How to work 30 hours a week (or less)

While 40 hours has been the standard workweek for the last few generations, the promise has long been that technology will give us more free time. Yet many Americans still find work spilling over into nights and weekends.

Whether you want to cut back your hours to make room for a side hustle, to spend more time with your family, or to pursue your own interests and hobbies, it is possible to complete your full-time job in 30 hours a week. 

As a time management coach for over 16 years, I’ve worked with a lot of people in a lot of situations. What I’ve seen is that almost everyone can reduce the amount of time they’re working. Getting down to 30 hours or less per week isn’t possible in all circumstances, but it is possible in many. Here are the steps to make it happen.

Set clear constraints

If you’re used to working more, you’ll need to put in place very intentional time constraints to learn to limit yourself to 30 hours a week or less. To make this as easy as possible, I recommend setting a new schedule and trying not to deviate outside of it.

For example, this could look like working 8:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. so that you can pick up your kids from school and take them to their activities. Or it could look like a 10 a.m.–4 p.m. schedule if you’re training for a huge competition and want to get in both early morning and evening workouts.

Without these limits, it’s too easy to fall back into more of a 9–5 and never really feel free to put extra time into your outside of work goals.

Consolidate your work

Most likely you’ve been keeping busy for 40 or more hours per week, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve been effective.

One of the fastest ways to reduce your hours is to consolidate your meetings. Take a good, hard look at any recurring meetings. Could they be reduced by shortening them, reducing the frequency, or even eliminating them? Could you cluster meetings on fewer days of the week so that you can open up longer stretches of focused work time on other days? Could you reduce spontaneous meetings by asking people to schedule in advance or send you an email with more details before agreeing to meet? All of these strategies can shave off hours from your schedule.

Next, you’ll want to look at the content of how you’re spending your work time. If you’re like most professionals, you’re likely overinvesting time in communication and under investing time in the highest impact activities. There’s room to consolidate here, too.

Some work environments do require instant responsiveness, but in the majority of them, it’s not necessary. If permissible, turn off all notifications so that you’re only engaging with your inboxes and IM tools when you decide it’s the priority. Then limit your checks to a few times a day. For example, you may set aside time to process through your inboxes at the start of the day, around lunch, and as you’re wrapping up.

For myself, I have a rule that I reply to business email messages by the next business day, and I reply to LinkedIn messages once a week. You need to figure out the cadence that works for you so that you’re checking just enough, but not too much.

With the time opened up from reducing meetings and communication time, you can then invest in consolidated focused time where you can complete tasks from start to finish without constant starts and stops.

Delegate out as much as possible

If you have the ability to delegate to others, you’ll want to fully leverage other people’s time to open up hours in your schedule.

As you go through your day, make a list of what others could do to support you and then begin to hand those items off bit by bit. Here are a few ideas of areas that have been effective for my clients to delegate:

• Doing research
• Following up on outstanding items
• Completing expense reports
• Booking travel
• Calling clients for longer conversations
• Scheduling meetings
• Answering standard email
• Putting together presentations
• Booking meeting rooms
• Planning events
• Taking meeting minutes
• Posting on social media

There’s a potential that almost everything outside of your core responsibilities could be done by someone else.

Challenge yourself to let go of some task at least once a week so that you can eliminate excess work from your schedule.

Automate where you can

With rapid advances in technology, more and more parts of your life can be automated or at least augmented. So where it’s supportive, let tech do the work.

For example, for many of my clients, getting some sort of email filtering in place can radically change their relationship with their inboxes. It could be as simple as setting up some of their own filters or using tools like SaneBox that utilize AI for email sorting.

For clients who struggle with longer email replies, they’ll dump their thoughts into a tool like ChatGPT and ask it to write an email for them. Or they’ll write their own email and ask for AI to change the tone.

If you’re someone who schedules a lot of meetings with outside parties, online scheduling tools like Calendly can be a game changer. You eliminate all back and forth.

And if you really struggle with weekly planning, you may want to check out tools like SkedPal, Focuster, or Motion that use AI to come up with a plan for you.

If you notice anything else time-consuming and repetitive in your work that you can’t give to someone else on your team, see if there’s a tool that would gladly do it for you. The options are increasing daily.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll carve your schedule all the way down to 30 hours a week or less. That can depend on a number of different factors. But what I can say is that if you try out these strategies to consolidate, delegate, and automate that you can find yourself working significantly less and opening up significantly more time for life outside of work.

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