Ep. 142 The 8-8-8 Rule: Is Equal Work, Rest and Play Actually Achievable?

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

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The 8-8-8 Rule: Is Equal Work, Rest and Play Actually Achievable?

The 8-8-8 rule sounds appealingly simple: divide your 24 hours equally between work, leisure, and sleep. Eight hours of each. But for anyone running their own business, the maths quickly falls apart – and the concept raises more questions than it answers. Here’s what the 8-8-8 rule actually means, why it doesn’t quite add up for solopreneurs, and what alternatives might work better for designing a life that genuinely fits.

What is the 8-8-8 rule?

The 8-8-8 rule divides the day into three equal parts: eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, and eight hours of sleep. It emerged as a counterpoint to the gruelling hours of the industrial age – when 16-hour factory days were standard and workers had few protections or rights. The campaign for an eight-hour working day gained momentum in the nineteenth century, and the nine-to-five construct followed from it.

The nine-to-five is, of course, what I’ve spent years questioning. My book is called Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5. I’ve talked and written extensively about the end of the nine-to-five, the rise of hybrid working, and what genuine flexibility could look like beyond the traditional office model.

But the 8-8-8 rule takes the nine-to-five as a given and asks: what if we were equally intentional about the other sixteen hours? If the first eight is work, what about the rest?

It sounds balanced. Progressive, even. But when you actually interrogate it, things get complicated quickly.

Does the 8-8-8 rule actually work?

Let’s take each element in turn.

Eight hours of sleep is broadly supported by the research. Most adults need somewhere between seven and nine hours. So this part of the model holds up reasonably well – though anyone who has had a newborn, a toddler who won’t sleep through, or a period of high anxiety knows that eight hours is aspirational rather than guaranteed.

Eight hours of work is where it starts to unravel. The nine-to-five assumes a standard working day, but research consistently shows that in office environments, people do around two hours and fifty-three minutes of genuinely productive work per day. The rest is meetings, email, context-switching, and the performance of busyness.

For solopreneurs, the number of hours you work is far less meaningful than what you do in them. Many of the people I work with have escaped the nine-to-five precisely because they realised that presence and productivity are not the same thing. Eight hours at a desk does not equal eight hours of meaningful output.

Eight hours of leisure is where the 8-8-8 model falls apart entirely.

The problem with the 8-8-8 rule

Here’s what the model ignores: life admin.

Cooking, cleaning, laundry, school runs, grocery shopping, bookkeeping, chasing invoices, replying to non-work emails, sorting insurance, dealing with the boiler. Where does that go?

If it goes into leisure, leisure starts to look considerably less like leisure. If it goes into work, you’re suddenly working twelve or fourteen hours a day. The model simply doesn’t add up – and the reason it doesn’t add up is that it was designed for a version of life where someone else was doing the domestic work. The nine-to-five was built on the assumption that the person going to the office came home to a household that had been managed by someone else.

Most of us don’t live that life. And for solopreneurs especially – who are running a business and often managing family, home, and everything else simultaneously – the 8-8-8 rule feels like a maths problem with a missing variable.

The deeper issue is that the model still divides life into two categories – work and not-work – and assumes they are equally weighted and clearly separated. But that binary doesn’t reflect how most of us actually experience our days. Work bleeds into evenings. A walk counts as both leisure and thinking time. Reading a business book is simultaneously learning and rest.

The 8-8-8 rule is a useful provocation – a way of asking whether you’re giving enough attention to rest and recovery – but it is not a practical operating model for a solopreneur building a business around their life.

A better alternative: the 5L model

Rather than splitting the day into three equal buckets, I find it more useful to think in terms of five dimensions of a good life – what I call the 5L model.

• Live – physical and mental wellbeing: exercise, sleep, nutrition, time in nature, rest
• Love – relationships: partner, children, parents, friends, community
• Learn – growth and development: reading, coaching, courses, curiosity, reflection
• Lead – work and impact: the part that creates value, builds something meaningful, and generates income
• Laugh – fun and spontaneity: hobbies, play, rest, doing absolutely nothing in particular

The 5L model doesn’t prescribe how many hours each dimension gets. Instead it asks whether each is getting enough attention across the week – and whether any one dimension is consistently crowding out the others.

Some days will be heavy on Lead. A big deadline, a workshop to deliver, a proposal to finish. Others might be almost entirely Love and Live – school holidays, a day off, a long weekend. The goal is balance over time, not balance within every single day. That’s a much more realistic and sustainable way to think about it.

And if you’re wondering where life admin fits – I’d argue that a clean, functional home contributes to Live, and that managing your business finances is part of Lead. Reframing helps, even if it doesn’t make the dishwasher empty itself.

What your ideal split might actually look like

Here’s a practical exercise. Rather than trying to divide 24 hours into equal thirds, try this instead.

Start by listing what falls into each of your five dimensions – or whatever categories feel right for you. Then ask honestly: which of these is getting squeezed? Which is getting more than its fair share?

For most solopreneurs I work with, Lead dominates – not because they want it to, but because the business expands to fill the time available. Without intentional boundaries, work takes everything. The other four dimensions become optional extras squeezed in around the edges, rather than non-negotiables built into the structure of the week.

Think also about your rhythms across the year, not just the day. Can you design seasons into your business – periods of intensity followed by genuine rest? Can you protect school holidays, take August lighter, build in a proper break? The nine-to-five never allowed for that. The 8-8-8 rule doesn’t either. But as a solopreneur, you have the freedom to design something better – if you’re intentional about it.

The 8-8-8 rule is asking the right question: are you being deliberate about how you spend your time, or are you letting work consume whatever space you give it? The answer it offers just isn’t quite right for the reality most of us are living.

If this resonates – the question of how to design work that fits your life rather than consuming it – there are two places to go next.

The Solopreneur Diagnostic is a free tool that shows you where your business is strong and where it’s holding you back. Takes about five minutes.

And if you’re an established solopreneur looking for a small group of people working through exactly these questions together, Off Script is the community I’ve built for that. Have a look and see if it’s for you.