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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

I'm living your dream. I'm on 70% part-time, originally because of the CS degree that I'm working on in parallel (I originally majored in physics bevore pivoting to IT), but I plan to continue on part-time (maybe 80% instead of 70 then) after I have my degree.

When I originally reduced from 100 to 80%, during my next annual review, my boss was surprised that it didn't impact my apparent productivity in the slightest, which supports your theory: More hours have diminishing returns, but cost the same from the employer's POV, so it would be better to spread it out to multiple people.

Indeed, the part-time model has been gaining traction within my circle of colleagues (in Germany). Many of them are taking a day per week off to work on their private projects, or cutting away some hours to spend more time with their children.

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I basically do the same. I work 4 days a week and I feel that I'm not really less productive. The fact that I have one day per week off, gives me a reason to procrastinate less and do more with the time I have.

I remember the time from an old job, were most employees did nearly nothing on Friday afternoons. They were burned out from the week and waited until the time was up to finally go home.

I work 4-day weeks for a few years now and I can say that I don't want to change this anytime soon. Having more time for friends and family makes me much more happy than a bit more money. And of course, I feel much more relaxed on Mondays since every weekend is a "long weekend".

I observed a similar productivity drop on Friday afternoons, although in my devops-y team it's mostly due to reluctance to deploy any changes right before the weekend.

I worked for several years in a similar fashion (working 6 hour days and attending classes at night, etc). The only word of advice / warning I'd add is that although they add up to a similar number of hours each week, there's a huge difference between working 6 hours per day Monday to Friday, and working 8 hour days on say Monday to Thursday.

When I transitioned to a research-based degree later on, I found it very difficult to make 2 hours per day amount to anything. It takes almost that much time to just get into the mode of working on your research, and you need to be self-motivated as there are no classes to keep you pitching up every time. An entire day per week dedicated to it would work much better.

Yeah, it's easier when you're mostly attending lectures and seminars. These are neatly timeboxed. But when university work is mostly assignments, it starts to eat into one's free time and gets tedious very fast.

I would totally work 20% less for a 20% pay cut, BUT then i would not get full pension in my country. So for the time being they are stuck with me 8 hours per day...

Interested (and faintly alarmed) at how the pension side of this works? Are we talking state pension, company pension, or something else?

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