The 4-Hour Workday

Work less. Have more freedom. Become wealthy. Never work a job again.

Image Credit: Midjourney

A 4-hour workday sounds like a scam.

Let’s not be cute. It almost sounds like a 4-hour workweek. Pre-2022, you could be forgiven for your hatred of the idea of a 4-hour workday. Now, not so much.

The 4-hour workday is psychological. The average person works 8 hours a day. Working half that would be a dream. In my last ever 9-5 job, I worked a 4-day workweek. I had to squeeze 5 days of work into 4. And I did.

It was the most productive phase of my life.

That’s when I figured out a 4-hour workday might be possible. I used 4-hour workdays to complete the work for my job faster, so I’d have time to take one day off a week and build my side business.

Now, in a world of AI, the 4-hour workday is no longer a clickbait p0rn fantasy.

It’s a reality (if you want it to be). By the way, I’m not the first person to discover 4-hour workdays. But my approach is wildly unique and far easier to implement than other models I’ve seen.

Here’s how to implement a 4-hour workday so you can work less, have more freedom, become wealthy, and never work a job again.

Have a strong “why” that’ll crush your petty little excuses

Let’s go straight to the biggest one.

If you have a piss-weak why, then you’ll never have what it takes to do anything great in life, including working a 4-hour workday.

The trouble with any goal is when life gets in the way you’ll delude yourself into pausing, delaying, or saying “in 3 months the chaos will pass.”

No it f*cking won’t.

A proper why pushes your lizard brain past the petty little excuses that hold you back in life and keep 99% of the population stuck in mediocrity while fantasizing about dreams they’ll never achieve.

Over the last 4 years, my personal why has become stupidly simple:

1. Feed my wife and two daughters.

2. Be an outstanding example for my two daughters of what achieving the impossible looks like while inspiring them in the process.

3. Leave behind a powerful legacy so my daughters can train an AI bot to take daddy’s words and use them as a personal coach when I’m dead.

My insane view of the world that I’ve jammed down my throat is that I either do my thing or my daughters starve. Skin and bones. World Vision Africa-type images of homelessness and despair. That’s what I imagine right before I think about eating a doughnut and taking a load off.

I have a good example to follow too. One of my good friends is homeless. He has three daughters. I love him to bits, but I don’t ever want my daughters to sleep in the car the way his have. Some call it an anti-vision.

Perhaps your why is different from mine. That’s okay. The point is you need an extreme why, or you’ll never do what it takes to achieve a 4-hour workday.

Work on a project that can actually make you enough money by only working 4 hours a day

Most successful businesses, income streams, and career changes start as a side project.

People stuff up their lives by trying to quit their current job or business and go all in on a project on day one. Big mistake. Ease your way in gently.

Before choosing the right project, you want to be clear on:

• What’s the business model?

• What’s the offer?

If you choose the wrong options here, you piss away any chance you have of ever working a 4-hour workday. When you take the right offer and business model and apply digital leverage, that’s what has the best chance of getting you to a 4-hour workday.

As boring as it sounds, the side project needs to be on social media, allow you to build an email list, let you work from anywhere, and it must actually help people with a key problem that’s associated with a big desire – health, wealth, relationships, business, career, etc.

In my case, I chose to help people with growing a digital business. I chose this because I’d already successfully done it myself. It started with a 1-1 LinkedIn coaching offer, evolved into writing challenges, and ended up as business consulting.

Your project will likely be different from mine. Cool.

Just make sure to pick a project that gives you energy, is tied to your current skills/experience, and that’s a pain killer for people & not a nice-to-have vitamin pill.

The simple formula that changed my entire life and made me a millionaire (and let me retire at 34)

Big freaking claim. But it’s true. Ready?

Experimentation + Iteration = Breakthrough

I got the inspiration for this from the lean startup philosophy. I’ve used it every day for 12 years. I even used it in my banking career. And I saw my former clients like Stripe, PayPal, and Amazon use it too. Let me explain…

Most people never achieve a 4-hour workday because they rely on:

• Free mentors with opinions (even though there’s no incentive to help you)

• Gurus who preach some gospel that doesn’t work for 99% of people

• Guesses, vibes, feelings

• Pre-AI career knowledge that is largely irrelevant

• Endless strategy that leads nowhere, assumes best-case scenarios, and is mostly idealistic p0rn

On top of all that, without realizing it, they overthink everything and are indecisive. So they live a death-by-a-1000-papercuts kind of life. That is, they mistakenly think they know everything when they know nothing.

Don’t worry, I made every one of these mistakes and more. Please criticize me in the comments and throw bananas at my head.

The truth is most people aren’t willing to change – but they think they are.

They have a goal and they come up with all these grand plans because they mistakenly think outcomes are fixed. But outcomes aren’t fixed.

You don’t have all the answers on day one. No. You assume that constant iteration is a part of every goal. That you launch, look at the data, assess feedback, try, then try again. When you think like this, step one becomes easy because you’re not looking for final answers or the perfect approach.

You’re looking for signal in the noise.

Secondly, what changed everything for me was I started treating every goal as an experiment. If I got stuck in my business or in life, I’d commit to a tiny experiment.

For example, my long-time girlfriend dumped me. She got out of the car in the middle of the road and yelled, “I hate you, Tim Denning,” and ran off. That left me single and s*xless. I had no clue if I could fix the problem.

I felt old. I had some grey hairs. I have big ears and a face only a mother could love. I felt deeply insecure. So I ran an experiment: I downloaded Tinder.

At first, I thought I was right. But then a kind lady reminded me I had all the filters turned on to limit the pool of female candidates. Turned out my limiting beliefs about who I could attract limited my options.

So I did an experiment and turned off all the filters.

I actually got supermodels and women way out of my league to agree to go on dates with me. The experiment proved I was an ugly duckling, but that I could indeed attract the woman of my dreams. It eventually led to marriage.

The mindset you must have is to:

1. Run daily experiments

2. Increase your rate of iteration

This formula will lead to breakthroughs that’ll change your life and get you to a 4-hour workday. Trust data, actions, and experiences – not thoughts and feelings.

Just get up and get to work. No more elaborate morning routines.

The perfect morning routine is the death of the 4-hour workday.

All the cold plunges, smoothies, yoga, and “forest bathing” are a distraction. The self-improvement industry loves to preach this stuff because it sounds s*xy and leads to a $99 course. But you don’t need it.

What I do is just wake up and get to work.

Then, after 1-2 hours of working on my main goal, I do some simple morning routine. This alone will save your mornings. Instead of starting to work on your goal at 9am after 3 hours of self-help morning masturbation, if you want, you can have 3 hours of your work done by 9am with only an hour left.

It’s so simple, and that’s why it works.

Feel free to riff on this. Everyone’s life is different. But focus on removing all the elaborate warm-up routines and getting down to business faster than normal.

Start the morning with creation. Do admin in the afternoon.

The morning is often when we’re the most productive. Makes sense because we’ve just had 8 hours of sleep.

Not every hour of the day has the same value. An hour before 9am is the equivalent of 3 hours after lunch. This is why I do creation tasks in the morning and boring tasks like admin and managing in the afternoon. Try it.

Have a psychopathic sense of urgency

The 4-hour workday is effective because it creates urgency.

If you mess around with bullsh*t, you’ll never work 4 hours a day. It’s why, when I had a 9-5 job, I had to ruthlessly cut all the fat to get it done in 4 hours a day. I said no to meetings. I deleted everything that didn’t tie to my sales target. I went ghost for every social function. And I didn’t hang out with my boss much.

I did this because I had a psychopathic sense of urgency. I wanted to retire at 34. My brother retired at 32 so I knew it was possible.

To achieve this goal I had to stop:

• Saying “should”

• Saying “someday.”

• Saying “in 3 months then I will…”

I don’t believe people who say “in 3 months.” They’re lying to themselves and they will take their dreams to the grave as a result.

The 4-hour workday philosophy is you either do it today or likely never. There’s no in-between. Your life and goals must be so urgent that anyone who dares get in your way will be steamrolled by you.

Implement a corporate slave KPI tracker

The gym has the best system in the world.

You go there and a trainer tells you what exercises to do, how many reps, and how many sets. You follow the routine and get to your fitness goal. It’s so stupid and boring which is why it works.

When I was a corporate slave, I had a boring-ass KPI tracker. I had to fill it in and give it to my slave-driving, micromanaging, son of a b*tch boss. He’d reply:

“Good job, Denning.”

Then I’d be on my way with a spring in my step because I had his precious approval. I later realized that big goals without an operating system rarely happen. And the foundation of an operating system is a KPI tracker that has daily, weekly, and monthly stats that you track.

The KPI tracker tells you “what do I need to do to achieve my goal?” That’s bloody important, yet most people do not have one.

You must measure your actions if you want to achieve your goals. Otherwise, you end up deluding yourself as to what you’re doing and achieving.

Once you know what to measure, the next step is making sure the hours you work actually count. That's where flow states come in.

Learn how to turn on flow states on command

A 4-hour workday sounds like clickbait because most people have never worked in a flow state before. Once you can turn on flow on command, you realize it’s way more productive than doing normal work full of distractions and phones buzzing.

Flow is where you become so immersed in a single activity that 8 hours feels like 4 — which is exactly why it powers the 4-hour workday.

What’s weird is we all secretly crave to see people in flow.

It’s why you pay $200 to go see a Taylor Swift concert. You’re not paying to see or hear her sing. You can do that for free on Youtube. You’re paying to see her in a flow state – and I bet you never even realized.

Here’s my flow state protocol:

• No distractions – most traditional work is done in an environment full of distractions. Open-plan offices, noise-canceling headphones, phones on, notifications blasting the home screen, emails popping up, etc. These things destroy any possibility of flow. You must do the opposite. Right now, I average less than 10 minutes a day on my phone. That’s how I achieve otherworldly levels of flow.

• Coffee – for many people, coffee helps spark a flow state. Try it.

• Warm shower – you have some of your best ideas while having a warm shower because your mind is fully relaxed. Have one right before work. Turn the lights off if you want even deeper relaxation.

• Background music – music helps focus the mind and block out background noise (crucial as I have a 24/7 screaming baby next to me).

Use flow states to do your work faster than humanly possible. Read the book “Stealing Fire” if you want to nerd out on the topic.

Do uncommon things that give you abundantly more energy

A flow state is a high-energy mood and work routine. But if you’re tired as hell and attempt to turn on flow, nothing will happen.

The greatest life force is simply energy. With high energy you can achieve the impossible. You can do things that make people say “How the hell does he/she do that?”

People often make the mistake of thinking I’m a genius. I’m not. I just have extremely high energy levels which draws people to me because most people are sleepwalking through life barely awake. When we see someone doing the opposite we pay attention.

Here’s my simple energy protocol:

Leave your loser friends behind

A loser is a loser is a loser.

Their only goal is to drag you down so you can be at their level and they can feel good about their bad choices. Sounds harsh but you’ve gotta get them out of your life. They drain your precious energy. Replace them with high-energy people who are going places. Join masterminds if you need more of these sort of people in your life.

Don’t argue with trolls on the internet

If you do anything noteworthy online, haters will find a way to twist your words and call you a Naz! or sexist or <insert popular term>.

The temptation is to argue. Don’t do it. Their goal is to get a reaction out of you and create a show. They have no intention of changing their mind. This steals away your energy. Ignore haters.

Stop trying to be right

This leads you to try and avoid failure, rejection, and embarrassment. This drains your precious energy because it’s an impossible goal. If you ever want to work a 4-hour workday, you’ll 100% experience all of these uncomfortable things.

Focus on being humble instead.

Eat high-energy foods

Not junk food. Not fast food. Not packaged food. Eat more plants. Drink more water. Impossible to have high energy if you eat low-energy foods.

Sleep right

8 hours a day. Dark room with blackout blinds. A proper mattress (insert 8-Sleep affiliate link here…joking).

Exercise

Do it every day.

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I feel like your bloody mother with this energy protocol. This stuff is so simple it’s become cliche, yet most people don’t do any of them. They pollute their bodies with crappy food, scroll the news to stumble upon rage bait, and spike their stress levels with petty thoughts from insufferable people going nowhere in life.

Do what obviously gives you high energy. Thank me later.

You might need a 16-hour day

Wait, what the f*ck?!

Yep. 4-hour workdays are incredible. But sometimes you need to throw in a 16-hour work marathon to remind yourself of what you’re capable of.

See, when you master flow states and choose the right project every day to work on, work suddenly doesn’t feel like work anymore. So if you choose to occasionally work 16 hours in a day, it’s not a big deal. In fact, like me, you may even crave it.

The world isn’t black and white. Your needs will change based on what you’re building and the season of life you’re in.

The point of a 4-hour workday is to prove to yourself that it’s enough if you choose. You get to decide. The old myth of long hours slaving away at a job for a promotion or pay rise that’s probably never going to come is busted.

Independent work done in a flow state without a job is becoming the norm. Lifestyle design is becoming the top priority. And you, too, can embrace it and access its enormous benefits.

The 4-hour workday isn’t a fantasy. It’s a decision. The only question is whether you’re willing to make it. Are you?

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PS

Now that you’re working on max efficiency mode…

Make sure you’re running on the right path.

For that, my new video training will help

Watch — The real path to $20k months — without complicated funnels