So I'm no longer an employee of eLife. Why? Bluntly, I was approached by a friend to earn more money and work a 4-day week... Who would say no to that? I'm a firm believer in the 4-day work week; if you're office based, your work isn't customer facing, and you already have a 'flexible' working schedule, it's quite easy to condense work into 4 days rather than 5. I've been kind of trialing is for the last month, using my annual leave before I left to make a month of 4-day weeks, and I can say I've never felt more productive! In a 5-day week, I find I'm mentally checking out around 3pm, but with a 4-day week I'm working up to and past 5, knowing I'll have a long weekend!
Enter, Opalescent, a small business consisting of mostly white men (and soon 1 (one) woman!). We're quite a quiet company, focussing on building high-quality digital products in-house and for clients. Being a small business, it's a big switch from a medium-sized organisation, but not one that I'm unfamiliar with.
Accepting and starting this new job isn't the only thing happening, a lot has been going on in my world. It's not all work talk here! I'm in therapy coming to terms with some mental health challenges that have plagued my life for over a decade. But I can say I'm making a net improvement (2 steps forward, 1 step back, right?). I've been making some life changes that a 4-day week will really benefit. I'm focussing on my wellbeing more, I've started reading more, I've started running again, I want to climb more, and I want to start learning piano again and produce music. Some may call this a quarter-life crisis, maybe it is, but this is the year where I discover the most about myself. I lived through university, the pandemic and 2022 mostly spaced out and going with waves; but now I'm hammering through my career, I'm earning more money than ever, and I'm taking control over my life, rather than feeling like life has been controlling me.
Elliot Jordan Kemp
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