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While 40 hours has been the standard workweek for the last few generations, the promise has long been that technology will give us more free time. Yet many Americans still find work spilling over into nights and weekends.Whether you want to cut back your hours to make room for a side hustle, to spend more time with your family, or to pursue your own interests and hobbies, it is possible to complete your full-time job in 30 hours a week. As a time management coach for over 16 years, Ive worked with a lot of people in a lot of situations. What Ive seen is that almost everyone can reduce the amount of time theyre working. Getting down to 30 hours or less per week isnt possible in all circumstances, but it is possible in many. Here are the steps to make it happen. Set clear constraints If youre used to working more, youll need to put in place very intentional time constraints to learn to limit yourself to 30 hours a week or less. To make this as easy as possible, I recommend setting a new schedule and trying not to deviate outside of it. For example, this could look like working 8:30 a.m.2:30 p.m. so that you can pick up your kids from school and take them to their activities. Or it could look like a 10 a.m.4 p.m. schedule if youre training for a huge competition and want to get in both early morning and evening workouts. Without these limits, its too easy to fall back into more of a 95 and never really feel free to put extra time into your outside of work goals. Consolidate your work Most likely youve been keeping busy for 40 or more hours per week, but that doesnt mean that youve been effective. One of the fastest ways to reduce your hours is to consolidate your meetings. Take a good, hard look at any recurring meetings. Could they be reduced by shortening them, reducing the frequency, or even eliminating them? Could you cluster meetings on fewer days of the week so that you can open up longer stretches of focused work time on other days? Could you reduce spontaneous meetings by asking people to schedule in advance or send you an email with more details before agreeing to meet? All of these strategies can shave off hours from your schedule. Next, youll want to look at the content of how youre spending your work time. If youre like most professionals, youre likely overinvesting time in communication and under investing time in the highest impact activities. Theres room to consolidate here, too. Some work environments do require instant responsiveness, but in the majority of them, its not necessary. If permissible, turn off all notifications so that youre only engaging with your inboxes and IM tools when you decide its the priority. Then limit your checks to a few times a day. For example, you may set aside time to process through your inboxes at the start of the day, around lunch, and as youre wrapping up. For myself, I have a rule that I reply to business email messages by the next business day, and I reply to LinkedIn messages once a week. You need to figure out the cadence that works for you so that youre checking just enough, but not too much. With the time opened up from reducing meetings and communication time, you can then invest in consolidated focused time where you can complete tasks from start to finish without constant starts and stops. Delegate out as much as possible If you have the ability to delegate to others, youll want to fully leverage other peoples time to open up hours in your schedule. As you go through your day, make a list of what others could do to support you and then begin to hand those items off bit by bit. Here are a few ideas of areas that have been effective for my clients to delegate: Doing research Following up on outstanding items Completing expense reports Booking travel Calling clients for longer conversations Scheduling meetings Answering standard email Putting together presentations Booking meeting rooms Planning events Taking meeting minutes Posting on social media Theres a potential that almost everything outside of your core responsibilities could be done by someone else. Challenge yourself to let go of some task at least once a week so that you can eliminate excess work from your schedule. Automate where you can With rapid advances in technology, more and more parts of your life can be automated or at least augmented. So where its supportive, let tech do the work. For example, for many of my clients, getting some sort of email filtering in place can radically change their relationship with their inboxes. It could be as simple as setting up some of their own filters or using tools like SaneBox that utilize AI for email sorting. For clients who struggle with longer email replies, theyll dump their thoughts into a tool like ChatGPT and ask it to write an email for them. Or theyll write their own email and ask for AI to change the tone. If youre someone who schedules a lot of meetings with outside parties, online scheduling tools like Calendly can be a game changer. You eliminate all back and forth. And if you really struggle with weekly planning, you may want to check out tools like SkedPal, Focuster, or Motion that use AI to come up with a plan for you. If you notice anything else time-consuming and repetitive in your work that you cant give to someone else on your team, see if theres a tool that would gladly do it for you. The options are increasing daily. I cant guarantee that youll carve your schedule all the way down to 30 hours a week or less. That can depend on a number of different factors. But what I can say is that if you try out these strategies to consolidate, delegate, and automate that you can find yourself working significantly less and opening up significantly more time for life outside of work.
Category:
E-Commerce
The most indelible image from Donald Trumps inauguration in January is not the image of the president taking the oath of office without his hand on the Bible. It is not the image of the First Lady scowling under the capacious brim of her hat or the memeified image of Hillary Clinton giggling at Trumps mention of the Gulf of America. It is, of course, the image of the worlds richest and most influential menhenceforth known as the broligarchylined up both literally and figuratively behind Trump. It was a carefully choreographed moment designed to illustrate Trumps strength. But the tableau could also be viewed another way: as a bunch of billionaires who looked scared out of their minds. Just about every man in the lineup had faced off against Trump in his first term: Mark Zuckerberg deemed him too dangerous for Facebook. Jeff Bezos sued him for harboring a personal vendetta that allegedly cost Amazon a $10 billion cloud contract. Tim Cook called Trumps immigrant family separations inhumane and condemned his moral equivalence after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And when Sundar Pichai protested Trumps ban on immigration from majority Muslim countries, Sergey Brin was right there with him. Even Elon Musk clashed with Trump 1.0 after the president pulled out of the Paris climate accords. Now, all of these men stood side by side on the dais, many of them in what appeared to be a naked act of self-preservation as Trumps retributive and transactional second term took off. So, 100 days in, how have these business leaders been rewarded for their subservience? Why, with tariffs and trials and tanking stock prices, of course. The billionaires have begged and bargained in the Oval Office, theyve kicked millions of dollars Trumps way, and theyve compromised on the values they once professed to hold dear. But while their fates under Trumps second term certainly could have been worsethe president once threatened Zuckerberg, for one, with life in prisonthe president has yet to totally forgive and forget. Take Zuckerberg. As Trump took office, the Meta founder bent over backwards to appease him, very publicly announcing, though not in so many words, that he would make it easier for people to say hateful things about immigrants and trans people on Facebook and Instagram and shelling out $25 million to settle a baseless lawsuit Trump filed after being banned from Facebook. But none of that insulated Zuckerberg from the Federal Trade Commissions ongoing antitrust lawsuit, which seeks to unravel Metas ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp. The same goes for Google, which is currently facing its own antitrust trial, through which the Department of Justice has asked a district court to force the search giant to sell off its valuable Chrome browser. As one Trump ally recently told The New York Times about the Meta case: The president still wants his pound of flesh. Tech leaders fealty also hasnt shielded them from turmoil tied to Trumps so-called Liberation Day tariffs, which briefly sent the global markets into freefall. Meta’s stock price plunged on the fear that advertising would dry up. Amazon got walloped as Trump imposed a 145% tariff on goods from China, tossing a grenade into its global supply chain. Google’s data center expansion plans were poised to suffer, as construction costs were set to skyrocket. Even Apple, which scored a tariff exemption on goods from China, may not be spared forevera possibility the company is preparing for as it scrambles to move iPhone production to India. Trumps so-called reciprocal tariffs are still on hold, but all of these companies are still struggling to find their footing in the face of so much uncertainty. Then theres the relentless assault on the very infrastructure that made the United States a tech powerhouse to begin with. Funding for key research institutions has been gutted, driving scientists overseas. Billions in broadband expansion grants have been held up, stalling projects meant to bring faster internet access to rural America. Trump even said during his joint address to Congress that he wanted to get rid of the CHIPS Act, a rare spot of bipartisan consensus designed to spur the construction of new semiconductor plants through billions of dollars in Congressional funding. (So far, the president seems satisfied placing CHIPS Act programming under a new office that will, he says, strike much better deals.) The war on talent has been just as chilling, as the U.S. government revoked more than 1,500 student visas in recent months, before abruptly reversing course. Already experts have called the crackdown a gift to China, which is eager for U.S.-educated STEM graduates to return home. At this point, its hard to see whats in it for the broligarchs. Thats doubly true for Musk. The cost of aligning himself with Trumpand becoming the chainsaw-wielding face of his government slashing efforthas been particularly steep. His popularity has sunk alongside Teslas profits, as protests of the electric vehicle maker have exploded. And yet, at least Musk is an indisputably true believer in Trumps cause. nlike the others who scrambled to make nice with Trump after election day, Musk spent nearly $300 million to get him and other Republicans elected last November. He recruited fellow investors and software engineers to do his bidding at the Department of Government Efficiency, unleashed AI tools on government databases, and bulldozed the regulatory state that he so loathes. After 100 days, Musk may be the only one standing on the dais who got exactly what he paid for.
Category:
E-Commerce
Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg launched Meeno less than two years ago with the intention of it being an AI chatbot that helped users through relationship issues. Now, the company is pivoting to focus on teaching predominantly male users how to connect romantically with women through interactions with voice-based AI characters. [Male loneliness] is a problem thats been getting worse for 30 years, Nyborg tells Fast Company. I never thought that this was something we could just go and snap our fingers and [fix]. The first iteration of Meeno, Nyborg says, allowed the company to prove that it could build something that appealed to men. She says the original platform, which will still be available on the Meeno app, attracted over half of its 100,000-user makeup as men. But they wanted it to yield faster results, and rapid developments to OpenAIs Whisper API and other technologies in the past few months meant it could rapidly decrease the amount of time its AI needed to offer insights. Users, she says, could get benefits within minutes instead of over three to four weeks thanks to the OpenAI advancements. The new Meeno is entirely web based, meaning it’s not going to be hosted on an app store. Users will go to the site, take a brief voice survey, and then get insights into how they present themselves. They’ll then make an account and go through fake scenarios, such as being prompted to talk to a woman while waiting in line at a pizza place. Users who want to go through more scenarios each day can pay $19 a month for a premium subscription. Think of it, she says, like Duolingo for dating. As part of its pivot, Meeno is raising a seed extension, with $2.7 million committed in the past few weeks. (The name, by the way, is a nod to Platos Meno writings.) The key to the platform, Nyborg says, was making it audio based so that it shows a clear intention of getting out of the house and interacting with people in the real world. A Pew Research Center survey from January found that while men and women report roughly equal rates of feeling lonely all or most of the time, men aren’t reaching out to their networks for help as much as women are. Nyborg says she and her investors have been testing out the product in the mornings, often feeling more confident in their conversations later in the day because they were warmed up. “Maybe someone pays you a surprise compliment, based on the band T-shirt that you’re wearing, which has happened to me, and what I’ve realized about myself is because I’m an introvert, if I’ve just left the house and I haven’t spoken to anyone, I’ve realized I can be a bit standoffish or aggressive,” Nyborg says. “And again, people are usually just trying to be nice and it can really make someone’s day doing that.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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