The Open Week

About this book

What if retirement wasn't the reward at the end — but a lifestyle you could sample all along? The Open Week is the playbook Elias used to go from 80-hour weeks to a four-hour workweek of managing a location-independent business, told through case studies of ordinary people who did the same.

The method has four moves, remembered as DEAL: Definition (decide what freedom costs, to the euro), Elimination (cut the 80% of work that produces nothing, using 80/20 and Parkinson's law), Automation (build income that runs without you), and Liberation (negotiate remote work — or walk — and take “mini-retirements” now).

What's inside

• Fear-setting: the one-page exercise that turns vague dread into a plan — the most photocopied chapter Elias has ever written.
• The low-information diet: how to ignore 90% of news and email without missing anything that matters.
• Muse math: testing a one-product business for under €500 before you quit anything.
• Remote scripts: word-for-word proposals that won work-from-anywhere deals at cautious companies.
• Mini-retirements: relocating for months, not days — with budgets, visas, and checklists.

Who it's for

Overworked professionals who suspect the ladder is leaning on the wrong wall, founders who want leverage instead of hours, and anyone who has ever thought “there has to be another way” at 11pm on a Sunday. If you love your job already, it will teach you to do it in half the time.