How to Cut Your Working Hours Without Cutting Your Income

If you’re a freelancer or small business owner who wants to cut down your working hours without cutting your income, there are two main ways to do it:

• Become more efficient
• Increase your rates

That’s really all there is to it. If you can do both, you’ll probably be able to work even less while earning even more. So how exactly do you do it?

Become More Efficient

There are a couple of ways to become more efficient. The first relies mainly on managing yourself better. Notice we’re talking about managing yourself, not managing time. That’s because, while traditional time management techniques can be useful, the real shift here is learning to manage your energy better.

As Belma McCaffrey states in this Forbes article,

“Focusing your energy on being more productive in less time starts by eliminating factors that slow you down, such as too much noise or not enough fresh air.”

More energy is what makes us more productive, not more time. In fact, the law of diminishing returns actually suggests we get less productive as we work longer and longer hours.

Authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have produced an entire book addressing this concept: The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. While it sounds like it might be a fluffy self-help book, there are some very useful tips in there about how to channel your four key sources of energy (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) as well as how to balance energy expenditure with energy renewal. 

If you genuinely want to get more done in less time, forget multi-tasking, getting up at 5 am, learning to speed read, and all those other time-focused productivity tips, and start seeking out energy-focused productivity tips.

Another way to become more efficient is to do a lot less of what you don’t need to do and more of what you do. Start by dropping all the tasks that literally aren’t contributing anything to your business. As Peter Drucker is reported to have said:

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Next, you’ll want to delegate or outsource that which needs to be done, but not by you. This is effectively the main concept behind Tim Ferris’s much-lauded 4-Hour Work Week book. If you can outsource all the work that can be done by others, you’ll leave yourself with the important work that you actually need to do.

This isn’t possible for all of us, of course, because the budget for outsourcing has to be there and it has to be quite substantial if you’re cutting a 40+ hour week down to four, but we can all take baby steps, and start outsourcing small (preferably cheap) tasks that we don’t need to do.

And now for the second piece of the puzzle:

Increase Your Rates

Earning more per hour is the other way to lock in greater earnings while actually working less. As I’ve covered before, there’s a simple formula to earning a million dollars (and I mean the math is simple, not the process). It focuses on simply hitting a specific pay-per-hour rate, once you combine all your earned and passive income.

Depending on your business model, increasing your income-per-hour might involve:

• Increasing your hourly rate with your current clients
• Searching out higher paying clients or projects
• Increasing passive income from digital products or referrals
• Increasing the price of your current (physical or digital) products

Or of course a combination of all of the above.

Whenever someone tells you there are ‘two simple ways’ to achieve something hard, you know they’re focusing on the tip of the iceberg, but sometimes stripping something down to its simplest form is the best way to start thinking about it. Perhaps you can take a few steps, right now, today, towards managing your energy better, eliminating tasks you don’t need to do, or increasing your income-per-hour. And sometimes even a few small steps can have an impact.

Karen Banes is a freelance writer specializing in entrepreneurship, parenting and lifestyle. She writes articles, website content, ebooks and the occasional award winning short story. Her work has appeared in a range of publications both online and off, including The Washington Post, Life Info Magazine, Transitions Abroad, Brave New Traveler, Natural Parenting Group, and Copia Magazine. Learn More About Karen