4HWW is first and foremost a book on marketing. The lesson is on how Ferris is fantastic at self promotion and promoting his snake oil business. The title of the book is nothing more than clever provocative marketing, not a literal recommendation. The hammock and palm trees on the cover are a proven marketing formula that someone has used every few years for ages, for example http://www.lazyway.net. I saw some self improvement book from the sixties with the same graphic.
I read some interview with Ferris a while ago where he revealed that he deliberately went around making semi-hyperbolic, controversial blog posts to draw attention to himself and incidentally his book. He sequentially targeted the online tech community, the health business community, and so forth. It worked well.
The guy is just very, very good at marketing and promotion and is worth studying in that respect. The rest of what he has to say is fairly valid and worth reading (minus the hyperbole), but it can be reasonably reduced to very little. It really boils down to an application of good executive management principles to your own time:
-Measure your productivity such that you're carefully considering meaningful outputs as they relate to personal goals/needs and not "work done."
-Track the real marginal returns on time invested and don't throw hours at a low marginal return: minimize time invested appropriately. Focus on the few high return things you do. Consider dropping altogether the low return things.
-Eliminate activities that waste your time or clutter your mind and break flow, e.g. always-on email. Minimize information inputs to that which truly matters.
-Do a proper analysis on the hourly value of your time, consider opportunity costs, and outsource tasks appropriately.
I think all the salient points in the book fit under these bullets. There's also a lot of fluff about international travel and so forth. As I say, the book has merit and is worth a quick read, but the main thing to take away from Tim Ferris is how far good marketing can take you.
