What would you do differently in your business today if you knew that a year from now you wanted to work less? Maybe you want Fridays off, maybe you want to take an entire month off every summer. Maybe you’re thinking about maternity leave or sabbatical. Maybe you want to travel more.
Or maybe, honestly, you’ve been in business for a minute and you just do not want to spend so many freaking hours sitting at your computer anymore.
You want to work LESS a year from now.
And whatever your reason, when we talk about working less, the conversation immediately turns to: what can I take off my plate? What can I outsource? What can I automate? How can I time block better? How can I cram 40 hours of work into 25?
While I get it — I’ve definitely been there — if I decided today that a year from now I wanted to work less, I wouldn’t start by opening my calendar and asking what I can delete.
Instead, I’d be asking: what am I doing right now that requires me to keep doing it forever? Because I think that is the bigger problem.
A lot of us have businesses that technically give us freedom. We don’t have a boss. We can set our own hours and our own pricing. We can take off a random day or week if we want to.
But the problem is that even with all that freedom, we’ve built marketing, delivery, offers, and operations that require us constantly. If I stop posting, leads slow down. If I stop creating, nothing gets published. If I stop answering questions, things don’t move forward. If I’m the only one who knows how to do something, it doesn’t get done unless I do it.
Eventually you realize that yes, you’ve built yourself a flexible business — but you’ve also built a business that is incredibly dependent on you.
Table of Contents
I also want to stress: this is not hypothetical advice for me. I’ve actually done this in my own business twice. I’ve intentionally built my business so that it relies less and less on me personally, and I’ve been able to reduce how much I work without needing to reduce the business alongside it.
I’m actually still doing this. While I do love to work, I’m realizing as I build a bigger and bigger business that white space is the work for me. I need time to go down rabbit holes and do my own things that make me better at the job. I need to intentionally plan for that.
I also have a young kid — if you’re new here, I have a four-year-old. I’m recording this in September, and I literally said to Jake the other day that next summer is going to be the last summer before kindergarten. I’m weirdly emotional about it.
So while I can look back and see that I’ve made these changes intentionally over and over because I wanted to work less, I’m also looking a year from now and wanting to work less again.
And around here, we’re not just going to be thinking about working less — we are going to be doing it.
Helping Clients Work Less In Their Business
Not only have I done this in my own business, I’ve also helped clients do it. I love when clients hire me because they’re ready to grow, but something that feels extra special is when they say: I know I want to have kids, I know I want to travel more, I know I need to be more available for something going on in my life, so I am doing this.
There’s something special about being able to tie a specific result to the work (something other than just wanting more leads).
I’ve seen these things work over and over again. So let’s get started. As a reminder, I run a search-driven marketing agency where we help small business owners get found online through blogging, Pinterest, podcasting, and SEO. A lot of what I do is about exactly this idea: how do we build marketing that continues to work for you without requiring you to wake up every morning and feed the content machine.
This is also just part one, so make sure you’re subscribed or following The Kara Report Podcast wherever you’re listening — you’re definitely going to want to catch part two next week.
Leverage Is the Word
If you’re loving this topic, check out episode 105, where I talked about my 2026 goals. One of my words for the year is *leverage*, and you are going to see that come through here.
As a little behind the scenes: you’re probably going to hear me say the word *leverage* about 85 times in this episode, because that really is it. If you want to work less, you have to leverage the things you can in order to make that happen.
1. I’d Build a Way to Get Found Without Showing Up Every Day
Of course, you know me — the very first thing I’d do if I want to work less a year from now is build a way to get found without showing up every day (like starting a blog!). This is obviously where I’m biased, but it would be priority number one. If I ever start another business, it’s going to be priority one.
The only time I recommend starting somewhere else is if you have the time for a lot of output and need money fast. If you need your business to work in 30 days, TikTok is probably what I’d recommend. In general, though, the question is: how can you build marketing assets, long-form content, search-driven things that set you up for success?
I would always want some percentage of my leads to come from people who are actively looking for what I have to offer, versus people I interrupted on Instagram. If your entire marketing strategy requires you to post, engage, show your face, send emails, and create something new every day, I don’t know how you do that and also create the ability to work less. That seems stressful to me.
Start Building Your Content Library Now
Instead, I would start focusing on building your content library now. Spend the next year creating assets that can keep bringing people into your business. For me, that’s blogging — and it also includes podcast episodes that turn into blog posts, which is my favorite service to offer.
I hope this episode brings me people for the next two years. I hope that when people search “how to work less” or “I’m a workaholic in my small business,” this episode shows up for them. That’s the goal.
The reality is that this kind of long-form content is what Google and AI bots love, because there’s so much depth to it. I know that reels and Instagram posts can start being found on Google too — that’s a topic for another day — but long-form is where the real traction lives.
That is why I’m prioritizing this kind of content in my own business, as somebody who loves to work but also loves the time when I’m not working. I said this on Threads the other day: I genuinely love blogging. I love writing. I love diving into topics.
The Compounding Power of Search-Driven Content
I love the business and life that I have because of blogging. So while this is one of those things you can’t expect to work overnight, I do think it’s the place you want to start — because I promise you, you want the freedom it gives you.
It’s also important to talk about how this kind of work compounds. Month one can feel very underwhelming. Month three might still feel underwhelming. But it’s important to stay focused on the fact that you are building a library.
You’re giving Google many ways to find you. You’re giving AI many places to reference you. You’re creating things that other people can link to and binge-read, and you can create supporting content — Threads posts, Instagram posts, Pinterest — that all leads back to this long-form content you spent a little extra time creating.
You’re basically building something that doesn’t disappear because you took a week off to be more available for your kids going back to school. I know that’s top of mind for so many of us.
Search Gives You Marketing Leverage
Search gives you marketing leverage — and that’s the magic word of this episode. Search-driven content lets you build something once and get found for months.
If you want to dive deeper into that, grab my private podcast, where I talk about my philosophy of creating content that gets in front of people who are actively searching for it. If you want to work less later, you need some of the work you’re doing today to still be working for you later. This is a very one-plus-one-equals-two situation.
Obviously this is what I do for a living, so I’m extremely passionate about it — and if you want to outsource your blogging, head here.
2. I’d Embrace AI, But I’d Be Ruthless About What Is Actually Useful
If you want to work less, use AI. I think it would be ridiculous not to. I know there are some moral and environmental concerns, and I can’t fault anyone for standing by that, but if you want to work less, AI is standing right in front of you begging to be used.
That said, AI itself can become a gigantic productivity hobby. You can spend three hours building an automation, two hours researching the latest model, an afternoon making a custom GPT or Claude skill. You can spend six hours hooking up all your applications to Claude, only to realize they don’t work the way you thought they would.
All of that effort might save you 11 minutes a month. Or worse, it adds things to your plate that you weren’t previously doing and don’t really need to do — now you have one more thing to manage instead of more time saved.
So my filter is: does this reduce the amount of work that needs me, myself, and I? Not just “can AI do this?” Because AI can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean you need all of them.
Prioritize Boring AI
I personally like to prioritize boring AI. First drafts, research, organizing information — that kind of thing. One of my clients did something really cool here: she has a Google Drive folder where she uploads all the stock photos I can use for her blogs.
The folder structure is a little annoying to navigate — labeled by the stock company and then by their collection names, which means there are 50 folders and I can’t always know which one has what I need. So she had Claude go through the folders and create a Google Sheet, essentially a cheat sheet. It maps out which collection houses images of money, a woman sitting at a desk, weddings — whatever I’m looking for. I go to the sheet, find what I need, and go into the right folder. Very helpful, very demure, very mindful.
AI is also really good at recognizing patterns, and there are so many ways to use that. We are too close to our own businesses to see clearly. A simple example: if you want more reviews, look at the reviews you’re already getting. As a human, you’re going to have bias you can’t avoid, but dropping all your reviews into Claude can surface patterns you might want to double down on.
The same goes for data analysis. If you’ve been saying you don’t understand Google Analytics, drop a spreadsheet into AI and have it break things down in your own language. So much of this stuff you don’t even need to learn how to do yourself anymore, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. For a weekly or monthly review, AI can be incredibly helpful.
Finding the Right AI Guidance
There’s also a lot of AI automation worth embracing. Her AI Club with Kinsey and Joyce is my favorite AI membership. They have two tracks, a regular tier and a VIP one. I’m in the VIP, but I got so much out of the regular membership. The VIP tier is something they just launched, so don’t feel like you need to jump straight to that.
As small business owners, we cannot stay on top of every single new AI development. Find someone whose style you love, who isn’t throwing shiny objects at you constantly, and who is ideally also a business owner. Then just learn from them directly. Let them do the testing, tweaking, and sourcing, and just give you the highlights.
AI for Execution, Not Replacement
Bringing it back to leverage: AI is what gives you execution leverage. Protect your valuable thinking — strategy, opinions, taste, the things that actually make your business different. But for executing, AI needs to be helping you.
I want AI removing work from my plate. I don’t want it removing me from my business. If you want to hear more on this, check out episode 129, where I talk about how AI is raising the standards of everything — because everyone can now do mediocre, which means we all need to be excellent.
3. I’d Narrow My Offer Suite
About a year and a half ago, in episode 75, I talked about bold decisions I made with my new website — and one of the biggest was majorly reducing the number of offers I had. Looking back, I knew at the time too: it was one of the most important things I could have done as someone who wants to build a business that requires a bit less of me.
More offers do not simply mean more ways to make money. They mean every single offer requires another sales page, another messaging angle, workflows, onboarding, more things for your team to learn, more decisions to make in the future, more context switching, and more things that can go wrong.
I love a generalist marketer — I really do. As a small business owner, I specialize in blogging, Pinterest, and podcast SEO, but I’m generally quite competent with Instagram best practices, TikTok, and a range of other things. I think we all need some level of general competence across different platforms.
However, as someone selling these things, adding an offer like social media management would mean staying current on another algorithm that is a whole other beast. Every offer has an operational cost. And as someone who has done this many times, I think we do not always account for that when we’re excitedly creating something new.
This goes for freebies too. I shared this in a recent episode — I recorded a private podcast, loved it, was really proud of it, and put it everywhere. But it took me a full year to build an email sequence to follow it up.
I don’t even think it sells anything directly. I think it pushes my services, but it took me a year to create that upsell series — and this is something I do for a living. I write email funnels and sequences for clients all the time, and it still took me a year to do it for one freebie. Multiply that across multiple freebies.
Specific Segmentation Is the Name of the Game
Sometimes you can combine sequences, but we all know — especially where email marketing is concerned — that specific segmentation is the name of the game. If that’s not something you’re familiar with, send me a DM and ask me to create more content about it, because I have a lot to say on the subject.
People do not want content in their inbox that isn’t relevant to them. The days of sending multiple freebies into the same welcome sequence are dead. I’m sorry, but I think we need to be very specific with every single thing we do now. Luckily, AI has made that easier — but it still needs to be said.
I also want to pause and speak specifically to seasoned business owners, which I think is most of my audience. We accumulate offers over the years and then we never retire them. We go through phases where we’re no longer actively selling something, but we don’t take it off the table either.
A personal example: I had website copy VIP days available on my website for much longer than I was actively selling them. I kept telling myself someone still buys occasionally, or that it used to sell better. But I think we just have to cross those things off the list.
Every single offer needs its own system, its own SOP, its own process, its own templates.
If you want to work less a year from now, you have to look honestly at your business and ask: if you were designing it from scratch, would you still create every offer you currently have?
Fewer Offers Make Marketing Easier
Fewer offers make your marketing easier across the board. It’s easier to become known for something. It’s easier to create content around it, and it’s easier for people to understand which of your offers they should buy when there are fewer to choose from.
It’s also easier to build a search strategy around your offers. Google is somewhat forgiving when different pieces of content have different focuses, but AI literally wants you to show up as the exact same thing everywhere. And if you have a team, fewer offers make it easier for them to support your work too.
The more offers you have, the harder it will be to remove yourself from pieces of the delivery — and removing yourself from delivery is the most straightforward path to working less. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, and it doesn’t mean it’s the best way. But it is the most direct route.
I also want to be clear, because social media turns everything into an all-or-nothing statement: I am not saying everyone needs one signature offer. I know that’s a thing right now, but that’s not my point. I’m saying that if you have multiple offers, it needs to be intentional.
Is That Offer Worth What It Costs You?
If one of your offers makes you $5,000 or $7,000 a year but requires an entirely separate marketing funnel, onboarding process, delivery system, and set of decisions — is it possible you could be making more than that if you just prioritized your other offer instead?
As I talked about in episode 75, I didn’t simplify my offers because I wanted a smaller business. I wanted a simpler, more focused one. And it goes without saying: if I want to work less, I can’t keep creating more things for future Kara to manage.
Once I’ve decided — which is step three — what actually deserves to stay in my business, the next move is to make those things run with as little dependence on me as possible. Which brings me to my fourth point.
4. I’d Make a List of Everything That Currently Needs Me
Start by getting out a pen and paper and listing everything that currently needs you: marketing, sales, client onboarding, delivery, emails, invoicing, scheduling, content, customer service, admin, and whatever else applies. If making a list from scratch feels impossible, there’s another way.
For the next two weeks, just track every single thing you do as you do it.
Here’s what I did when I wanted to analyze what I should be cutting and where my time was going: I logged everything in Google Calendar after I did it. Most productivity advice on YouTube or TikTok will tell you to batch your time and block it all out on Google Calendar ahead of time.
That has never worked for me, because things take more or less time than I expect.
I’m terrible at estimating how long something will take. My brain also needs a certain amount of flexibility — it’s hard for me to force myself to work on task A if I feel like working on task B and they have the same level of urgency. If I put task A on Monday and task B on Tuesday, there’s often no real reason for that beyond what I decided on Sunday night when I thought I’d wake up as a perfectly productive person.
So instead, I keep all my tasks in ClickUp or some other task management system — that’s how I stay organized, or as organized as I stay. There’s definitely room for improvement there.
I don’t think you need to track your time all the time. I do it in seasons when I’m actively looking to make a change in my business — when something feels off and I need to figure out what it is.
So let’s say I’m writing a blog post for a client. I write it, and then I fill it in on Google Calendar afterward.
My calendar starts the week empty but ends up full with everything I actually did. I’ll even add notes like “blog for client A — four hours, took longer because I was distracted” or “took less time because I had a great outline already.”
I find it so much more helpful to fill it in after the fact based on how long things actually took, rather than guessing and trying to stick to a schedule. I also personally love how visual Google Calendar is — and maybe there’s a way to get that in Toggl, but I haven’t found it.
One time I did this, I threw three weeks of data in and noticed I had one client that required a bit of work every single day. I was spreading it out without realizing it. I ran that through AI and it said, “You need to find a better way to batch this.”
I pushed back with all my reasons why I couldn’t, and it just kept offering alternatives. Eventually it suggested something I hadn’t considered, and I thought, “Oh, okay, maybe that would actually work.” That’s what I love about using AI this way — throw in your tracking data and use it to detect patterns, get advice, and coach you through it. It’s not a substitute for an actual coach, but for this kind of analysis, it’s genuinely useful.
Does The Task You “Can’t Outsource” Actually Need You?
Once you have two to three weeks of data — maybe even four — the next step is to go through your list and ask one question about each task: does it actually need me?
Some things will be a clear yes. Your expertise, perspective, and personality are the product. Some things will be a “not necessarily” — meaning someone else could handle it with the right system, or under certain circumstances it could be batched differently. And some things will be an obvious no.
If something doesn’t actually need you but also isn’t worth outsourcing, it might just not be worth doing at all. From there, you can start identifying what could be outsourced, systematized, or both.
But you need the data first. You can’t make good decisions without it.
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