American employee mimics the European workday by working 1.5 hours less than his company expects: 'I will make sure that 90 minutes is filled with non-work related activities.'

Emmy Pratt • Writer and Editor

Jun 10, 2026 12:30 PM EDT

He's taking back 1.5 of his 24 hours.

We all wish we had more hours in the day to do the things we actually want to do. So many of your waking hours consist of doing things for your boss, and that is nowhere near as fun as doing things for yourself. If you would rather look at a spreadsheet for an hour a day than have lunch with friends or read for pleasure, you're a different breed of human.

How can we make more time in the day when so much of it is filled up? For starters, you can wake up a little earlier and go to bed a little later, creating more waking time, but sleeping less can come at the detriment of your health. You can turn off your phone more, so that you're not wasting your life scrolling through short-form video content, but who wants to do that? You've got to cut out something pointless if you want more time to yourself, and finding that time is truly harder than it looks.

The employee in this story decided he would give himself more time in the day by modeling European employees, who work less and take more PTO, which means they work 1.5 hours less a day than the average American employee, who is pressured to have a sigma grindset by every boss and manager they've ever had since they were teenagers. This guy decided that if he wasn't going to have more vacation time, he was going to create it himself.

via Getty Images (Unsplash+)

_{A model pretending to be an employee playing with a basketball at his desk to pass the time, doing something that has nothing to do with his actual job}
I have a new goal to work 1.5 hours less each day at work

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_{A woman representing an employee who blocks off her first and last hours of the workday so that she can attend to personal matters, like grocery shopping, during that time.}
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_{A representation of a Norwegian man, who gets two months off from work every year, and has a much better work-life balance than your average American worker.}
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