Part-time

As many of you might know, I am capping my work load for Product Academy at 40%. I work two mornings and one full day per week and grant myself an extra 15 minutes on the other days for urgent voice messages in order to unblock people I am working with. That’s it. Whatever I get done in those roughly 18 hours per week determines what happens at my company and how fast it is growing. 

Allowing myself to work part-time has been a liberation. Not just, because I get to spend more time with my kids (which, to be honest, can also be exhausting at times…). But because three years ago I sat down and defined how much time I wanted to allocate to each bucket in my life from scratch: work, sports, family, me-time, creativity, pro-bono work, time spent in the nature, time spent at the office… 

I’ve been struggling with the term «full-time» ever since. Here is what I believe: we all work part-time. We are part-time partner, part-time parents, part-time friends, part-time sports people, part-time travellers… Even those of us who work «full-time» are not spending their entire life at the office. However, because some genius came up with the idea that 40 hours is the default amount of hours we should be working, our society stopped questioning whether this is how we would like to spend our time. Yes, we all need to pay our bills. Yet many of us might be able to work a couple of hours less per week and trade them for something more meaningful in life. It’s just that most of us never dared to ask for a change of contract or a new way of splitting work and chores in our relationships. And many of us never took the time to challenge the status quo and figure out what we truly need to be our happiest selves. 

What would you do with two extra hours per week?

Have a great week!

Tanja

This text was first published in my though-letter Tanja’s Butterflies (November Edition 2021 – Part 1). If you are interested in receiving the next editions in your inbox with additional resources, you can subscribe here.