How to Achieve the 4-hour Work Day: 3 Proven Strategies for Mastering Organization with Remote Work
A Managing Director shares her 3 top tips for increasing your efficiency at work and getting more done with less time.
As many of us continue to work remotely and seek remote jobs, the ability to organize ourselves within our own digital workspace has become more crucial than ever.
It’s too easy to become bogged down by meetings, Slack notifications, and emails. Working from home means you don’t get sucked into those hallway conversations. Instead, you’ve also got the looming threat of dishes piling up, that dust bunny in the corner, and potentially even childcare or in my case, dog care.
I’ve written before about how I only work 4 hours many days. This hasn’t changed in the almost 4 years since we first told all of our employees to work from home indefinitely. There are many days when I work more than 4 hours, but keeping myself organized and efficient creates way more 4–6 hour days than 8-hour days. It allows me to write on Medium, work on my novel, stay fit and keep off the 15lbs I lost, and have a life with my friends, family, and dog.
Work to live, not live to work, amirite?
I’m going to let you in on my secret. All it takes is 3 simple strategies.
Live and die by the calendar
My husband and I coined this term when we first started living together, as we often had conflicting social plans. This resulted in wasted food from unmade dinners, having to show up to parties solo, and lots of broken promises.
Enter: “Live and die by the calendar.” It’s a simple concept: if it’s not on the calendar, it’s not mandatory. This has been so successful for me that now I actually forget things if they aren’t on my calendar.
Luckily, Google Calendar is an extremely powerful tool. You can sync multiple accounts (work and personal, for me), create tasks and reminders within your calendar, and color code events for aesthetic and functional purposes. You can share parts or all of your calendar with family, friends, and coworkers. As new AI tools roll out, you can even get recordings and notes sent directly to your inbox from a meeting.
In order to maximize my efficiency throughout the day, everything is blocked off on my calendar. I block working sessions when I know I need deep focus time. I block my workouts, my dog walks, and any upcoming appointments. I even block lunch, and you best believe I will decline a meeting invite over that time if someone hasn’t asked me first.
When it comes to what to put on your calendar… well, you need to get a little cutthroat.
In my personal life, I try not to schedule more than 4 social outings a week. I’m as extroverted as they come, but even my social batteries need to recharge.
Professionally, every meeting has an agenda. If I receive an invite without an agenda, I’ll ask for one. If it looks like I won’t speak at all in said meeting, I’ll politely decline and ask for the meeting notes afterward.
Reduce distractions and focus on one thing at a time
Context switching can be the death of your productivity. According to Atlassian (you know, the masters of productivity tools), “it can take up to 9.5 minutes to get back into a workflow after switching between digital apps.”
Say you context switch just once an hour during your work day. That’s 1 hour and 15 minutes of your 8-hour day completely lost. Over the course of 2 work weeks, you’ve lost an entire day and a half.
There’s your 4-day work week right there.
To reduce the amount of context switching I need to do, I focus very specifically on 4 different work types and make sure they are blocked in my calendar. Those types are:
- Slack
- Meetings
- Focus work
When I’m in my email (which for us, is Gmail for work), I have a “work” window open in Chrome and nothing else. This means my personal Gmail is not a tab in this window, nor is Android messages, Notion, Reddit, or any other common distraction.
Same thing for Slack; when Slack is open, all my other windows are minimized.
Meetings are the hardest for me, as I need my computer to fully be in Do Not Disturb mode. Otherwise, I’m unfocused immediately. Going back to tip 1 where every meeting requires an agenda; this concept means that I’m pertinent to every meeting I attend. I try to only keep my digital notes doc open but even so, I sometimes revert to hand-writing my notes and copying them digitally after. If you’re unfocused in a meeting, what was the point of you attending anyway?
For focus work, having this on my calendar makes the world of difference. Slack will pick up that you are “in a meeting” and you can adjust your settings so that you are set to be away at that time. I keep Slack open while I’m performing focus work, just in case, but I mostly ignore it unless I see a slew of notifications come in at once.
Last but not least, turn off most, if not all of your notifications. On your phone and your computer. You’ll see the little red icon telling you that you have a message once you are done with your task — you don’t need to know someone has messaged you immediately. I wish I could quantify the amount of screen time I’ve saved by turning off Instagram notifications alone (and really, just deleting the app)!
Taskbar and Remind Me features
If you receive an email or a message that you don’t want to forget but are in the middle of something else — save it for later! Both Gmail and Slack make it easy to specify an exact time and date to be reminded of the message.
I break down exactly how to use both of those features here (with gifs!).
Not on Slack or Gmail? Use a good ol’ post-it note! There’s a reason these tiny scraps of adhesive paper have stood the test of time. And let’s be real, there are few things in life more satisfying than crumpling up that post it when you’re done (or hitting “complete” on your taskbar).
It’s never been easier to remove distractions while still maintaining a to-do list. Going back to the pitfalls of context switching, these two tools alone have saved me countless hours and majorly increased my efficiency.
Real talk time. I wrote this article in under an hour. You know how?
- I blocked this time on my calendar today
- I stayed completely focused on the task at hand by minimizing windows and turning on Do Not Disturb
- When I saw an email come in from my financial advisor, I moved it into my taskbar and set a reminder for an hour from now
We all might not have the same hours in the day as Beyonce, but with these 3 strategies in place, you can remove roadblocks and increase your efficiency.
The 4-hour work day is a sexy albeit elusive concept, but think about how much better even the 7-hour work day sounds to an 8.
