10 Ways To Work Less And Get Paid More

Are you exhausted after a long day of work? Living paycheck-to-paycheck? Too many people think working harder is the way to solve money problems. The truth is you can work less and get paid more, but you have to do it right for the maximum benefit.

If hard work guaranteed success we would have a lot more financially wealthy people. Instead, we see people working longer and longer hours with less to show for their efforts.

The 10 ways to work less and get paid more below are easy to use. The last thing a list like this should do is add more to your workload. Used properly, you work fewer hours, get more done, and have the money in your pocket to show for it.

1.) An 80% Workload Drop; 20% Income Drop

There is scientific proof you are working too hard! The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. The remaining 80% of your efforts only brings you 20% of the gian.

Twenty years ago, I was running myself ragged in my tax practice. My employee count during tax season approached 20, with five or more full-time employees all year around. The office glowed 24/7. It was rare for the office to be empty anytime of the day or night for the four months of tax season (January – April).

Managing a growing business took time and was coupled with stress. I decided to review my entire client list. I had the tax software kick out my complete list of clients from top to bottom, ordered by the highest to lowest fees collected on each account.

It was obvious 400 clients were costing me more than fees derived from said clients. I sent those 400 clients a letter explaining I was not earning a profit on their account and that they needed to find a new tax professional. Because I love my clients, regardless the level of profit they bring in, I included a list of local tax professionals they should consider contacting.

I started with ~2,000 clients and fired 20%. What do you think happened the following tax season?

You might think I had a small decline in revenue, with profits relatively unchanged. Instead, my revenues increased double digits and profits reached their highest point of my career! Why?

Well, my best paying clients wanted to pay me more, but I was too busy to serve them at the level they deserved. (How awesome are my clients to wait for me to regain my sanity instead of leaving?) Now I had more time to serve my remaining clients better and they paid for the additional service.

This story shows even someone like your favorite accountant can focus on the wrong metric. I knew better, but could not bring myself to thin the herd.

If you are a business owner, I bet you do the same. Focus on the 20% that matter because they generate 80% or so of your revenues. With the time saved, you can add new clients that generate better profits, thereby reducing your workload and increasing your income.

2.) 80/20 Rule in Your Personal Life

The Pareto Principle works great for business owners or those with a side hustle, but what about the rest of us?

The good news is the Pareto Principle works everywhere. Yes, the 80% productivity from 20% of my efforts is an estimate. In my office, no matter how hard I try to manage my client list, no more than 35% generate 80% or more of revenues. Most years ~27% of clients produce 80% of revenues.

It is impossible for me to know the details of your life. And I have no desire to micromanage your life even if I had the details.

What I can do is encourage you to review your spending and time management.

Track your spending for 90 days and see where your money is really going. There is slack in your spending that is low hanging fruit. Review your bank statements and credit card statements carefully. You may have serious money going out the window for subscriptions you rarely, if ever, use.

Do the same with your time. Track your day for at least a month. Longer is better. Look at where you spend the most time and effort and match it with results. I bet there are plenty of areas where you can get back large chunks of time at a cost of zero.

Many households have multiple sources of income. There can be more than one job involved, a side hustle, investments.

Once measured, it might make sense to drop a second job or side hustle so you don’t need daycare anymore. For some, this alone will increase your income after adjusting for the costs of acquiring said income.

Each person reading this is different. All I can do is encourage you to review every detail of your personal life. Once something is measured it often becomes obvious what needs to be done. This review process should be done on a regular basis to prevent waste from creeping into your life.

3.) Get Some Sleep!

If there is a common thread among clients struggling, this is it. Why people think they can pound themselves like a machine and still function is a mystery.

Ryan Holiday is a New York Times Bestselling author many times over and one part of his success formula is getting ample sleep.

Sleep is not an elective. It is a vital part of human health.

And the issue goes beyond working inhuman hours at work. When we get home we can go late into the evening watching YouTube videos or watching Netflix. Reading a book might put us to sleep, but we have many ways to keep ourselves awake to our own detriment.

When I was younger, I worked ungodly hours at the office during tax season. I discovered the first two weeks I could pound out 20 hour work days seven days a week. Week three it started to hurt. Week four and after were very painful and my work quality suffered.

What took me longer to learn was that pain was not the deciding factor. Just because I could do it without much pain did not mean my work quality was at peak performance. Worse, a single night of good sleep did not heal the weeks of abuse. It took months for a full recovery after tax season. And then the errors were revealed, causing more pain with no revenue to show for my arrogance.

You, like me, make poor decisions when tired or exhausted. Sleep is not this evil thing to avoid. Ample sleep is vital for a good life. Lack of sleep can even shorten your life and cause health issues!

Worse, you may need to make a financial decision and if you are sleep deprived you will make the decision with the same impairment as an intoxicated driver. Cutting spending that is a complete waste requires a clear, well rested mind. Same goes for investment decisions. Your best decisions do not come after pulling an all-nighter.

Get ample sleep!!!

4.) Read More (or Less)

Regular readers of this blog know my love of reading. Warren Buffet has said more than once he spends most of his day reading. However, some people read too much! (Did I just say that?)

Buffett reads with a different style. He skims a lot of newspapers and earnings reports. This is a different type of reading than used when reading a novel or non-fiction book.

Most of my day also involves reading. I read tax books as I prepare returns and write articles for a variety of publishers. Newsfeeds also are part of my daily routine. I read as part of my job. It is what I do. But the reading I do in the office is along the lines of research and is a different type of reading from books I wish to consume cover-to-cover.

I discovered that a week vacation is not a 24/7 readfest. If I want to remember what I am reading, especially if consuming new material, I need to limit myself to no more than four hours per day, maybe an hour more for novels. Anything more and eye fatigue and brain fog team up to reduce the pleasure of the reading experience.

Bill Gates is famous for taking a few “think weeks” each year. He brings books to read. All media is out. The time is spent reading and in deep thought.

You might think Gates is a machine during think week. You would be wrong. Think week is not about beating yourself for seven days. Instead, it is time to focus on the topic of interest.

Gates takes time from his secluded location for meals and walks. Reading difficult material requires a walk, coupled with a healthy self-talk, to fully digest the information and process it. Think week is not a speed test; it is time to slow down and focus.

Reading is vital to wealth. If you want to earn the same or more while working less you will need to grow your knowledge. But your growth isn’t about volume. Reading less more fully so you understand the material is a million times more important than checking off a list of books you sped through, learning nothing along the way.

So, depending on your habits, you may need to read more (most people) or less (for those with an insatiable desire to learn more). Done right, your new knowledge and growing experience allows you to earn more while working less.

5.) Deep Thinking

Most people need 8-9 hours of sleep per day. Reading two hours can be better than reading four hours if you retain and process the material better. Then we come to deep thinking.

Another lesson from my office.

I make every effort to tackle the difficult tasks early in the day when my mind is most fresh. Late night is often not my best time for handling the toughest projects.

My grandfather used to say, “You get most of what you will get done today before noon.” I find his words are still true.

We all know about the afternoon slump. And after an eight hour day on the job we are not mentally at our best. For me, late night work requires a review later to verify I didn’t do something I’ll regret later.

Leaders need to take time for deep thinking. Deep thinking takes time and requires no interruptions. Interruptions, multi-tasking, and distractions destroy creativity, leading to subpar performance.

Deep thinking is hard. When you close the door you open your mind to all possibilities. But there are limits.

Age plays a role. So does the time of day. And the amount of sleep you have been getting.

Most people can stand about two hours of deep thinking per day max. More than that and the mind begins to wander. You are no longer in deep thinking; you are daydreaming. There is a difference.

Those two hours dedicated to deep thinking can be broken into two sessions. Regardless how you spend your deep thinking time, it is these moments of deep thought where you will get the ideas for living life on your terms. Once again, we are all different. I can’t tell you what you must focus on when in deep thought. It certainly will change as your life changes. The important part is you take the time, away from noise and distractions, to think. Deeply.

6.) Believe Half of What You Read and None of What You Hear

My dad always said, “Believe half of what you read and none of what you hear.” It was his way of saying people often have the story and facts wrong. Even when filtered through the writing process, a large portion is bupkis.

One of the easiest ways to improve your life is to turn off the news. Politics is the worst. The negative messages and outright lies take a toll on one’s soul. It is hard to have a good life when you fill it with garbage on a regular basis. Some news is fine. Limit yourself to 30 minutes a day; an hour tops. Don’t go down the rabbit hole, spending a large part of each day listening to the news and discussing it. Life is too short for that. And remember what my dad always said.

7.) Investments

Working less and earning more is about more than traditional employment. Earning more on your investments is also nice and eventually frees you from working so many hours at a traditional job or running your business.

Remember the Pareto Principle above. It applies to investments, too. A few investments will generate the bulk of your gains. Rare is the year where everything performs at near the same performance levels.

Another story from the office.

I have a client with a very successful business. He keeps $500,000+ in his business and personal checking accounts. At most, $150,000 of working capital is needed. Even $100,000 would suffice.

I have on several occasions asked him to consider a money market account or Treasury Direct for his excess cash.

At the bank he is pulling 0%. If he followed my advice, he would earn 5%+ as I write. (Short-term interest rates fluctuate a lot. The 5% I use may be high or low when you read this. Still, you understand my point.) Treasury Direct is U.S. government debt and is safe enough to called guaranteed.

My client could be pulling an additional $20,000 per year without a second more of work. Free money! If he used a money market account he could keep most of the funds invested at all times in safe, liquid products. Yes, he could be $25,000 richer every year without risk. But he doesn’t do it.

Understand, this is a current client. I will not use names. He reads this blog so I ask he refrain from commenting on this post. It isn’t anyone’s business who he is. But there is a massive lesson in the story.

When you understand how money works you can increase your investment performance without additional risk.

If the goal is to work less and earn more, then you have to be smart with your investments.

8.) Guaranteed Pay Increase

Over the years, several of my employees have gone out on their own. I encouraged them. It wasn’t because I wanted to get rid of them, but rather to help them move to the next level.

Your employer is a middleman. She will get some of the profits. It is just the way it works. However, it is possible to keep a working relationship with your current employer (if you like working for her) and have your own business.

Currently, I have an employee that is working a side hustle doing bookkeeping. I send new clients her way because I don’t take new clients anymore.

The neat thing about this is she still has a relationship with my practice which brings a safety net with it. She also has her own clients. She does the work, bills at her own rate, and handles everything on her own. The best part is she makes more doing this than I could ever pay her (unless I wanted to work for free, which I don’t).

The urban legend is that self-employment is more work. It can be. But if you spend your time learning and growing you can earn a lot more while working modest hours.

There are so many people running a side hustle as their main source of income these days. This can allow you to get your life back.

Most of your hours at the office are not hyper-productive. When you work for you there is no longer a need to fill an employer’s requirement. Use technology to improve your quality, reduce the time needed for a project, and make more for knowing it can be done.

9.) Never Take Off the Stack

My dad was a wise man. My paternal grandfather wasn’t a slouch either.

My grandfather once told me, “Never take off the stack.”

He meant you can spend the income from savings and investments, but never, EVER(!) kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

As long as you never touch the goose, your income will either stay the same or climb. (Reinvested gains become part of the stack.)

Think of it this way. Imagine I have a twin brother. We both go to the same high school, take the same classes, get the same grades, and go straight into the workforce for the same employer the day after graduation. Neither of us decide to go to college.

Both our paychecks are exactly the same, $1,000 per week.

One week later, we get out first paycheck. My twin spends it all. He gets nice furniture, a large TV, and subscribes to several video platforms. I, on the other hand, spend only $800 of my wage, including taxes, electing to invest the unspent money in an index fund.

After a year, my twin has exactly $0. Thank God he didn’t go into debt! I, the good brother, invested $10,400. If the stock market climbs 10% per year on average, I stand to be ahead another $500 or so by year-end.

In 10 years, my twin brother is flat broke. My steady investing has $100,400 of my original money and an account balance of over $165,000.

The dividend gives me an extra income boost before I lift a finger. My twin brother, not so much.

Plus I get capital appreciation! This deal gets better by the day, for me.

The message is clear. Save and invest today! And never kill the goose laying the golden egg. A growing passive income stream is the best way to have more financial wealth, allowing you to work less and enjoy life more.

10.) Sharpen the Saw

In Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit 7 is Sharpen the Saw.

The lessons in this article are only the start. If your goal is to grow your income and have more time for yourself, one reading of this is not enough. It isn’t the end of your studies either. There are a lot of posts on this blog worth your reading time. And you can’t stop there! My opinions and worldview are not the only valid ones.

Reviewing your investments is a sharpening of the saw. And saw blades need regular sharpening.

The 80/20 Rule is a great place to start. Find things wasting your time with not much in the way of reward. Eliminate those items. Run the numbers again and you will find more do not make the cut.

Inefficiencies always creep in. Instead of working more hours for the man, spend more time educating yourself. Cut out the non-productive.

Apply these 10 Ways to Work Less and Get Paid More to your personal and work life. But beware! This is not about always being at peak efficiency. Down time is good. Reading is great. So is watching a movie. And time with family and friends is the definition of the good life.

Sharpen the saw often so the work is easier.

Most of all, make you the most important part of your life. Live Life on Your Terms.

This post originally appeared at The Wealthy Accountant.

Category: Personal Finance