Imagine working 2-3 hours/day while your coworkers need to pull 40- to 80- hour weeks. They’re a slave to their jobs while you’re not, and you’re getting paid more dollars per hour than your coworkers (2.6X-8X your colleague’s $/hr). This post will show you the exact steps on how to work less than 40 hours a week.

As a caveat: the following generally works for knowledge workers/white-collar workers. I don’t think it’ll work for blue-collar folks because 1) I’m not experienced in those types of jobs so I can’t honestly say I can give good advice here, and 2) the fundamentals of blue-collar work is to trade hours for money, which makes it hard to leverage abstract things like knowledge.

The First Year (Phase 1) Will Suck

Unfortunately, in your first year you will need to do 40-hours a week. But it’ll pay off down the line as long as you’re with the company.

By the way: when I say 40-hour week, I mean you actually will learn and execute and work for 40-hours, like a slave. Not “20-hours work, 20-hours socializing.”

This “Phase 1” of your job could be a lot less than a year, depending on your learning curve and how fast you accomplish the 2 objectives below:

1. Understand all the details of what you own.
2. Establish a reputation that you’re world class.

A slave is dependent on their coworkers and constantly needs spoonfeeding to get work done. This “feels” great as a slave doesn’t need to do any thinking, but ultimately they’re wasting a lot more of their own time.

When you’re hired as a new employee, the thing you should do is to be voracious and learn as enthusiastically and as much as possible. You want to learn enough so you can be 100% independent of your coworkers. Any task assigned to you should be easily done by yourself without consulting anyone: this saves tons of useless meetings, calls, emails, and instant messages. Your coworkers will still be dependent on you though, since they’re chumps that like working 80 hours a week – no worries though, we’ll cover how to minimize their impact on your time in this post.

Once you’ve ramped up and is an expert at your domain, you’ve accomplished the first objective.

Next, you should prioritize executing only the high-priority, visible stuff as an employee. And you should do this at the cost of pissing people off. If people want you to do something that won’t accomplish one of the 2 objectives above, ignore them. You need laser focus and prioritize ruthlessly (feel free to use strategies below to carve out more time for you to do this) so you can accomplish the 2 objectives above ASAP. The sooner you hit the 2 objectives, the sooner you can transition to a 2-3 hour/day schedule.

My example: At the company I work at, I worked 60 hours/week (this was made easier since they gave me free meals—this was pre-COVID). My focus allowed me to ramp up within a week whereas other people that joined would take 2-3 months to ramp up. I understood everything by the 2^nd week, and by the 4^th week I destroyed all the tasks I was slated to do. This gave me the reputation to my coworkers and my manager that I was quite the competent employee.

Once you’ve executed some high-visibility targets and built a reputation around how competent you are, congratulations, it’s time for Phase 2: Being As Lazy As Humanly Possible While Keeping Your Job.

Phase 2: Being As Lazy As Humanly Possible While Keeping Your Job

Now that you have the street cred and the knowledge to do the work, just be as lazy as possible to maintain that knowledge and execute minimally to keep your job.

Below are strategies to use in Phase 2 to transition yourself out of your 40 hour/week schedule. If you don’t deploy these strategies, you will be stuck in an “infinite work loop,” where the more work you do, the more work you’ll get.

So if you want to get out of your 40 hour/week schedule, the below strategies are required. All of it. And then some.

Hey, I didn’t say being lazy was easy.

First, Minimize Your Comms To Shave Off Useless Hours Spent At Work

Here’s what your communication should look like in Phase 2. Wasteful communication will waste hours per week. You’re not technically “working” when you’re having useless conversations at work, but you are slowly losing your life.

Instant Messaging

Never just message: “Hi <their name>” and wait for a reply. This is a waste of your time because you’re not paid to wait for another person to respond. This is also a waste of their time because they don’t give a shit about how good-mannered you are; they just want to answer your message and go home.

If you want to be nice, just do: “Hi <their name> – <your question in detail here>” in one message. Make sure your question has enough detail so they can sufficiently answer it. Don’t keep it vague – you wouldn’t go to a doctor’s office and just say “I have some pain, somewhere.” The reason for this is because ideally there’s no back and forth messaging and they can just reply with an equally detailed answer. You get what you need within 2 total messages and move on.

Meetings

Waste of time, period. To add insult to injury, people like to go on endless tangents in meetings to waste even more time. Here’s how you’ll conduct meetings you host.

Set up 15-minute meetings for a better time-constraint. 30 minutes if things are very technical and complicated.

Set a specific agenda beforehand (if you’re running it) so as soon as things get out of hand or on a tangent, you say “that sounds good, but let’s stick to the agenda and we can shelve your thought for a future meeting.” Spoiler alert: you will not be setting up a follow-up meeting. If it’s important enough, they’ll do it.

Any time someone ever asks: “Is there anything else?” Your ONLY reply is “no, nothing from me.” Avoid answering the question even if you have something, because it’s outside the agenda and it’ll lead to tangents after tangents. You’ll die someday. You don’t want to spend a second more of it in a meeting if you don’t have to. If you have something really important to say, set up another meeting.

Conversely, in your meetings never ask: “Is there anything else?” There’s always some bum that likes diving into meaningless tangents endlessly because they don’t have any friends outside of work so their shitty tangents is their only way to socialize. Don’t get sucked in.

Second, Your Coworkers Are Crap and They Can’t Help It. Here’s How to Minimize Their Impact On You So You Can Work Fewer Than 40 Hours A Week

You want to be “remote working” because there’s only 3 ways they’ll be able to communicate with you: calls/meetings, DMs, and emails.

In an open office space, they can just show up and invade your private space – if this happens frequently, just book a conference room and hide out all day. Congrats: you’re remote again.

Calls/Meetings

Never take impromptu calls, or make up some excuse about how you’re very busy and cannot take a call right now. You need to respect your own time and letting others control your time is a surefire way to be a slave and work 80 hours a week.

Instead, book a meeting with a fixed time. When you book a meeting on someone’s calendar for 15-30 minutes, you’d ideally book it adjacent to another meeting if possible. This is so when time runs out in the meeting, you can honestly say “I have a conflict. Let’s pick this up later.” Spoiler alert again: you never “pick this up” later and they either need to figure it out themselves or spend the extra effort booking a follow up meeting with you.

This way, you’ll train your coworkers to not talk endlessly and get straight to the point as you’ll always have a conflict and limited time. The added benefit is optics: you’ll look like you’re super busy all the time so people will bother you less.

Emails

This is the bane of existence. Pure distraction and most people are terrible at emails. I’m so bad at responding to these that my manager tells me to respond to emails sometimes.

Other times, folks ask me via DM to respond to some emails they sent 3 days ago, as if they’re the only email in my inbox. I just tell them to ask the question via DM instead of having me search for it. Err on the side of refusing and procrastinating in answering emails and accidentally deleting them than answering emails impulsively.

Emails are distracting and detracts you from your work (detracts from your competence and can eventually reverse your reputation that you’ve tried so hard to build in Phase 1).

If people get pissed off at you for not answering emails, you’re doing it right. Your job here isn’t to people-please, and your job here isn’t to be liked either. Your job here is pure and simple: maximize your $/hr.

Direct Messages

There are disruptive messages, and non-disruptive ones.

Disruptive messages are generally open-ended and contain little to no information, like:
“hi <your name>” – these shitheads generally don’t know how to capitalize a sentence.

Ignore disruptive messages. We use “MS Teams” at work which lets others see if you’ve read their messages. If they’re being a shithead I will read the message and ignore them, so they know I’m ignoring them. These messages provide no information nor value to you and they’re obviously not going to respect your time, so you shouldn’t waste time following up.

Non-disruptive messages generally have a well-posed question that isn’t open-ended like “do you know anything about <high-level topic>?” They’re more specific, like “Do you know how to do <xyz procedure> by <using abc technique>?”

There’s 2 approaches here:

1. If it’s easy for you to answer in a single, detailed message, go ahead and do it.
2. If it is more of a complicated subject matter, call for a scheduled meeting to go over it. Follow above rules for meetings.

Communication summary: eliminating hours upon hours of useless communication will help you shave off many hours of soul-sucking interactions each week. As a result, this will get you much closer to working less than 40 hours a week.

Third Step: Automate Mundane, Frequently Done Things

If you’re in a tech company, there’s going to be a lot of stuff they make you do that’s antiquated and a waste of time. Things that normally take 1 second now takes 10 minutes because every company’s top seller is apparently red tape.

If you’re in the tech world and know how to code, just bite the bullet and spend the couple hours needed writing a script to automate mundane stuff. However, this is only worth your time investment if this annoying thing is part of your workflow such that you’ll need to be doing this as long as you’re employed with the company. Not worth it for a one-off.

The added benefit to writing a script to automate dumb things is you can put it on your resume so you can position yourself to get a real raise (AKA leaving your job for another one with a bigger offer).

Even if you’re not in tech, there are some automations you can do.

Example: email autoresponders telling people to stop sending you a ton of email messages and to call a 15-minute meeting instead (A World Without Email by Cal Newport talks about how to do this in a non-asshole way which I’m not very good at).

Another example: You can download software that can substitute short phrases like “asdf” into a long essay. I personally do this for my work because I have a lot of people filing bugs for me to fix, without giving me any steps to reproduce the bug. This makes the bug unsolvable. I frequently have to tell them to give me steps to reproduce the bug so I can actually debug and solve it. Instead of typing a paragraph + a list of bullet points of requirements each time, I simply just type “badbug” and it’ll auto-expand the text into the paragraph + bullet point of requirements.

If your work doesn’t allow you to download software, you can alternatively just write down a spiel in a OneNote or some Word doc and you can just copy/paste things you have to explain/say very frequently without having to type it out each time.

Automation summary: wasting less time doing mundane things = less time doing work = gets you closer to working less than 40 hours a week.

Fourth, Inflate Your Working Scope To Your Manager

I’ve made the mistake of doing my best at work before. I just end up in an infinite cycle of work where I get progressively more and more work, and other people being paid as much as I am get less and less work. If you want to work less than 40 hours a week, don’t bring your A-game after Phase 1.

You should be not dumb like me, and instead you should “sandbag” and inflate all your deadlines.

Something will take you 2 hours? Great, say it’ll take 2 weeks. Be as ridiculous as you can with this.

And if there’s any pushback from your manager or they want you to “also” do something else, just say “sure, I can do that, but it will take away from <top priority thing you’re trying to do>. Is it OK if <top priority thing> takes a backseat?”

They generally will drop it then and there, but if they insist on you doing the low-priority thing, by all means do it…at the expense of the top priority thing. Even if you have time to do both tasks, just let the top-priority thing die and make up a bunch of excuses why the low-priority thing is complicated – keep in mind you’ve already built a reputation of competence so whatever you say, goes. After a while, they’ll let you go back to your original task.

This “inflation” technique will save you the most time and differentiates someone who will work 80-hour weeks vs someone who works much less than 40 hours a week.

Why this works is intuitive: less work = less time required to do the work = how you’ll work less than 40 hours a week.

What about a raise? If I do very little work, won’t I be passed over for a raise?

That’s funny, because you’ll be passed over for a raise regardless; most companies work on politics and seniority, not meritocracy.

Which would you rather have: a raise of optimistically 3% to 10% YoY (but you’ll definitely work more than 10%+ the next year), or would you rather 8X your $/hr, so you can reinvest all that extra time doing due diligence on high return investments or perhaps doing a side hustle?

Let me spell out the math for you: 30 extra hours per week vs. you earn 3% to 10% less money, but you’ll have all the extra time to enjoy your life and perhaps start a side hustle or do investments that will yield you more than the 10%/yr. And spoiler alert: most companies are going to be much closer to the 3%/yr than the 10%/yr mark.

Finally, Your Co-Workers Are Not Your Friends If You Want To Work 10 Hours A Week

Your coworkers are not your friends, and should never be.

That is, unless you’d like all your de-facto social conversations to be about work.

You’re at work to maximize your dollars per hour, not to make “friends.” You’ll want to decouple your social life with work because you’ll want to actually enjoy your social life without the Sword Of Damocles of work hanging over your head.

If your work friends are tied into your social life, you’ll expose yourself to the unnecessary risk of correlating your social time with work time.

Want friends? Go to meetups. Get a dog. Work is *NOT* a place for friends.

Co-worker “friendship” summary: If you want to work less than 40 hours a week, don’t mix the rest of your life with work.

Freedom Is Hard

There’s ton of social pressure and conventions that’ll cause most people to bend over backwards and get caught in the quicksand of endless work.

If you follow these social traps instead of getting work done, you definitely won’t be working less than 40 hours a week.

The traps to avoid are:

• Convention that it’s “polite” to respond to messages or emails
• When your coworkers invite you to outside-of-work events
• When you feel the urge to go on a tangent…just don’t and save yourself and everyone some time.

The conventional thing to do when a coworker asks you to hang out for “Happy Hour” is to say “sure.” The right thing to do is to say “I don’t drink” or “I can’t; I have to go return some videotapes.”

The conventional thing to do when someone is direct messaging you for an impromptu meeting is to say “sure.” The right thing to do is to say “I’m in the middle of something – let’s schedule something for tomorrow.”

What you need to do is to throw all of these conventions out the window because we’re not going for conventional here.

Conventional means overworked and underpaid. Conventional means never-ending work and stress, only to be rewarded by a crappy 3% to 10% raise each year. Conventional is wage slavery.

You don’t want conventional. You want freedom.

P.S.: This is a new blog and if you’ve found this helpful at all, it would mean the world to me if you were to share this post to someone that you think this post might benefit. It would also be immensely helpful to me if you could give me any feedback on the content at hello@goodmoneygoodlife.com