Small Business Booster may be interested in a piece over on Syntagma taking up Timothy Ferriss’s idea of a “low information diet” to boost personal productivity and quality of output :

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Read the whole article here.

More than half of small business owners think that their enterprises are harder to run than three years ago, according to a survey commisioned by T-Mobile.

A third believed customers, suppliers, and even co-workers now demand faster response times. This has increased the pressure on smaller businesses, which often have fewer resources than larger outfits.

Dead time, defined as time wasted by travel and meetings, cost small concerns around $120,000 (£60,000) a year.

Head of T-Mobile’s business marketing said, “The rise of the internet has given rise to a ‘want it now’ culture — customers expect an immediate response to every inquiry. This is forcing smaller firms to operate in a different way and use all the tools at their disposal to be more productive and efficient”.

Small Business Booster suggests a careful reading of : Take a Nap! Change Your Life by Dr Sara Mednick, previously reviewed.

An afternoon nap may seem like a luxury to most small business owners. We tend to associate it with lazy folk who live in hot climates and eat dinner around midnight.

However, a new book by Harvard University sleep expert Dr Sara Mednick, Take a Nap! Change Your Life, describes the the practice of taking a nap as a “lifesaving habit”. She claims that snoozers make fewer mistakes and enjoy “boosted brainpower”.

One of her experiments involved one group taking a nap, another group drinking a mug of coffee (200mg of caffeine), and a control group taking a placebo.

They were then given a series of tasks, including typing and spatial skill tests. The coffee drinkers performed much worse than the placebo takers, while the nappers performed best of all. So the common assumption that coffee will keep us going through the day is simply not true.

Dr Mednick, a psychologist and research scientist, has accumulated a lot of evidence that a simple siesta in the afternoon is the best medicine for a more productive work life. In addition, people who sleep for 30 minutes at least three times a week had a 37 percent lower chance of a heart attack, according to a lead researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health.

In another study, recently published in Nature Neuroscience journal, the Dr Mednick put 30 well-rested people through the same set of tasks four times in the course of a day, starting at 9am through to 7pm.

Performance dropped by 50 percent in those who stayed awake all day. However, the volunteers who took an afternoon nap kept up their performance throughout the day.

NASA has also made a contribution. Tests conducted by them show that astronauts who took a brief snooze doubled their alertness even if they were not tired before the nap. They also increased their work productivity by at least 13 percent.

The ideal time to nap apparently is between 1pm and 3pm which enables the most restful kind of sleep pattern for boosting performance.

Small business owners need to keep on top of their game since they rarely have a backup team ready to take over at short notice. Time off can cause all sorts of problems, especially if it’s prolonged. Half an hour a day would seem a small sacrifice to keep on keeping on.

The subtitle of this book is, “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”, which just about sums it up. You should, however, factor in the author’s weird way of doing just about anything.

That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker though, as Timothy Ferriss uses counter-intuition as a positive business tool.

The core message of The 4-Hour Workweekis a powerful one, and it contains much food for thought for anyone stuck in a boring career, or running an ailing business.

A few questions emerge as you start to read. Did Timothy Ferriss really become national kickboxing champion of China by using a loophole in the rules allowing him to push his opponents out of the ring a number of times to disqualify them from the contest? And why did the judges allow such a pathetic bending of the rules?

He also claims to have been a motorcycle racer in Europe, Argentine Tango champ in Buenos Aires, a scuba diver in Panama and a skier in the Andes. Oh, and a language teacher in Thailand and Japan and … much more. Bear in mind he’s only 29, or was when he wrote the book.

Ferriss is a very smart cookie. His main ideas, like the low-information diet, outsourcing the boring stuff, reducing work to what you do best, have much in common with the 80/20 principle, but go that extra mile to the very limits of absurdity. The brakes screech on at the last moment, though, and he avoids complete overturn — just. Maybe that’s his motor-racing experience coming through.

The book is also interestingly interactive. We’re referred to his website for the latest, or most detailed information. It’s a good way to drive traffic as those of us who advocate print/online synergy have been saying for a while. Be aware, he also embeds passwords in the text for the most intriguing documents online. This is a total tease, but one way to make sure you read the whole book.

By now you will have realized that Timothy Ferriss is a bit of a flamboyant sort of chap. While that may be the new blue in business book style, the main question for this reviewer is : does it contain enough meaty nuggets of new ideas and information to justify trawling through the whole book with umpteen visits to the website?

I would say, yes. It certainly made me rethink many of my lazy, received-wisdom notions about business. That’s what Ferriss does to you, he gets you branching out laterally in ways you never intended.

Whether any of his schemes will stick enough to actually change anything remains to be seen. I also have to say, that some of them appear to be marginally illegal. You must make up your own mind whether you want to be as batty as he is.

However, I would recommend this book if you have a taste for out of the ordinary activities and don’t mind flouting conventions. Of course, if you do things his way, you may find yourself perched on a giant Ferris wheel unable to get off. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.