Ep. 379 Four-hour workday strategy to grow in less time

If your workdays are constrained by school hours, health, or simply how you want to live, a four-hour workday isn’t indulgent – it’s a smart business strategy. In this episode, Anna shares how to protect your best thinking time, simplify what doesn’t matter, and design a business model that works inside real life.

[00:52] Workshop invite – A practical session to turn the four-hour workday into a real plan for your calendar, offers and priorities.

[01:38] The “dirty secret” – Most needle-moving work fits into a focused four-hour window.
[03:29] Constraints as a design brief – Stop comparing yourself to an imaginary person with endless time.
[04:59] The deep work reality – Most of us only have 3–4 high-quality thinking hours before performance drops.
[06:03] Deep work vs shallow work – Revenue-driving work versus admin, tinkering and micro-decisions that can swallow the day.
[07:25] Parkinson’s Law in action – When time feels unlimited, tasks bloat and decisions get delayed.
[08:09] A business model problem – If your business only works when you overwork, it’s not time management.
[10:32] Why the constraint is commercially smart – A hard cap forces prioritisation, boundaries and simpler offers.
[11:09] Profitability under pressure – Higher value work beats more hours; clearer offers and better pricing become non-negotiable.
[17:45] The closing question – What would you stop doing if you truly only had four hours to grow the business?

Key resources

• Join the Four-Hour Workday workshop on 12th February -[date passed]

• Try the Toggl time tracker – Toggl

The Four-Hour Workday Strategy

In this episode, we’re talking about why a four-hour workday is not a fantasy, it’s actually a strategy. How to focus on the work that actually moves the needle and how to stop letting everything else expand to fill your week.

Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, when that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for. Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love? Let’s get started.

Okay, before we start, and I hope you can hear me through the rain on my window because it is a very wet, miserable day today, but what better day to record lots of podcast episodes.

So before we start, I want to invite you to my workshop coming up on Thursday, 12th of February, all about the four-hour workday. If you’re trying to run a commercially strong business inside limited time, whether that’s school hours, client delivery, or just, let’s face it, real life, then this is where we make it super practical.

We’ll cover what to prioritise, what to stop doing, and what needs to be repeatable so that things keep moving even when you’re busy. You’ll get the live session and of course you’ll get the replay to return to after the session. So details are at onestepoutside.com forward slash four hour a day. That’s onestepoutside.com forward slash the number four hour a day.

Okay, so here’s the dirty secret, I’ll whisper, here’s the dirty secret of most solopreneurs. The work that really moves the needle probably fits into about four hours a day.

So I’m speaking to, and I assume that you are an ex-corporate independent, you know, you’re building your portfolio career, maybe you’ve got the school hour window of work, you’ve got health limits, or simply a desire not to recreate a nine-to-five.

And here’s the tension that I see and have experienced myself. On paper, I’m my own boss, I can work how and when I want. The reality, somehow I’m still exhausted, busy, and the day never feels like enough.

So today is about why a four-hour workday isn’t just feasible for you, but it’s actually strategically smart and often the only way to build a business that actually fits your life.

So look, let’s take school hours. I have kids who are five and six. They’re now both at the same school for a whole year and then they’ll be going to two different schools. We actually leave already at eight o’clock. We do some reading outside of school. And so it’s basically an hour to school and back, then pick up at three o’clock, depending on if they have after school clubs, that kind of thing.

But by the time you factor in travel, life admin, eating, everything else you need to do, and a brain that isn’t a machine, you have a very narrow window within those core school hours.

Or let’s take health. I’ve worked with clients who have a chronic illness. Maybe you’re recovering from burnout. Do you have ADHD or an autistic brain that just cannot brute force eight or nine hours? I mean, honestly, who can?

Or let’s face it, it’s not just about the constraint. It’s also about our vision of how we want to live our life. Maybe you want to have long holidays and travels. Maybe you’re nearing retirement and you don’t really need to fill every day. Maybe you’re in a very lucky position where you’re almost financially free or you don’t need to be earning the big bucks, even though I strongly believe that you still can.

Maybe you want to spend that deep work on writing a book or caring for parents or just simply long walks and slow mornings.

So whether we like it or not, I suppose for most of us, if not all of us, our day is already constrained. And so the choice is whether you plan around that reality of the constraints, or you constantly compare yourself to some imaginary person who doesn’t have those constraints and some imaginary endless workday where somehow you can get everything done.

Unfortunately, I think this leads to this sense of shame and the quiet belief, and it’s perpetuated, of course, by social media and what we see online, whether that’s true or not, that real entrepreneurs are grinding, they’re slaying, they’re working all hours harder than they ever did in their full-time job, but it’s so worth it because they love it and they’re going to be millionaires, I suppose.

And also, let’s face it, the fear that wanting shorter days sounds really indulgent, lazy, unserious, unambitious. And I’ve had people say that to me, probably behind my back, some people to my face, and it’s hard not to let that get to you.

But I want to reframe this whole conversation. Certainly the people I work with, the solopreneurs and experts I work with, love what I say about the four-hour workday and the constraints, but they’re also very much not wanting to just work less. That’s not what motivates us.

So constraints aren’t evidence that you’re weak. They’re actually a design brief, let’s call it that, for how you want your business to work, how your business needs to work.

So most of us, and this is outside of even school hours and health and so on, from sort of a physical, mental perspective, most of us only have around three to four hours of truly high quality, focused, problem-solving brain time in a day. After that, you’re mostly shuffling information.

So this is contrasted with seat time in the whole conversation about return to office and CEOs measuring productivity by how many hours you’re clocking in and out. And look at me, I’m working so late, I must be so productive and important.

So a typical long day might be being very reactive, responding to things in your inbox. I’ve never used Slack, but in the corporate world, I guess Slack, and WhatsApp messages, social scrolling, tweaking fonts, redoing your website for the umpteenth time, reorganising your Notion.

Very little of that is deep work, and very little of that creates revenue or assets that will actually bring you revenue or any kind of growth in the future.

So there’s a real distinction between deep work, let’s say, proper strategic, intentional thinking, designing offers that you are actually going to sell, or at least test with your market, writing core content, not just pumping out a kind of generic post on LinkedIn, delivering client transformation, versus the shallower work, which still needs to get done, but it’s sort of admin, micro decisions and tinkering, which unfortunately can spill over into all day.

A whole day of tinkering is not going to move the needle on your business. So a question to consider is when in your day do you do your best thinking and how long does that really last before you’re fried?

I’m sure you’ve had that experience of heading off on holiday or I get very productive suddenly when I’m heading to pick up time, because even though I’ve had a whole day of no meetings or anything, suddenly I’ve got that constraint and it’s that last minute homework deadline that you become really productive. But that’s not a rhythm, that’s not a pace that you can sustain non-stop.

There’s a window and then you need to rest, you need a break, you need to spend time with your family, you need to go for a walk, exercise, cook, whatever it is.

Most of us notice that we’re most productive in a tight morning block before meetings or, as I said, in that short kind of pre-pickup window.

Even though it sounds dreamy to have a whole day or a couple of days ahead of you, unfortunately work expands to fill that time and we may find we get less done than we would have if we’d have less time, ironically.

So your brain is, let’s think of it as sort of a four-hour athlete and past that, performance drops, even if you’re still sitting at your desk.

That may remind you of Parkinson’s law that I’m sure you’ve heard about. So when time feels unlimited, work expands to fill that time. Tasks get bloated, decisions get put off and delayed, and you make everything more complicated than needs to be.

And I’m not blaming you here because I totally have been there and sometimes still there.

So maybe we spend a whole day on a sales page that didn’t need to exist yet. Rewrite a talk for the fifth time instead of actually sending three emails to try to get it booked. Saying yes to a misaligned project just because, oh, it’s just a few extra hours and a bit of money.

And in fact, and this is the key point, I think, those extra hours can compensate, they can cover up for structural issues.

So let’s say you have fuzzy positioning, you take anyone who asks and then work nights have to happen in order to make it fit into your day.

Or underpricing, again, you compensate with volume and over-delivery.

Or over-customisation, you build bespoke for every single client instead of trying to craft a repeatable offer that you can then kind of rinse and repeat, even if you’re evolving it.

So this is a model problem, it’s not a moral issue. If your business only works when you overwork, then you don’t have a time management problem, you have a business model problem. And I’ve talked about that a lot. And that’s really key to how I work with my clients.

So quick reminder, again, by the way, if you do want to dig into this more and really apply it to your business, check out onestepoutside.com forward slash four hour day, that’s the number four hour day for my workshop coming up on the 12th February.

So looking at the four hour workday as a design constraint, that’s your design brief. So let’s shift from seeing it as a problem. Oh, I can’t be successful because I only have these hours to actually, okay, this is possibility that we’re seeing here.

So four hours are those core deep work hour blocks where you are on, right? Strategic thinking, creating, delivering, selling. Everything else, admin, errands, rest, and so on, wraps around, or, if necessary, gets aggressively simplified, or streamlined, or outsourced, or whatever we can do.

Now, look, it’s really important to understand, and this is kind of a cap, it’s not necessarily today’s reality. You might currently be doing 11 scattered hours. But the idea is to design towards a world where the meaningful work fits into four.

And hey, if you’ve got longer hours, so a couple of days a week, my kids are after school club, that works really well for me. And I have more than four hours. But that also means another day, I can maybe take a bit of time off, or I can take the whole day off to go on a school trip with my daughter, whatever that looks like.

So it’s not a prescription. I’m not saying you have to only work four hours a day. It could also be, you know, what does it work out of sort of two and a half or two, three longer days, and then you take the rest of the week off.

It might be that one week you work 40 hours, 50 hours, and the next week you don’t work any hours. It’s very flexible in that sense.

And of course, ultimately, it comes down to how you want to or need to work. But what a designed four-hour day as a concept does is to force you to make choices because you cannot do everything.

So you have to prioritise what actually means revenue and reputation. You have to set boundaries. No becomes non-negotiable because there literally is nowhere to hide low value work. And you have to simplify.

You do simpler offers, your platforms for your services because you just can’t behave like a 10-person agency. If you only have four good hours, you cannot afford to waste them on pretending you’re a huge team, on spending five hours on LinkedIn content or whatever.

It’s just not feasible to earn what you want to earn in those hours.

But really importantly, again, I have to emphasise the commercially smart angle because this is not just a lifestyle pitch. Okay, high value work beats more hours. This is fact.

It is better to spend two hours on a 5k proposal for a client or a key client session than eight hours reformatting slide decks and writing posts that just don’t lead anywhere.

Secondly, a hard time cap forces profitability. You have to increase price per unit of effort. Fewer clients, better fees, clearer transformation.

And you can really quickly notice when an offer is unviable because it eats your four hours and then leaves no room for selling or marketing.

Great if you’re full of delivery. But as I had clients say recently, suddenly I realised I don’t have time for business development anymore because I’m delivering and over delivering for these clients. And that’s just not sustainable.

Okay, so let’s contrast two imaginary solopreneurs. Let’s think about the overworking generalist. I’m broadly positioned. I help you live your most fulfilled life, whatever that looks like, and says yes to everything.

Eight to 10 hour days, low margins, lots of back and forth and scope creep, feel really busy, but pipeline is fragile and obviously revenue is going to spike and dip.

Compare that to the four-hour specialist. So clear niche and flagship offer, four focused hours on delivery, marketing and strategic assets, rest of the day is deliberately small, fewer clients, better fit, more predictable revenue.

So the four-hour day doesn’t work despite being constrained. It works because it forces commercial clarity.

And I know that you and I share this too, don’t want to niche down into just one thing and one offer. And that’s not what we’re talking about. But having that lens, having that constraint really makes you focus on at least for now, for this particular week, month, quarter, whatever it is, being super single-minded on what you’re actually selling and how you’re selling it and all that jazz.

Okay, so let’s address the objections that you may be shouting at me through the medium of the phone or whatever you’re listening to me on.

Okay, that’s nice for you, but my situation is different. Okay, some people genuinely do have more complexity, multiple kids, multiple income streams and so on. Totally true.

We’re not talking about perfection. We’re talking about moving in this direction. So even if you’re moving from 10 messy hours to 8, actually, or to 7 to 5 intentional hours, that can change everything, right?

The point is to make progress versus where you are.

So again, let’s say coming out of the workshop, if you join, if you are working 10 hour days, I can’t guarantee that you’ll come away the next week just working four hour days.

But it does give you a lens on both the short term boundaries and tweaks you can make to already move in that direction to improve where you are now, and longer term business model shifts that you can make to, months or years from now, make sure that you’re working in a very different way.

So we’re not talking the perfect, super speedy transformation overnight.

Another mental pushback might be, I like working. I don’t want to do nothing the rest of the day. Totally fine.

I’m not banning additional work, learning, anything else. But the point is to protect and design around your four peak effect hours. Everything else is optional, lower stakes.

It doesn’t mean that you have to feel the obligation. I’ve got to do this because I told the client it would come later today. Or it’s not something you have to do, it’s something you can choose to do.

Because you have the energy, because you’re feeling inspired and you want to do more.

Or maybe you’re saying, but I’m early on in my business, I need to hustle first so I can earn rest later.

And look, this is really important. So yes, you may experiment more early on, but you still only have a few good thinking hours. And it’s better to use those hours to test clear offers and conversations than to spend loads of time again tweaking websites and building a really complicated labyrinth of systems and all sorts of things.

And then the final pushback, which I did get on a LinkedIn post, I think, when I talked about this months ago, this just sounds too rigid.

And then I explained, but again, it’s a design principle. It’s not a prison. I’m not prescribing that you have to only work four hours every day. And that’s sort of the be all and end all, right?

Some season you have three hours, some you have five. The idea is to stop pretending that you have 12.

I mean, we’ll get into this in the workshop, but depending on of course your exact business, but let’s say for a school hours coach, you come back to your desk, I don’t know about you but I grab a cup of tea, come upstairs, do a little bit sort of LinkedIn tinkering, I know that’s not productivity best practices but for me I really like that, to sort of ease into the day.

Then maybe you’re looking at planning priorities, what are today’s one two three high impact tasks.

Then for the morning, because that’s really for most of us the deep work, I always block that. I don’t have phone calls in the morning, and unless of course there’s always some flexibility.

And then I have those asset creation things, really. So writing, frameworks, curriculum, keynote, maybe working a client proposal.

I actually have a treadmill so I can do walking under my standing desk. But in the summer, when it’s not raining, like it is today, I can head out for a long walk, obviously have a nice lunch break, and potentially have another deep work block.

But really, the afternoon is when I then do the calls, you know, anything that leads to clients, really. It might be emails, outreach, that kind of thing that doesn’t require my most creative work, but it’s a bit more repetitive.

And then to be honest, as I get towards sort of the pickup time, it’s okay, I’ve lost a bit of my brain power already. So I do a bit of admin, light email, that kind of thing, with the understanding that the day’s value, of course, is already delivered.

So again, the specifics from flex, but the four hours are protected, no random calls and endless social media rabbit holes, and everything else fits around those four hours rather than the other way around.

Sometimes this kind of thing comes to identity, right, and ambition. But who do you actually want to be?

So I always, and I think I almost can say I don’t identify in this way now, but I always identify as a hard worker, the good girl, ambitious, always over delivering, perfectionist, and we can kind of pride ourselves on that identity, right?

But I’d really question that, you know, are you trying to prove that you’re hardworking or are you actually being effective and valuable? Because actually just working long hours doesn’t mean that you’re working on the right things and doesn’t mean you’re adding more value to clients either.

Importantly too, you’re not a mini employee doing eight hours for a boss who doesn’t exist. You’re the boss. You have a small sharp firm, let’s call it that, whose primary assets are actually your energy, your judgement and instinct and your reputation.

So let me ask you this as we wrap up. What would change if you believed you only had four hours a day to grow this business and maybe you actually only do have four hours a day.

And what would you stop doing? That’s the most important question, right?

And what would suddenly matter more? So something to think about. What would change if you only had those four hours? What would you stop doing? And what would actually matter more?

Okay, so look, we’ve talked about the concept of the four-hour workday and the why. And the real magic, of course, is in turning this into your calendar, your offers, your pricing.

So again, on the 12th of February, we’ll be running it. It’s a 90-minute workshop to help you apply this in really practical terms to map your real constraints and define your own personal four-hour window or version thereof.

Of course, audit your current time, where that actually goes. And in fact, if you take nothing else away from this episode, I encourage you to track where your time is actually going. I think you’ll be surprised.

Obviously, redesign offers pricing delivery if needed. So they’re viable within that four-hour day. Again, it won’t be an immediate next day transformation, but you’ll start steering the ship in that new direction.

And of course, decide what gets automated, outsourced, simplified or just dropped entirely.

So you’ll leave with really tangible choices, you know, clear offer focus, weekly pattern and a shortlist, importantly, again, of things that you’re going to stop doing on purpose.

So again, you can sign up at onestepoutside.com forward slash four hour day and it’s the number four.

Again, if you don’t join the workshop or even if you do, I’d encourage you to notice over the next week when those four hours are happening.

If you can use a tracker, for example, Toggle, I have no affiliation, T-O-G-G-L, to track what you’re actually doing and where the real meaningful work is happening. And by the way, if you don’t know, that’s already an important awareness or something to dig into.

And then imagine building the business around those core hours, not around what LinkedIn says a real entrepreneur should be doing.

Okay, see you next week.

Quick reminder before you go, if this episode hit home, then I think you’ll love my live workshop on Thursday the 12th of February, the four hour work day. It’s 90 minutes super practical and we’ll turn this theoretical idea into an actual plan.

What to prioritise, what to stop doing, and what needs to be repeatable so your business keeps moving even when time is tight. Of course you’ll get the replay as well.

Details are at onestepoutside.com/4hourday.