DEAL Lifestyle Design
Design work around time, income, and mobility instead of deferred retirement
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 99%
DEAL is Ferriss's repeatable sequence for lifestyle design: Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. Definition identifies the life someone wants to create, its cost, and the efforts that produce desired results. Elimination removes low-value activity and unnecessary information rather than making every task more efficient. Automation transfers the remaining necessary work through rules, systems, and delegation. Liberation then creates mobility and asks the person to use the recovered time deliberately. The sequence is governed by three currencies in descending importance: time, income, and mobility. Its intended output is not idleness or permanent retirement, but a scalable lifestyle in which work no longer consumes identity, location, and every available hour.
Origin
Ferriss said the sequence encapsulated four or five years of experiments across roughly 20 to 25 countries after leaving an unsustainable startup schedule.
Core principles
- 01Treat time as the most important and non-renewable currency
- 02Define the desired lifestyle before optimizing work
- 03Eliminate low-value inputs before improving efficiency
- 04Automate or delegate the important work that remains
- 05Use the resulting freedom rather than postponing life until retirement
How to run it
- 1
Define the destination
Specify what you want to do, be, and have, then determine the financial reality of that lifestyle. Identify the outcomes that actually matter before changing the work.
Pro tip Test whether retirement is really the destination or whether meaningful work will remain part of life.
Watch out Do not let a job description become the only available self-description.
- 2
Eliminate the trivial
Remove unnecessary inputs, low-value customers, interruptions, and activities. Focus on the crucial few rather than organizing an ever-growing volume of work.
Pro tip Eliminate the sources of disproportionate stress as well as the activities producing weak results.
Watch out Efficiency applied to unimportant work only makes the wrong work faster.
- 3
Automate what remains
Quantify the value of your time and transfer suitable recurring work to systems or other people. Establish rules that prevent urgency from reclaiming the saved hours.
Pro tip Delegate tasks that can be completed for materially less than your effective hourly rate.
Watch out Automating before eliminating can preserve tasks that should not exist.
- 4
Create mobility
For employees, test working outside the office and use measured results to expand the arrangement. For entrepreneurs, loosen control by building a virtual operating structure.
Pro tip Make initial mobility requests limited and reversible.
Watch out Entrepreneurs may resist giving up control while employees may resist taking it.
- 5
Use the recovered time
Rebuild interests and choose experiences or work that make the time valuable. Expect discomfort if work has occupied the entire identity for years.
Pro tip Begin exploring postponed interests before removing all work at once.
Watch out Unstructured leisure alone may create boredom rather than a sustainable life.
In the wild
Ferriss left the United States for about a year and a half, traveled through roughly 20 to 25 countries, and did activities he had postponed until retirement. Although he received about a thousand emails per week, he checked email once every 10 to 14 days and said company profit increased about 40 percent.
→ Reduced availability and redesigned operations coincided with more mobility and higher company profit.
Common mistakes
Optimizing before eliminating
Ferriss argues that people often focus on doing things better before deciding whether those things should be done at all.
Treating freedom as permanent leisure
Removing work without rebuilding interests can leave a difficult void rather than a satisfying lifestyle.
Ignoring lifestyle scalability
More customers, email, and calls can turn the individual into a bottleneck even when conventional business metrics are rising.
Is it for you?
Best for
Entrepreneurs and employees whose work has expanded to consume their time and constrain where they can live.
Not ideal for
People unwilling or unable to change priorities, reduce inputs, delegate tasks, or test greater mobility.
From the transcript
“And uh this the structure that I'm going to go through is definition, elimination, automation, and then liberation.”
“And, uh when I look back on my own experience, I really followed that process, and it is repeatable.”
“And that entails controlling three currencies in order of importance, time, non-renewable, income, and mobility.”
From the episode
#548: The Lost Presentation That Launched The 4-Hour Workweek — “Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World” from SXSW 2007