Lifestyle designer and time-management philosopher, Tim Ferriss, wasted a total of 3.82 seconds on Sunday evening, when he absent-mindedly glanced at a Calvin Klein billboard while on an errand.
“The Marina is ranked by my research team as THE most streamlined and efficient traffic-grid in North America. Its contra-rotating circuit patterns and direct lateral orbit synchronizations are second to none. See, what I do is rent an Electric Scooter online, pick it up at the end of my street, then ride it entirely downhill on Fillmore, turn it back in at the station at the bottom of hill, then take the bus back home. I don’t have to pay for the battery recharge,” said Ferriss. “But that’s where everything went wrong.”
The young, physically fit author says that on his way down the hill, he felt a sneeze coming on. He looked up at a 45 degree angle, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth in order to pacify the sternutatal nerve, a technique he learned while traveling the countryside by unicycle in India. “That’s when I saw the damned billboard and got totally distracted for a few seconds.”
He then missed his bus back up the hill, which departs from the corner of Fillmore & Chestnut between 4 and 5 seconds after he deposits his rent check into his landlord’s mail slot. He was then required to jog back up the hill without the aid of his Nike iPod Interface. On the way, he purchased a small package of unsalted peanuts, which slightly raised the density of Immunoglobin E in his blood, causing him to jog at a 6% deficiency.
Ferriss claims the delay in his return home over-humidified his apartment, causing a drop in oxygen levels in his personal rain-forest which decreased his handwriting speed by 4% over several days. He also cited an inability to focus on his book-on-tape Vietnamese language studies, missed his Kenpo class, and forgot to take his hourly hypodermic B12 supplement several times. He spent the rest of the evening depressed, shopping on Craigslist for exercise equipment, then fell asleep on the futon.
An elaborate chapter on the holistic health benefits of ignoring roadside billboards is featured in Ferriss’ new book, “The Twelve-Minute Errand,” which teaches entrepreneurs to speed-read street signs in over 20 languages, allowing anyone to filter out unnecessary information while engaged in time-critical daily missions.
“Even the most efficient time-management guru can make a mistake, I guess,” said Ferriss, in a press release written by his team of Personal Assistants, who were themselves on vacation in Qatar while subcontracting their work to a firm in Utah. “This has taken me weeks to recover from. Don’t make the same mistake I did.”
As restitution, Pre-Orders of Ferriss’ “Philosophy of Impatience” eBook are being offered at a 17.4% discount off the $1997 price if they purchased their tickets through Twitter at 7:46pm PST on March 29, which were the exact moments when Tim was too distracted to process orders completely efficiently via Skype on his iPhone.
Readers of Tim’s personal blog were disappointed.
“Your advice has taught me how to drink fourteen gallons of Starbucks Coffee in only one afternoon without getting sick, how to use NLP to cut in line at the restroom, and techniques for social engineering at the post office. Through one of your blog posts I even learned how to craft a crude Indonesian bow & arrow out of ordinary office supplies. I can’t believe I even wasted 32.48 seconds posting this comment.”
The above article was preemptively rejected by The Onion.