4 Steps to a 4-Day Work Week for Entrepreneurs

If I offered you 10 million dollars to learn a new language completely in one day, could you do it?

What if I offered you that same 10 million to learn a language completely over a five-year period? Does that sound a little more doable? If you could get that 10 million dollars, and although you knew you’d have to work for it, but you couldn’t make it happen in a day, would you go for it?

A 4-Day Work Week Is Worth Waiting For

I want you to take that same logic and apply it to working a 4-Day Work Week. This counts whether you're an employee or an entrepreneur, but I'm going to speak even more specifically to the entrepreneurs who are already making enough money, or let's say 80%-90% of the income they need to be making.

I have coaching clients that have paid me to help them work a 4-Day Work Week. I have other clients from my software company who have seen the ideas I share in my podcast, and who have started working a 4-Day Work Week, just from implementing those ideas I share. If you need help implementing these ideas, coaching can help, but there’s nothing to say you can't just take the ideas and run with them, and that’s what I'm going to suggest you do.

I have a goal to help 4,440,440 people work a 4-Day Work Week. If a couple of million here or there don't pay me to work a 4-Day Work Week, that's okay. I'm just looking to help you get there.

4 Steps to a 4-Day Work Week for Entrepreneurs

Let’s start by breaking down the idea of getting to a 4-day week into simple steps. Let's say you're working 40 hours a week, but you don’t want to go to a 4-Day Work Week yet, because you don’t want to be working 10-hour days. So your aim is to cut down your working hours, but without sacrificing income or productivity.

With these steps, you should be able to do that in a year. Of course, you might prefer to take it more slowly – in which case, just multiply the amount of time by how long you would feel comfortable taking. You could even change months to years, and you would still be at a 4-Day Work Week in 12 years. That’s 10 years less than it took me!

However long you’re taking to do this, you're making sure you have time to figure it out. This is not a rush. This is just about slowly and steadily moving in the direction of your goal.

1. Months 1 – 3: Get Down to 38 Hours

You first step, over the first quarter, is to drop from 40 hours a week to 38 hours a week, with the same income and the same results. This would let you finish work at 3pm on a Friday.

2. Months 4 – 6: Get Down to 36 Hours

Once you’re reliably leaving work at 3pm on a Friday, start moving it to 1pm. Now you’re working a half day on Friday, and a 36-hour week.

3. Months 7 – 9: Get Down to 34 Hours

In the second half of the year, you need to cut out a further 2 hours. This will have you working until 11am on a Friday – unless you choose to take Fridays off completely at this point, and fit those 2 hours in at another point in the week.

4. Months 10 – 12: Get Down to 32 Hours

Finally, you just have to cut the last 2 hours out, until you’re working 32 hours, and you reliably have Fridays off.

It's really that straightforward and that simple. It's about making it a priority to work less, and then filling up Friday afternoons (and eventually the whole of Friday) with something that's more fun and more exciting than work. It could be time with your kids, or family, volunteering, giving back to the community, or whatever it is you want to do.

Maybe you want to start a side gig: another job or another income opportunity because you don't like the one you're currently in. Whatever it might be, slowly and steadily create a situation where you're working fewer hours.

Your 4-Day Work Week Journey

Some people find the idea of working less and earning more bizarre. But think about this: how much did you earn per hour when you started working? Are you making more now? Probably, because you have more skills, and experience, and you’re more efficient.

Of course, it also depends on your budget. If you’re spending all the money you earn, you might find it difficult to cut down your working hours. If you’re earning more than you’re spending and saving and so on, it will be much easier.

There's no tactic here on how to get to a 4-Day Work Week, as it works differently for everyone, but it mostly just comes down to cutting your work hours. I’ll give you a real example of what I told one of my clients, and this has worked for her.

She was really over-investing time in their business, and I was trying to explain to her strategically how and why she needed to work less, because she was just being ineffective. So I told her at 3pm on a Friday to just shut her laptop, switch off her cellphone, and leave the office. Don’t work over the weekend, even to answer emails. On Monday, I tolder her to come back into the office and look at where she left off, and to finish it if it needed finishing. Then, I told, her, she just needs to keep doing this, eventually learning to leave at 1pm on a Friday, and so on.

Another thing to remember is, just because you're an entrepreneur, that doesn't mean you have to stick with your business forever. One of the toughest things as an entrepreneur is when you have a business that's doing well, but you don't really enjoy running that business. My suggestion would be to slowly phase yourself out of that business and figure out how to run that business in just 2 or 3 days a week. Then you can start another project with the other days.

The Next Steps Forward

There are so many different ways you can begin moving towards a 4-Day Work Week, but you've got to make the choice and you have to start working in that direction. If you want a more specific tool to help you map out exactly what your plan would look like, go to 4daygameplan.com, where you can create your free 4-Day Work Week Game Plan.

It's a series of training videos similar to this one and a tool that you can use, either written or Excel-based, that will do the math for you if you put in your variables and help you map out what would your plan look like. It helps you map out your 12 steps to working a 4-Day Work Week. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get there right away, but it gives you the big picture plan, whether you're an employee, an entrepreneur, or a small business owner.

I hope you find this advice helpful. If you have any questions on this episode, please put shoot me an email or reach out to me on social media.

As always, I look forward to helping you make more money in less time doing what you do best.