In a prior gig I was fortunate enough to work for an organization that graciously accommodated my wishes to reduce my hours - dropping to an 80% schedule (4dx8h) which I was able to further scale back to 60% schedule (4dx6h) schedule. I really wanted to try a 3dx8h schedule but this was an ask too far for them - the 4 days off per week I was hoping for (yes spoiled me!) would be too much of a gap to work around for my team, which made sense.
To be truthful, I could've shrunk my time down to 10h per week and I still would have wanted fewer hours
- and this was at a place where the team was 100% remote, the tech work fairly interesting and the work very impactful! But I'd been doing software dev for so long (> 30 years) up to that point, mostly in startup environments, and I was clearly burned out on it. So no optimizing of my work schedule would ever make me feel great, so I ultimately left.
During my 60% schedule stint, I believe I was easily better than 60% as productive as I was when I was FT - I was better rested and focused. I did find it much more difficult to stop working after 6h due to conditioning and maybe to prove my value despite the shorter hours and also I'm a bit of workaholic (hence the burnout). It was much easier to unhook on the days I wasn't working because I didn't need the discipline to stop what I was doing at an earlier time - I never got started on those days so it was a non-issue! Anyways, just a reminder that if you can get a part-time schedule, it's not always easy to stick to the part-time hours - takes more discipline than I had.
Peevish aside: There can be some trickiness when it comes to factoring in vacation time and holidays for part-time salaried work, most notably if the scheduled workdays are less than 8 hours, like I was doing with my 60% schedule of 4dx6h per week. The HR system used by the organization granted a certain number of vacation days per year, which is pretty standard. For example, the org may have granted say 20 vacation days per year. Then I'd be granted 60% of that or 12 vacation days instead - fair enough. But _technically_ my working days were 6h long, so whereas FT devs would get the equivalent of 160h of vacation, I'd get 72h of vacation which isn't 60% (96h of vacation would be 60%, or what amounts to 12 of my 6h workdays). I know "poor baby", ha! Anyways, it didn't matter enough to me to address the discrepancy as I was happy and super appreciative just to have a salaried 60% part-time job with full benefits. Probably should have my head examined for leaving that, but burnout is real and stuff was getting kinda weird there ...