Penelope Trunk Hates Tim Ferriss. Deeply.

The whole Four Hour Work Week is obvious bullshit, but I hadn’t realized what a jerk Ferriss is. Penelope Trunk has witnessed this all first hand: the way he slimed his way into having coffee with her, his annoying email ‘etiquette’, his worker bees spamming blogs with comments that link back to his book’s site, etc.

She ends her post, 5 Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferriss, this way: 

The idea of time management only matters in relation to how important the stuff is that’s competing for your time. The stuff that makes time management the most difficult is relationships. Which Tim does not excel in.

Fine. Not everyone has to be good at making real connections.

But Tim runs around telling people who have lots of relationships competing for their time how to think about work/not work, forgetting that in the real world, where people are not assholes, time management is not an equation or a semantic game because relationships really matter. And figuring out how to judge time in terms of competing values is the hardest thing of all.

Tim is all about time management for achievement and winning. But there are not trophies or measurements for relationships. There is only that feeling that someone is kind. And good. And truly connected.

And Tim is not.

Comments

[original comment(s) from /Message]

Stowe,

Great post and I truly believe that relationships are life.

I do not know Tim but I do use a lot of his methods and productivity stuff (taking notes, eliminating things, etc) but there is no room for self arrogance and only caring about yourself. I am up for meeting anyone and would actually like to have coffee with Tim to talk about this post… :)

I live my life to help enable others and there is nothing better than a Thank You. One thank you is all it takes to give me a reason to do what I do, whatever that may be.

To that I say, Thank you. You are a person who I look to and value your word greatly.
March 15, 2010 | Shane Mac (shane@shanemac.me)
           

Thanks for the pointer, Stowe. Enjoyed your and Penelope’s post!
March 15, 2010 | Samuel Driessen (samuel.driessen@gmail.com)
           

I don’t know enough about Tim Ferriss to speak about him directly, but (slice and dice the semantics of “relationship” however you want) it seems to me that the real, non-jekish relationships are built out of mutual investment by both parties.

Not half-hearted compliments or blog comment spam by worker bees or empty flattery or back scratching…

Sure there’s plenty of money to be had in being a jerk. But you have to live with yourself too. :)

Do you think that the attention economy is stacked such that people view the kind of scammy behavior that Trunk complains about to be easiest way to generate significant revenue?
March 15, 2010 | Andrew Swenson (theword@wordpost.org)
           

Shane - Thanks. I appreciate it.
March 16, 2010 | Stowe Boyd
           

Andrew - I don’t buy the attention economy hype. Attention is not a commodity or a resource. Like knowledge — which was once touted as the foundation of the information age economics — ‘attention’ is a pastiche of wish fulfillment and metaphor. See http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/the-false-question-of-attention-economics.html.

Yes, I think Ferriss is a con artist, a showman, like PT Barnum or one of those oddballs who impersonates a surgeon or an airplane pilot and gets away with it for years. He’s an impressionist doing a stage act. Nothing he says or does matters.
March 16, 2010 | Stowe Boyd