Stay there four days

[j4]

I took Friday and Monday off work with no more concrete plans than "catch up on sleep and chill out a bit".

Comments

[hsenag]

I think a three or four day week would make a nice balance. I do other stuff too but I think I'd just get lazy without having some element of focus.

[venta]

I was chatting last week to a friend who works three days a week (Tues-Thurs) and is a full-time mum the remaining four. She reckons that's an ideal split, as at the end of each work/home period she's looking forward to the next home/work period.

[jvvw]

Pregnancy got me thinking about all the same sort of things, though also realised that it was a bit premature to start making any actual decisions. Cost of childcare is another added dimension/ complexity too.

[julietk]

Going back to office work after two years of freelancing has made it very clear how much I prefer a) working part-time, and b) being my own boss. This is only temporary, so I can put up with it for another 6months (and in fact I wouldn't have taken it on permanently in the first place), but I am greatly looking forward to June. I've been doing 4 days/wk and keeping up the freelancing on the spare day which is fairly tough; I've just agreed with my boss to go down to 3 day/wk as of December and am incredibly relieved.

Freelancing for me was working out at 2-3 days of "work" per week, after which everything else got happily filled up with all the *other* interesting things I want to do but which aren't necessarily lucrative :) And I still felt more than busy enough.

(Current situation is not helped by the fact that whilst I think my company is great and does awesome stuff, I'm not madly enthused by the job itself, but that is something to elaborate on elsewhere if at all.)

Glad you managed to get some rest in

[jinty]

Never heard of that Sugru stuff before - looks very cool! Thanks for the link.

No, I am the last Guardian-reading person in the universe who hasn't read Miss Smilla - never felt the urge, aka it's too popular and I like genre fiction me.

I'm expecting to go back four days a week; I've been wanting to work a four-day week for years anyway. I have this uncertainty that childcare is gonna turn out to be a bigger hit than we can readily appreciate right now, and R is going to go down to four days a week too so our income will be reduced, but we'll see how it looks on that basis initially.

Re: Glad you managed to get some rest in

[j4]

Four days a week would be good. I asked our HR person ages ago whether she thought I'd be able to come back part-time & then go back to full-time later, & she said she thought not, because it was really awkward -- so I'd sort of dismissed the idea, but I asked Nice Boss today & he said "gosh yes of course that's quite normal". So maybe Mrs HR and I had crossed wires or something -- I think I need go and have a talk to her.

Childcare is going to be cripplingly expensive. I'm not really sure what the answer is, apart from "Never have any spare money again"...

Re: Glad you managed to get some rest in

[jinty]

At one point years ago I asked about the possibility of going four days a week unless any project came up that needed me for five days - ie offering them flexibility within a framework of me basically doing four days a week, rather than doing four days at point X and then changing back to five days at point Y. - They said that would be too complicated. Maybe HR lady thought you meant that?

Re: Glad you managed to get some rest in

[scat0324]

HR person is wrong (surprise!). As a parent, you will have the right to request flexible working - including the option to go part time. While the right is a right only to ask, your employer can only reject the request if there are good business reasons to do so. Given Nice Boss supports you, that's case closed, but even if he didn't I'd find it hard to believe that in our sector, and in our type of work, going part time would really break the "business" of our employers.

[k425]

I still haven't read Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - I fail at Guardian readership!