I passed up promotions for a 4-day workweek. Spending time with my kids is more important.

• I’ve turned down opportunities in my company for a four-day workweek.
• On the side, I’ve built a freelance career. Doing this has allowed me to spend time with my kids.
• People at my company don’t understand, but it’s what’s right for me.

When my wife and I moved from Calgary to Nelson, British Columbia, in 2017, we were mostly thinking about our kids. We wanted them to have space, freedom, and a childhood spent outdoors in nature rather than in a car seat during rush hour.

What I didn’t think much about, though, was what the move would do to my career.

After we moved, I was fortunate enough to keep my corporate job and go fully remote. Over the years that followed, I made a series of choices that, from the outside, probably look like a career stalling out. Instead of working long hours in an office in a downtown high-rise, I work four days a week from our spare bedroom in a small town of 11,000 people. And I’ve turned down multiple opportunities to step into a lead role within my company.

None of that happened by accident. Every part of it was deliberate, and I’d make the same choices again. But I’ve learned that when you opt out of the ladder on purpose, the people around you struggle to read it as a decision. They read it as a problem.

People assume I’m waiting for something better

Colleagues, friends, and family members will often ask me how the four-day thing is “working out,” in the same tone you’d use to ask about a medical treatment. Nobody has ever said “you’re wasting your potential” out loud, but the assumption is right there underneath the conversation: that I’m stuck in a holding pattern, that this is temporary, that eventually I’ll get serious about my career.

The truth is, I already did get serious. I just got serious about something else.

I take Fridays off to homeschool and spend time with my kids. I get to drop off and pick them up from school. I coach their soccer teams. And I’ve built a second career as a freelance writer that exists entirely in the hours a promotion would have taken.

While this picture may not look like career ambition from the outside, it’s the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done.

The trade-off is real, and I made it anyway

I want to be honest about what this costs, because I don’t think choosing time over a job title is free.

I make less money than I would in a lead role. Which can be stressful at times, considering I have a mortgage and two kids. I feel that math every month.

I’ve also given up a kind of professional standing. In meetings, I’m not the go-to person the room turns to. Decisions get made in conversations I’m not in. Some of the work I’d be genuinely good at goes to other people, and occasionally that stings more than I expect it to.

And I’ve noticed the cost of being on a non-management track for years. You become slightly harder to place, and people stop thinking of you when something big comes up. The old adage of “out of sight, out of mind” rings true in my life.

But here’s what I got in exchange: I’ve been home for nearly every school pickup and sick day my kids have ever had. I was there for the years when my daughter still wanted to tell me about her day, and I’m still here now that she’s almost 12 and doesn’t always want to.

I’m well aware that window of time in my kids’ lives is closing. The promotion will still be there. This time with my kids, however, will not.

My kids don’t know I gave anything up

The funny thing is that the people this decision was made for have no idea I made it.

My kids don’t know that I said no to a promotion. They don’t know there was a version of my life with a bigger salary and less of me in it. They just know that I’m always around, that I’m the one at the soccer field on Saturdays, and that when they walk in the door after school, someone is there.

To them, that’s not a sacrifice. It’s just how things are. And I’ve come to understand that’s the whole point. A choice like this only works if it’s invisible to the people it’s for. If my kids ever had to be grateful for it, it would mean I’d made it about me.

I’ve stopped explaining myself

For a long time, I felt a need to justify the four-day workweek. I’d over-explain, list the reasons, and make sure people knew I was still productive, ambitious, and valuable, as though I owed the world an explanation.

I don’t do that anymore.

Part of it is age. I’m 39, and I’ve spent enough years approaching my work like I’m always job hunting to know that professional security is mostly an illusion anyway. Titles disappear. Budgets shrink. Companies restructure. The people climbing hardest are not necessarily any safer than I am.

But mostly, I’ve just made peace with being illegible to the people I work with. They see a career that plateaued, while I see a life I built on purpose, one deliberate step at a time.

They don’t have to understand it. It was never for them anyway.

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