Tijdelijk GRATIS te bestellen:
Karels boek over zijn ervaringen in zijn geslaagde reis door de zin en onzin van de 4-urige werkweek.
Met mijn illustraties 🙂 Klik deze link.
Wouldn’t you like to escape the rat race? Karel is on his 6-month USA Roadtrip right now! You can follow his progress at Road To Freedom.
Inspired by Timothy Ferriss’ New York Times bestseller ‘The 4-Hour Work Week”, Karel decided to take up the challenge: to find out if a lifestyle with little work and lots of freedom can be designed from scratch. In the summer of 2014, Karel started to change his business and his life.
Check out his 4-Hour Work Week live in action at Road To Freedom.
When Karel asked me to help him out with an animation for his USA Roadtrip, I figured it would fit with my plan to try a new illustration style.
This animation was done with some stock images for time-saving purposes but mostly uses drawings of my own. I did these on paper and had them traced in Illustrator, thus keeping a more natural hand-drawn look. Coloring was done in Illustrator as well, intentionally made to look haphazard. I really enjoyed doing that. As usual, it all comes together in After Effects.
Next time, I’d even like to eliminate the tracing step in Illustrator and just use drawn illustration on paper to animate. Not just to save time, but because I like the look.
Is “The 4-Hour Work Week” bogus or attainable? Well, a 4-hour work week is not for me. Of course, I have been trying to figure out how to save time in animating but quickly realized that I don’t want to animate less, I want to animate more, growing in skill and storytelling.
I already escaped the rat race by becoming a freelance filmmaker (later-on in Tim’s book defined not as ‘work’ but a ‘vocation’), so for me it’s about being more efficiently effective with my time, for a better balanced family and working life. It rarely matters where I am. It’s more about saving time in my workflow and clientele — notice for instance how this blog is only in English?
Having finally read the book myself it gets somewhat questionable at times and reeks of cyber colonialism. I could delve into it some more, but I do realize that the US is much more focussed on work, and holidays are few, so efforts to escape that system probably ask for more dire methods. In any case, Tim redeems himself as a person in later chapters, for instance when he acknowledges that the workplace does have a social function and he also mentions his goal in life being: “to love, be loved, and never stop learning”.
It is a fun read and it certainly does hold some indisputably good time-saving tips. This one will also allow you some peace of mind: only checking and answering your mail about twice a day on set times. You might need only 5 minutes to read your mail, but if you can’t act upon it, it’ll just bug your brain until you can, and that divided attention is a killer. For me, that’s for instance taking a walk with my family and having my mind stressing out elsewhere. Now, of course, I have to implement these clever tips.
Meanwhile, I’ll be checking in on Karel’s progress and wish him all the best on his Road To Freedom. At the moment of this writing he was in New Orleans.