I did this for a few months while I was transitioning back from parental leave and was similarly insanely productive. It just made me absolutely ruthless about prioritizing. Part of it was motivation to keep up with ft colleagues while knowing I had a hard deadline when I would be back on baby duty, so not sure how replicable it is now, but it was wild to go through a few workdays with all the day trimmed out, and then have a very full extended weekend with family every week.

But does ruthless prioritization mean you’re making other people do that work? You might feel more productive because you cut your day down to well defined tickets. But who is doing the dirty work to define the tickets, iterate with product, mentor and unblock other engineers, do on call, work on incident review actions etc etc.

I also suspect ruthless prioritization is my main driver of increased productivity.

This is exactly what I'd like to do now that I'm in my 60s. I'd still like to work for several more years, but not full time. How did you arrange this? It seems to not be common in tech.

It was mostly accidental: first, I took a 3 month leave of absence to explore a midlife crisis. I came back announcing I'd like to go half-time to do a masters degree which my company was okay with, and when that was over, I just never went back to full time and my company was okay with it.

I guess and hope that simply directly asking for this is another strategy (and what I plan to do if I ever lose this job); otherwise, performing the above sort of misdirection, consciously, might also help justify the exception for management and peers.

Maybe I'm getting this wrong but... you're working 3/5 of the time, you're getting 1/2 of the money and you are earning the company > 100% than full time?

I'm working 1/2 the time (7 hours Monday & Tuesday, and 6 hours Wednesday), and, yes, it even surprised me that my total productivity is about the same as when I worked 40 hours per week. It's even possible that my total productivity is actually greater than before but we don't have sufficiently precise metrics off of which to judge that.

We do have data from sports training. It is pretty simple: If you dont rest you wont grow. You get injured.

If you're producing more than a full-time colleague, does the 50% pay cut seem a bit harsh?

Probably, yes, but I suspect that it's so hard to find this arrangement (20 hours per week, full benefits, and still very good pay despite it being 50% of total), that I'm just very content with the arrangement.

What does your full time coworker say about that? Are you concerned at backlash or retaliation?

I didn't mean to give the impression that I was boasting or that I bring this up with him or my management, but just that there's a somewhat objective relative measurement that shows that it's possible to keep up high output for some jobs. I was surprised that my _total_ output stayed so high after transitioning from 40 to 20 hours.

No backlash or retaliation so far after more than 2 years.

I didn’t mean to insinuate you were boasting! I apologize if that was the case.

I do my required work in 20 hours most weeks. I spend the rest of the 40 hour work week resting, learning, and working on myself. I am careful not to publicize this because I am concerned at backlash from colleagues who find they have to spend more time than me.

People work at different paces and provide different value to the company for many reasons. I may be efficient and effective, but I tend to burn out faster, hence the rest time.

I think that's a good strategy.