Ask HN: Reduce work to ~20 hours/week?
My dream is to come down to about 15-25 working hours per week.
I don’t mean to work part-time for all of my career. But I would like to have such an arrangement for the coming 5-10 years.
Has anyone tried this? If so, how did you manage to achieve your goal?
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Why work part-time?
Since this is an important topic for me I thought I’d provide some background for my reasoning.
For me there are two major reasons. First of all I want to have more time for my family. My wife and I have three kids. I feel that work takes away too much time and energy for me, time and energy that would be better spent with my kids during these formative years. We do have daycare. It’s pretty crowded though, so I don’t want my kids to spend too long days there.
I also have a long commute. Since the housing market is what it is, we have settled in a small town with a ~60 km commute to the nearest big city (about 40 miles). So if work requires me to be in the office every day then I need to spend 12-13 hours commuting each week. That is also time that I can’t spend with my kids.
Sometimes I feel that all this would be easier if only one of us was working. But I can’t demand this from my wife. She likes to work and she doesn’t want to throw her career away. Rightfully so. In theory, I could put my own career on hold and then I could be the one that stays at home with the kids full-time. I believe we could afford it if we wanted to. I’m certain though that it wouldn’t work out so well in practice. I’m just not good enough at that kind of stuff to do it full-time.
Having some kind of job is probably a “must” for me. But it’s also crucial for me to have time and energy left for my family. If anyone has tackled a similar situation I would really like to hear your thoughts on how to handle it in a good way.
I work in tech/IT but not as a dev.