
Ask HN: How to negotiate fewer hours as a project manager? - thrway2busy
I&#x27;ve joined a great team where the most overworked people were the two founders (agency; 1 other PM). They have over a dozen projects going on at once, and more in the pipeline.<p>I don&#x27;t like to micromanage, but one of their goals was driving efficiency, so less slacking off. As such, since joining I am always completely on-point all day, hold scrum standups every morning to maintain focus (by the way, this is something anyone can benefit from, ask anyone who&#x27;s worked for themselves and had nobody to boast to.) Likewise we do cooperative planning and review meetings around sprints, to maintain motivation high, keep delivering, keep client satisfaction high.<p>I appreciate the recurring paycheck, but one of my personal (outside work) goals is to continue to plough ahead on more risky projects on my own (allowed). The pay I joined on is below-ave., but I really like working with this team.<p>Given that a lot of my work is client communication, does it sound like I would be in a position to negotiate even fewer hours in the office? Specficially, to suggest coming in in the morning for the scrum motivational meeting and to learn about roadblocks (as an equal), to hold planning and review meetings and meet with the owners; but to do some&#x2F;a lot of the client contact from my home office? I&#x27;m very closeby.<p>I&#x27;d really like to tie this somehow to my performance landing new clients and projects, and how well I PM them, as opposed to tying it with just hours.<p>At this office, there is a very productive 1 day in office, 4 days remote worker (down from 3 days in the office in the past) and this makes me think that a solution like this might work. slack is used heavily. Of course, if there are any late afternoon meetings (bunch of time zones are involved) I can stick around.<p>What do you guys think? Is this a reasonable thing for a manager to do? Or should I just suck it up and sit in the office all day, keeping everyone tense?
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ejo3
It sounds like, if you can, you need to have an honest conversation with your
boss. Ideally you can find a balance where your boss feel like you are getting
an appropriate amount of work done and you feel like you have a good work/life
balance. That's probably the only way you will last at this job long term. To
answer you question: No I don't think it's unreasonable for you to be happy at
work. Just understand that you boss also needs to be happy with your work.
Good luck.

