6 years ago (pretty early in my career) I was working for a small consulting company in San Fransisco and negotiated a 4 day workweek for a paycut (as well as going remote). The schedule was awesome, but I did see one big downside - you inherently start falling behind the full time employees. Everyone else is working full time, so they tend to accomplish more than you. Also, you end up missing out on important meetings that will inevitably happen on your day off. Over time, when important projects came up, they would not be given to me since I would deliver them slower and also sometimes didn't have background on them since I missed meetings where they were discussed. Eventually I quit out of boredom and career stagnation.
I am curious if you experienced any of these things, how you handled them, or how you managed to avoid them.
Now, I find that the model that works better for me is to work full time, but take big (many month) breaks between projects. I would still love to work 4 days a week though, just didn't work out for me in practice.
What you're describing are symptoms of not-so-great management, basically. Similar problems will occur if you're the only remote employee. And to be fair not-so-great management is fairly common.
I actually think if you work less you can and often will learn to become more productive (https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/02/11/working-long-hours/). But—a priori one would expect you to accomplish 80% of what others do, and that should be fine with a good manager.
So some ideas:
* You want to choose your day off so there isn't conflict with important meetings. If important meetings happen randomly, yes, this can be an issue.
* Get a job someplace with good management. They do exist.
* If there's a variety of tasks, focus on ones where you can have high impact without requirement for fast turnaround. E.g. I did this at one job where there was the "we need this tool tomorrow!!!" tasks, but also the "if we don't get this algorithm working in 6 months, all this work is wasted". So I took on the algorithm, because a lot of the work was _thinking_, instead of desperately churning out code.
I am curious if you experienced any of these things, how you handled them, or how you managed to avoid them.
Now, I find that the model that works better for me is to work full time, but take big (many month) breaks between projects. I would still love to work 4 days a week though, just didn't work out for me in practice.