The 3.5-Day Workweek Field Manual
Jamie Dimon says your kids will work 3.5 days a week, someday. I've run that schedule since March 16, 2023. The field manual: the audit, the day types, and the walkaway math.
In April 2026, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon looked into a CBS camera and told the next generation what their working lives would look like: "Your kids are probably working three and a half days a week." He placed the arrival about 30 years out. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan gives the shorter week 3 to 5 years, and Bill Gates floated a 3-day week back in 2023, musing that the purpose of life involves more than jobs.
I've run the schedule they keep predicting since March 16, 2023. It started on my birthday, and I've documented it in public ever since. The predictions describe a future someone might build for you. This field manual shows the version you can build yourself, with the audit and the receipts.
Work half the week. Live all of it.
TL;DR: A 3.5-day workweek is a compressed schedule built by elimination: 3 full working days plus a floating half day, 18 to 24 hours in total. I've run mine since March 16, 2023, and the path there was one calendar audit that cut 60% of my recurring commitments, plus the discipline to keep what remained.
About the author: I'm Marissa Brassfield. I've published at Ridiculously Efficient since 2011, and I've run my business on a 3.5-day workweek since March 16, 2023, with the schedule and the math documented as they happened. At the three-year mark I wrote down the lessons. I've coached 500+ senior leaders through some version of the same subtraction since November 2022, and I made the professional case in Forbes: the best problem-solving leaders work less.
What Is a 3.5-Day Workweek?
A 3.5-day workweek is a working structure of 3 full days plus one half day, totaling 18 to 24 hours. Mine runs Tuesday through Thursday, with a half day that floats to Monday or Friday and never lands on both. The remaining days hold zero work: school pickups, whole days where my phone sits in another room.
The number matters less than the design principle behind it. Every hour on the calendar answers for itself, and the week gets built around the life instead of the leftovers.
Why Do CEOs Keep Predicting It?
The mechanism behind every one of these predictions is the same: AI absorbs the routine layer of knowledge work, and the hours it frees stop needing to be performed at a desk. Yuan points to Henry Ford's assembly line, which helped shrink 6 working days to 5. Dimon's shareholder letter says AI will eventually shorten the workweek across the developed world.
The evidence has been accumulating for years, at company scale. Microsoft Japan tested a 4-day week in 2019 and measured a productivity jump near 40%. Iceland ran public-sector trials with 2,500 workers that researchers called an overwhelming success. In the UK's landmark pilot, 56 of 61 participating companies kept the shorter week after the trial ended. The 4-day workweek movement keeps growing because the results keep repeating.
So the executives and I agree on the mechanism. We differ on the timeline. The institutional version may take decades to reach your industry. My individual version took one birthday and a season of subtraction.
How the Week Actually Works
Every day on my calendar runs as one of 3 day types, adapted from Dan Sullivan's Entrepreneurial Time System at Strategic Coach. Revenue days hold the focused, high-value work clients pay for. Reset days absorb the prep and cleanup around them. Recharge days stay workless by design, and my week defaults to three of them.
Two boundary conditions keep the structure honest. My son's school drop-off is the one meeting on my calendar that never moves. And rest gets scheduled first, a rule I unpacked in the earned laziness refresh: the days I do nothing are the reason the other days work.
The Elimination Audit: How You Get There
The 3.5-day workweek replaced a 60-to-70-hour operating pattern that burned me out on an 18-month cycle. At the peak I ran a calendar color-coded into 15-minute blocks and hit inbox zero by 9 a.m. Here is what I wrote about that season:
Everything felt equally urgent. Everything felt equally necessary. That's how you know you've lost the plot.
The way out was one audit. Every recurring commitment on my calendar answered three questions:
- Why does this exist?
- Is the original reason still true?
- What would happen over the next 14 days if it disappeared?
That audit cut 60% of what filled my weeks, and the value survived intact in what remained. Every commitment that goes through the questions takes a margin verdict, and the four verdicts spell LEAD: Leave it, Eliminate, Automate, Delegate. Check the doors in order past Leave it, Eliminate before Automate and Automate before Delegate, so nobody inherits unexamined work. The guided notebook version of the audit lives here, free with membership.
On my old 70-hour week, about 7 hours produced the results. On the 20-hour week, about 2 hours produce the results, and the structure exists to protect them. The full cut list lives in the strategic elimination audit, and the conclusion from the math post still holds:
The optimization was subtraction.
What About the Money?
The honest answer includes a walkaway. In the first half of 2025, I offboarded a client engagement worth $10,000 a month, $120,000 a year, because the calls claimed early mornings that belong to my son. A knot took up residence in my stomach every Sunday evening while I talked myself into keeping the contract. The knot dissolved the week the final invoice went out.
That was additional revenue rather than survival revenue, and the distinction is the whole discipline. The audit tells you what to cut. The walkaway number tells you what you're willing to cut when the cut costs something. My income has grown across the years since the restructure, a receipt I keep dated in the case study, and motherhood is what made the math legible in the first place:
Motherhood dragged me back to the singular whether I wanted to go there or not.
The Field Manual, In Order
- Run the elimination audit. Put every recurring commitment through the three questions above. Expect the honest answer to remove half or more of your calendar. Mine lost 60%.
- Classify your days. Give each day one job using the 3 day types, and start the week from a default of Recharge days you then trade away deliberately.
- Set your boundary conditions. Pick the commitments that never move, and let them outrank work by design. Mine is a school drop-off.
- Price your walkaway. Decide in advance what revenue you would decline to protect the structure. A number you set calmly beats a number you negotiate while depleted.
- Re-audit quarterly. Commitments regrow. The audit is a ritual, and the structure survives on repetition.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a 3.5-day workweek?
A working structure of 3 full days plus one floating half day, 18 to 24 hours in total. Mine runs Tuesday through Thursday with the half day on Monday or Friday, and I've kept it since March 16, 2023.
How many hours a week is a 3.5-day workweek?
Between 18 and 24 hours. The range flexes with the season, and the ceiling is the point: the structure caps working hours so the eliminated ones stay eliminated.
Do you earn less on a 3.5-day workweek?
My income has grown since the restructure, documented in my public case study. The schedule did cost me one $10,000-a-month engagement I chose to walk away from, and that trade is the discipline the structure runs on.
How long does it take to move to a 3.5-day workweek?
One thorough elimination audit plus a season of holding the cuts. I restructured on March 16, 2023, on the strength of a single audit that removed 60% of my recurring commitments.
Will AI make the 3.5-day workweek standard?
Jamie Dimon says roughly 30 years. Eric Yuan says 3 to 5. The company-scale trials already point the same direction. My receipts say an individual version is available now to anyone willing to run the audit.
Start With the Audit
The CEOs are describing your grandchildren's schedule. The audit on this page describes your next quarter. If you want a guide through it, a Strategic Clarity Session is the 60-minute diagnostic version, and The Simplicity Protocol newsletter delivers one elimination strategy every Tuesday, implementable in 20 minutes or less.
Which commitment on your calendar would fail the 14-day test first?
Stop Adding. Start Subtracting.
The world keeps accelerating. The Simplicity Protocol helps ambitious professionals do less to achieve more through weekly elimination strategies you can implement in 20 minutes or less.
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