Reduced Work Hours

Starting in February, I cut my hours at work to 80% (32 hours a week). I had lots of reasons for doing this, but the most important ones had to do with my family. For the past 6.5 years, I have been extremely busy with school and a full-time job, which kept me from spending as much time with my family as I would have liked. Since I finished with school in August, I have been feeling a desire to reconnect with my family. Another reason is that my wife has rarely had a break or a vacation since we started having children. Even when we go on vacation, she's still extremely busy taking care of our family. With four young children, imagine what that feels like. I believe she has sometimes felt trapped. I felt the desire to liberate her from some of the demands of being a mother so she could figure out what was important to her outside of that challenging role. I hope it has been helpful to her.

My schedule now goes something like this: I wake up with the kids around 6 or 6:30am, help them get ready, make breakfast, pack their lunches, read scriptures with them, and take the two oldest to school. I then head straight to work. I get off work in time to get home and make dinner. While I'm home, the kids and I clean the house and I'm around to put the kids to bed. My wife still has to take care of the kids after school before I get home, but most of her cooking and cleaning is taken care of by me ... and sometimes even laundry. I know she appreciates it, but even if she didn't, I have enjoyed being with my family and taking care of those things for her. I have had more time to play with my kids, though not as much as I would like, and I feel more connected to my family than I have since the early days of my marriage.

How did an extra 8 hours a week bring me so much satisfaction and happiness? It's well worth the income I'm giving up. I don't know how long I'll keep this up, but I'll probably do it until it feels right to go back to full time. It may be a few months, maybe a year. I don't really care. For as long as it lasts, I'll enjoy it. And in the midst of trying to be a bit of both mom and dad, I'll try to remember to make time to play with my wife and kids.

I've already felt the freedom to plan and take my wife on two dates this month. The quantity and quality was a bit more than we're used to, but I'm hoping we can keep it up. On the first date, we went to a dinner theater where a local group performed a murder mystery comedy. It was great! Very fun to get dressed up and go out and play. On the second, we went on a double date with some good friends of ours to a local museum. That was a lot of fun too.

When all the nonsense of life has been stripped away, I've come to realize that money isn't all that important. It's necessary and we all have to have enough to live, but beyond that, it doesn't really mean much. Relationships with others - with God, with family, and with friends - are the only things that really matter. They are the things that give life most of its meaning. This act has, in a way, been my repudiation of the world and its incessant striving for all the things that the media claims we need in order to be happy. I'm trading money for time with my family and although it has only been about three weeks, my experiment seems to be paying off.