The Truth Behind the 4-Hour Workweek (And How to Make It Work)

5 shifts to turn your dreams into reality...

Bay of Islands, NZ. The kind of view you regularly get when you design your life with intention.

The 4-Hour Workweek doesn’t promise easy. But it does promise options.

I read it on a flight home after spending a few days with friends in Cyprus who were 'making money online'. I had no idea what that even meant, but I was hooked.

I downloaded the book before takeoff and devoured it somewhere over Eastern Europe.

It wasn’t the four-hour bit that grabbed me. It was the idea that you could design your life. That you didn’t need to wait for retirement or win the lottery to reclaim your time. You could work on your own terms, from wherever you happened to be, and still earn enough to live well.

That book opened a door in my mind.

Not long after, my husband and I sold everything, packed up our lives, grabbed our four-year-old, and flew to Cyprus (housesitting for said friends) with a secondhand laptop and barely a plan.

The rest, as they say, is history.

15 years later, with multiple 6 & 7-figure businesses under my belt, 45+ countries lived and worked in, and more mistakes (and comebacks) than I can count, I can say with full confidence:

What Tim Ferriss laid out in that book is absolutely possible.

You really can earn more, work less and design your life how you want it. But only if you build with intention and make some very specific decisions about how you structure your work and your days.

Here are the five shifts that made it real for me, and can do the same for you.

1. Start with Leverage, Not Hustle

Leverage means creating something once that can keep working for you without constant effort. It’s how you uncouple your time from your income. Without it, you’ll always be stuck trading hours for money, no matter how “flexible” your lifestyle looks.

If you're freelancing, coaching, consulting, selling services, or even running a small business that relies on your daily presence, you're in a time-for-money model. And that’s a fine starting point. But if your goal is to work less while still earning enough to fund your travels, you’ll need to shift that model.

So how do you do that? You start building leverage into your work.

Here are a few ways to create leveraged income:

1. Package your knowledge into a product

Create a toolkit, a guide, a printable, a journal, a workshop, or a simple course. Anything you can build once and sell again and again without needing to show up live.

2. Create leverageable assets

These could be digital courses, ebooks, templates, subscriptions, memberships, or even physical products like planners or supplements. If you can produce it once and deliver it repeatedly, it counts.

3. Build content that sells while you sleep

Blog posts, Substack articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, and newsletters can all promote your products, bring in affiliate income, or build trust that leads to paid offers.

4. Automate your delivery and marketing

Use platforms like Podia, Gumroad, Shopify, ConvertKit, or Substack to handle your sales, emails, and product access. Once it’s set up, your systems can do the heavy lifting.

The early days will feel like work. You’ll need to create, build, test, and tweak before it runs smoothly. But every piece you put in place becomes part of something bigger.

Over time, you create an ecosystem. Your content attracts the right people. Your systems guide them through your offers. Sales happen without you being glued to your inbox.

If you can clearly envision your outcome, and you’re willing to grow your audience, create your assets, and set up the systems, then all that’s left is consistency and patience.

2. Focus Like Your Freedom Depends on It

Because it does.

Distraction is one of the biggest killers of momentum. It’s not the lack of ideas that holds most people back. It’s trying to do all of them at once.

I’ve been there. Ten business ideas scribbled across notebooks. Five domain names bought in a week. A course half-finished, a blog post started, a funnel mid-build, and a shiny new platform always just one click away.

The result is burnout, and nothing finished.

If you want to move faster with less effort, here’s what to do instead:

• Pick one platform to show up on regularly (Substack, YouTube, a blog, Instagram — just choose one to focus your energy)

• Pick one product or offer to build, refine, and promote (a guide, a course, a service — whatever matches your skills and audience)

• Commit to one schedule for creating and sharing content (weekly is enough if you’re consistent)

• Ignore everything else until you’ve given this path enough time to prove itself

Read that last bullet again;

You can revisit your other ideas later. They’re not going anywhere. But trying to build everything at once will only slow you down.

Freedom comes from finishing.

And the only way to finish something is to start focusing like you mean it.

3. Build Systems That Run Without You

If everything in your business depends on you being online 24/7, it’s going to feel like a hike with no summit, just one long uphill slog with no view at the top.

Systems are how you get there faster (and appreciate the views along the way).

They’re not just for big businesses or people already earning. In fact, the earlier you start thinking in systems, the easier everything becomes down the line.

At its core, a system is anything that saves time, reduces decisions, or stops you repeating yourself.

You can systemise using:

• Templates for emails, landing pages, product descriptions, social posts

• AI tools to help you brainstorm ideas, write faster, summarise notes, or repurpose content

• Schedulers to batch and queue content ahead of time, so you’re not stuck posting on the fly

• Simple workflows that outline what happens when someone signs up, buys, or books with you

And systems aren’t just digital. Sometimes the smartest system is another human being.

If you spend hours on tasks that drain your energy or don’t move the needle (updating Canva graphics, tweaking fonts, organising folders), it’s time to look at outsourcing.

Even just a few hours a week can give you back space to focus on higher-value work, like creating products, growing your audience, or engaging with buyers.

Whether you’re just starting out or earning consistently, the goal is the same:

Create repeatable steps that make your business lighter, not heavier.

That’s what gives you flexibility, frees up your time, and turns your ideas into something sustainable, even when you step away.

4. Know Your Enough Number

You don’t need to be rich. You need to be free.

Years ago, my husband and I were floating in the Andaman Ocean on a Thursday afternoon, cold Chang beers in hand, staring up at the beautiful blue sky. We’d been living in Thailand for a while by that point, working online, spending our days together, and picking our projects.

And I remember saying, “What would we change if we had a million in the bank right now?”

We both said in unison 'Nothing!'

That was the moment I realised we were already free.

That’s your enough number.

It’s not a random figure plucked from a motivational podcast. It’s your personal baseline for freedom.

It’s what you need each month to live the life you want, with a bit of wiggle room and peace of mind built in.

Start by asking:

• Where do I want to live or travel?

• What kind of lifestyle do I actually enjoy day to day?

• What does that cost per month, realistically?

Add it up: accommodation, food, transport, insurance, extras. Then give yourself a buffer. That’s your Freedom Budget. The number that buys you time, choice, and breathing room.

And here’s where this gets really good.

When you stop aiming for vague goals like "six figures" and start focusing on your enough number, things get much simpler. You make better decisions, stop overcomplicating your offers, and stop saying yes to things that don’t move you forward.

Whether your number is $2,000 or $20,000 a month, once you know it, you can start building with intention.

And when you do, you’ll stop trying to do everything, and start seeing how focused effort in the right direction can give you exactly what you need, with far less work than you thought.

5. Play the Long Game (with Short Bursts of Intensity)

You don’t need to work hard forever. But you do need to show up fully when it counts.

One of the biggest shifts I’ve made over the years is moving from constant effort to intentional sprints. I can launch a full course in 30 days, write a book in under a month, and build digital products from scratch in a week. But I can’t keep up that pace year-round.

Because that’s not sustainable, and it’s certainly not freedom.

What works isn’t hustle for hustle’s sake. It's short bursts of focused energy, followed by time to breathe.

I like to work in simple, repeatable cycles:

Create → Automate → Coast → Create again.

(NB: This is a huge work/travel hack for nomads on the go by the way.)

When you’re in the creation phase, you go all in. You build the product, write the content, set up the systems, do the work. Then you automate what you can (emails, delivery, marketing), so it doesn’t need you every single day.

And once that’s up and running? You pause. You don’t walk away, but you slow the pace.

This is the time to just keep the wheels turning. Post content, engage with your audience, send your emails, and let your systems do the heavy lifting. You’re not building anything new, you're just keeping things moving and letting your audience continue to grow.

Then, when you’re ready, you go again.

This is the part so many solopreneurs miss. They build something great, but they never switch off. They're always chasing the next big thing.

But you don’t need to run at full speed forever.

You just need to build something solid enough that it keeps ticking while you rest, reset, or focus on what’s next.

What the 4-Hour Workweek Really Meant

When I first read The 4-Hour Workweek, it opened a door I didn’t know existed. The idea that you could design your life around freedom, instead of squeezing scraps of it into weekends, felt radical.

And while I didn’t build a four-hour week (at least not every week 😉), I did build a life of choice, a business that supports how I want to live, and a rhythm that gives me space.

That’s what the book really taught me, and what I hope this article helps bring into focus.

If you want to work less and earn more, it’s absolutely possible. But only if you do it on purpose.

• Start with leverage so your income doesn’t rely on trading time for money

• Focus your energy on one path until it starts to work

• Build systems that keep things moving, even when you step away

• Know your enough number so you stop chasing and start choosing

• Work in sprints, not slogs, and give yourself permission to rest

And remember, a lifestyle business that gives you freedom looks nothing like a VC-backed startup, yet so much of today’s advice is written for people chasing unicorns.

You don’t need to work 24/7, or sacrifice the next twenty years to be happy later.

You’re not building an empire.

You’re designing your life: doing what you want, from where you want, with who you want.

And that is what the 4 hour workweek truly looks like.

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