[Der_Einzige]

You can safely ignore hegel as I am afraid that if you don't ignore hegel you may think philosophy is useless after you get through 20 pages of any of his works.

Kant may also be a stretch for someone whose new - even the "idiots guide" versions of his works that he wrote because his other works were criticized in his own time for being hard to read

The rest listed here are good - but IMHO you should always start with plato/socrates. I'd throw in Timaeus and the sophist and maybe even parts of republic (at least the chapter involving allegory of cave and allegory of divided line) to this list

[tyre]

Hegel is useful to read if only because he had a meaningful impact on others (whether inspiration/building upon him or, at the very least, reacting to him.) But I could be convinced that spending an hour wrapping one’s mind around the Hegelian Dialectic is enough of an 80/20.

Similar with Kant. Bang your head against the categorical imperative at least. It’s a concept to be familiar with. I agree that a deep read of Kant is too far down the rabbit hole to start with.

[libraryofbabel]

For Hegel I’d just say read a short modern secondary source that summarizes the main ideas and traces their influence on subsequent thinkers. Honestly the main point of knowing about Hegel anyway is because he deeply influenced Marx, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and many other philosophers that you might actually want to read and apply to your life and worldview. Peter Singer’s Hegel: A Very Short Introduction is short, clear, and has all the information you’d need (https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer...).