I did ‘Quiet Quitting’​ before it was cool. Here are three lessons I learned.

In 2017, I made the decision to go part-time at my startup data science educator role to pursue photography as a career.

I negotiated a work arrangement where I’d put in complete workdays 3 days a week (Mon-Wed). Everything else, including my pay and equity, was scaled down to 60% of what I made on a full-time job.

Ok, so it was a not-so-Quiet Quitting, I guess.

While I took a bit of an extra step in going part-time, ultimately it was about setting healthy boundaries around work and quitting the culture of incessantly having to go ‘above and beyond’ to prove that you’re worthy of being an employee.

Here are three lessons I learned from that experience.

1. People respected my boundaries when they perceived my time as rare and valuable

I had worked in several startups before, and I knew first-hand how hard it can be to preserve work/life boundaries in those environments. Startup cultures tend to glorify heroic efforts: spending your weekends fixing bugs, or running yourself ragged to meet an arbitrary launch deadline for a marketing campaign.

In my past experience, whenever you say ‘no’ to extra work in a startup environment, someone inevitably questions your passion or dedication to the mission. Would my 3 days/week schedule actually work? Would my workplace actually respect those boundaries I was trying to set?

To my surprise, my entire work experience changed for the better

Every time a task was assigned to me that I didn’t believe was either high-value or a priority for the company, I’d ask, “I’m only here 3 days/week. Is this the most important thing I could be working on?” People would take that question seriously; something I had never experienced before! They’d either respond with a good rationale explaining why that task was important compared to others, or just take it off my plate (and often, off the team plan altogether).

Someone in a meeting would assign me a task and someone else would say, “I don’t think that’s worth Raj’s limited time, let’s deprioritize that task for now.”

On the rare occasions when I needed to work an extra day to meet deadlines (for a launch, for example), my manager immediately made sure I had a different day off scheduled.

Why would this be the case? My best anecdotal guess is that when you present something as a scarce resource, people automatically value it more. Marketers have understood this ever since marketing was a thing. I was experiencing the scarcity principle in a different context; my time was seen as scarce, and hence more valuable.

Of course, there were external factors that helped with this. I happened to work for a company with a relatively healthy culture for a startup. I was also a very early employee in a fairly mission-critical role that was not easy to hire for.

Maybe you don’t have that luxury right now, but it’s worth asking yourself what you CAN do to have your time be perceived as more rare and valuable.

2. My quality of life AND work improved drastically

I had planned to spend a year working part-time. But my workplace experience and mental health was so close to optimal during that period that I ended up spending almost three years in that situation. It gave me the time I needed to build my photography skills as well as the foundation of my creative business.

Instead of checking out of my day job, I found myself far more energized. I was there for only 3 days/week, but I was working on the projects I cared about, and I felt a greater sense of control and autonomy. That resulted in me being far more excited about those projects and doing a better job on them than I’d have normally done.

Yes, there were tradeoffs. I forfeited the leadership track I was on, and any chance of a promotion or decision-making roles. However, I got to spend 3 years in a role where I could work on very high-impact, personally meaningful projects, with a much lower percentage of the ‘bullshit tasks’ that we often have to spend a lot of time on at a full-time job.

Speaking of which …

3. I got to experience how much of ‘work’ tends to be busy-work

David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs, calls out how much of today’s workplaces have tasks or work that’s meaningless or performative. I got to see that first-hand.

It was amazing to see entire meetings disappear and turn into emails when my time was constrained. It was incredible to see entire projects vanish into the backlog, never to be heard from again, because they weren’t really that critical after all.

The culture of going ‘above and beyond’ ends up being a Sisyphean effort. When everyone goes above and beyond, it effectively means that nobody does. The goal posts move. You have to do even more to stand out.

And all of this happens with no extra pay or overtime.

In their excellent and deeply insightful book, Out of Office, Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel dive into the changes that the last two years have wrought upon the world of work. The first topic they cover is: flexibility.

Pre-pandemic, flexibility was a buzzword that in most cases, benefited employers far more than employees. It meant finding ways that employees could stay connected 24/7 to the office and could be reached while they were anywhere (including on vacation) — all while avoiding any semblance of overtime payments.

Now, employees are seeing through the facade. They’re demanding real flexibility and asserting their right to have a life and existence that doesn’t revolve around work.

As I look back at my part-time experience I have to wonder:

• Why was it so easy for my workplace to respect my work boundaries when I was there for three days in the week, but not when I was full-time?
• Why do we take full-time employees for granted?
• Why do we insist on having so much busy-work for everyone?

And most importantly

Why do we have to label having healthy work-life boundaries as “Quitting”, quiet or otherwise?