The Hidden Advantage of a Shorter Workweek: Why Less Time Makes It Easier to Win

Across the developed world, the average workweek has been shrinking for decades. It’s happening slowly enough that most people don’t notice it, but fast enough that its effects are reshaping society. The typical worker today puts in fewer hours than their parents did, and far fewer than their grandparents. Most people think this trend makes life harder. They assume fewer hours mean lower productivity, a more distracted workforce, and a society slowly drifting toward laziness.But the opposite is true for anyone with ambition. A shortening workweek is one of the biggest structural advantages you can have—because when the crowd lowers its effort, the bar for standing out gets lower too. It becomes easier to get ahead precisely because fewer people are trying.Most people still imagine success as a race where everyone around them is sprinting. The reality is that the track is getting quieter every year. The race is still on, but half the runners have slowed to a jog, and a growing number have stepped off entirely to scroll through their phones. If you understand that dynamic, you can build a life that accelerates while everyone else drifts.The modern world is full of soft corners that didn’t exist before. Remote work blurred work hours. Bosses enforce boundaries so workers don’t burn out. Many offices run four-day weeks or treat Fridays like a warm-up lap rather than a race. The default mode for most people isn’t exertion—it’s conservation. It’s not that they don’t care about success. They just perceive the world as a place where work is something to be minimized, not mastered.That cultural shift creates a quiet opening. You don’t need to outwork the legends of old. You only need to outwork the people around you. If the average person is giving 60 percent effort, giving 80 already puts you in the top tier. If the average is drifting toward a four-day week, giving solid effort five or six days a week puts you in a different orbit entirely. You’re not competing with the heroes of history. You’re competing with people who are trying to finish the day early.Technology intensifies this advantage. Tools that once required specialists—editing software, analytics platforms, AI assistants, high-level research—are accessible to anyone with a laptop. You can make more progress per hour than any previous generation, and the average person uses that power to scroll, game, or half-work while half-distracted. The combination of increased leverage and decreased average effort makes it easier than ever to turn a few focused years into outsized results.There’s also a psychological factor at play. When everyone around you treats work as something oppressive, simply enjoying the craft of improvement becomes a competitive edge. Curiosity becomes rare. Discipline becomes rare. Showing up with purpose becomes rare. In a world full of people trying to escape effort, the person who embraces it quietly rises above the noise. The world starts to feel rigged in your favor, not because you’re superhuman, but because the baseline has fallen so far.A shorter workweek also redistributes the value of time outside work. Most people use their extra hours for entertainment, but the winners use those hours to build something. A side project, a blog, a skill, a language, a business—these used to require sacrificing rest. Now they only require sacrificing distraction. The gap between those two mindsets is enormous. One produces comfort. The other produces momentum.And momentum compounds. If you consistently invest even a little effort while others are decompressing, a year later you gain an advantage that is almost irreversible. You know more. You’ve done more. You’ve built systems, habits, and output that don’t disappear. Meanwhile, the people who took comfort as the default wake up later wondering why everything feels stagnant.None of this means you have to grind endlessly or live in a state of strain. It simply means that choosing to work with intention—especially when others are drifting—has outsized returns. When the average workweek shrinks, the people who maintain strong habits gain a bigger slice of the opportunity space. It’s like walking up an escalator that’s moving down for everyone else, but still up for you.The biggest illusion of the modern world is the belief that success is getting harder. In many ways, it’s getting easier. Fewer people compete seriously. Fewer people pursue mastery. Fewer people are willing to concentrate for more than ten minutes. The baseline of effort is collapsing, and that collapse creates empty space for anyone with ambition to rise.The winners of the next decade will not be the smartest or the luckiest. They will be the ones who recognized the truth early: as society works less, the reward for working well becomes greater. The world is quietly lowering the bar. You only have to step over it.