Making the case for taking your job part-time

livemint.com:

You thought you could work full time and still have room for everything else in your life. What if you realize you can’t? The number of people opting to work part time has been climbing since the pandemic’s recovery, reaching new highs in recent months. Many of us want more time for family, hobbies or side gigs.

Some would take a pay cut for the privilege. First, we have to get up the courage to ask. “Historically, work has been pretty binary," says Claudia Naim-Burt, the co-founder of an employee-coaching company.

Struggling with a lack of child care or a demanding client, a frazzled employee often thinks, “Either I stay and I do exactly what I’m doing, or I quit my job." The thing in the middle—having a nerve-racking conversation with the boss, hashing out a new model of compensation, sticking to boundaries—is possible, but hard. In reporting this column, I expected to find tidy success stories of people dialing back their hours, smoothing the friction inherent in having a job and having a life. Instead, I heard about part-time requests that ended in a firm “no" from on high, and people who scored the setup they wanted but ultimately walked away.

Shifting to part-time gave others what they needed, even if it wasn’t perfect. Everyone agreed: It was worth the ask. Georgia Dixon tried to shrink her role at an education company by looking at her job description.

A resident of Leeds, England, she mapped out how she could get her central responsibilities done in four days, instead of five. She ticked off the extra tasks she’d picked up over the years, noting which department would be a better fit to oversee them. And she came to terms with the fact that she wouldn’t be in charge of it all anymore.