A year ago, I decided to reduce my employment level from 100% to 80% and to take Fridays off.

My main motivation was to have some time for myself: Relax, reduce my stress level from work, have more time for side projects, do more sports, and maybe spend more time with my wife without the kids. This was only partially successful as there were a few things I had not realized beforehand.

I’d like to describe my experience, and will focus on the effects this change had on my work, financial situation, side projects, and personal life / health.

To give some background, I’ll start with my personal situation: I have two small kids and spend the mornings, evenings and the weekends with them. During the day I’m working. This schedule does not leave much time for myself. When the kids go to bed in the evenings, I’m usually too tired to do anything meaningful.

While I worked 80%, I put the kids to childcare during my day off.

Work The four days I spend at work have become very fast-paced and concentrated. There is less time for chats and social interactions at work, and I’m more focused on getting stuff done.

Some activities do not reduce by 20% but have a fixed time requirement per week or month (e.g., weekly team meetings). These will now fall in 4 instead of 5 days, leaving over-proportionally less time to get work done.

Additionally, this increased density of meetings during the 4 days means there will be fewer long time blocks available to get deep work done.

Your colleagues need to adjust, e.g., they need to know that you don’t work on Fridays. While you can make this clear by putting a blocker in your calendar, they also need to consider your reduced availability in their planning.

There is also a risk that management and your colleagues only slowly adjust their expectations to your reduced level of output.

As a result, I believe it is proportionally harder to be productive at the new employment level, while at the same time your colleagues and management may only slowly adjust.

Financial situation The obvious first-order impact of reducing your employment level by 20% is that you will earn 20% less salary.

However, there are a few less obvious things to consider in this calculation:

The income tax progression means the top 20% of your income are taxed higher than the remaining 80%, meaning that after deduction of income tax, a reduction of 20% gross salary will translate in...

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