Taper FI?

[SilentC]

I was thinking about the experiment where you can boil a frog by very slowly raising the temperature of the water it is in without it jumping out.  I am wondering if the same phenomenon of microscopic incremental changes adding up to a large change could be executed in the workplace.  Aways a high achiever, taking on big audacious projects, I am daydreaming about spending the next ~5 years slowly tapering to being a “B team” player.  I’ve seen people crash from burnout and drop from A to B team performance overnight and get fired, but maybe if it’s done strategically and slowly, termination could be avoided or at least deferred while keeping an “A” salary in place?  Does anyone have experience with this?  FWIW we are technically FI but another 5+ years would really cinch it and let us do some stupid stuff with money. 

Edit- also important to note, there is not rigorous quantitative performance measurement happening at my office, which probably helps tremendously.  So things like getting in a couple minutes later per month, taking on one less project per year (out of 20+), etc could actually go unnoticed. 

[AccidentialMustache]

The usual recommendation is to focus on higher value work and ignore the not important stuff. Then nobody will care if you're doing less work, because you're doing the higher value work. I've never had a boss care about when I show up and leave (that has changed due to daycare/school schedule changes) as long as I get my work done (I do, and more than my share of work).

[Loren Ver]

Watch out, that only certainly works on frogs that have had their brains removed :D.  The rest is still debated, but most experts are pretty sure it doesn't work.  Though most places of work aren't known for their brains.

When I was a few years from RE (we RE before reaching FI, so we did things not like most people) I starting curating what I was doing.  There was SO MUCH work and it was important but not urgent.  Some of it was just to make the boss look good, or wrap things up that people that were laid off left behind, or cross training or etc etc.  The company was merging then splitting so there was all kinds of drama and random going on. 

Boss (after talking to his boss): I want you to work on x and wrap it up. 
Me: I thought you wanted me to work on active project A and keep it moving forward to hit the deadline for submission?
Boss: I do, that is most important.
Me: Okay, so I will prioritize A, but that means I wont have time for x.
Boss: But I'd like x to get done.
Me: So you don't want me to get B done by date?
Boss: no we need B done by date.
Me: Okay.  I'll work on those two projects.
Boss-- realizes he has no ability to actually dictate the over 35 projects that have come under my umbrella when we went from 60 staff down to 20- many of who are managers....  X was so far down the list, I was never going to get to it.  It had been on no ones to do list for years, and was not going on mine. 

Mine wasn't subtle like you were talking about.  My avoiding cross training was slightly more subtle.  After my group imploded and got moved to another state, I moved departments instate.  For a year and a half before I REed, I was there.  For most of that there was this special training I did not want to do for work. I really did not want to do it.  I managed to avoid it by being busy, etc.  Finally in the last few months I finally told the trainer, I'm retiring soon, it will be a waste of time for both of us if I learn to do this.   

Apparently I don't do subtle well. 

[FIRE 20/20]

You might want to look at the Calling all Downshifters thread:
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/post-fire/calling-all-downshifters!/

About 3 years (maybe 2?) before FIRE I transitioned from leading a 30-something person team with a high-maintenance government customer to leading a ~3-6 person team with an easy-going internal company customer.  I was able to do most of my work in 10 hours each week instead of scrambling to get it done in 50 hours.  I didn't twiddle my thumbs with the down-time, I just added in some individual-contributor level technical work, but most weeks I just worked about 32 hours and went home whenever I felt like it.  I used a huge backlog of PTO to fill in the extra 8 hours.  The funny thing is that I was considered a superstar in my new role!  I had been so used to preparing all the formal reporting requirements for a micro-managing government customer that the less strict internal reporting requirements were trivial.  The product I moved on to developing was an internal application that went from a low-level R&D project to a widely used product within the company.  We had a handful of A-performers who really knew the game, and with B-level of effort produced something very useful.  Sometimes working in a less stressful environment on fewer hours actually results in doing better work. 

Once you've learned how to play the game at a high level, I think it's pretty easy to downshift to getting the important stuff done without raising any red flags.  Finally, a lot of times people get by on reputation even if their good work was a long time in the past.  Unless you start really flaming out, I think it's unlikely anyone will notice even if you really do start doing B-level work. 

Downshifting was one of the best things I did on my FIRE journey.  My partner dropped to a formal 32 hour a week schedule around the same time I did my DIY 32 hour a week schedule.  It was amazing.  The couple years of coasting across the finish line were some of the most enjoyable of my career. 

[SilentC]

You might want to look at the Calling all Downshifters thread:
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/post-fire/calling-all-downshifters!/

About 3 years (maybe 2?) before FIRE I transitioned from leading a 30-something person team with a high-maintenance government customer to leading a ~3-6 person team with an easy-going internal company customer.  I was able to do most of my work in 10 hours each week instead of scrambling to get it done in 50 hours.  I didn't twiddle my thumbs with the down-time, I just added in some individual-contributor level technical work, but most weeks I just worked about 32 hours and went home whenever I felt like it.  I used a huge backlog of PTO to fill in the extra 8 hours.  The funny thing is that I was considered a superstar in my new role!  I had been so used to preparing all the formal reporting requirements for a micro-managing government customer that the less strict internal reporting requirements were trivial.  The product I moved on to developing was an internal application that went from a low-level R&D project to a widely used product within the company.  We had a handful of A-performers who really knew the game, and with B-level of effort produced something very useful.  Sometimes working in a less stressful environment on fewer hours actually results in doing better work. 

Once you've learned how to play the game at a high level, I think it's pretty easy to downshift to getting the important stuff done without raising any red flags.  Finally, a lot of times people get by on reputation even if their good work was a long time in the past.  Unless you start really flaming out, I think it's unlikely anyone will notice even if you really do start doing B-level work. 

Downshifting was one of the best things I did on my FIRE journey.  My partner dropped to a formal 32 hour a week schedule around the same time I did my DIY 32 hour a week schedule.  It was amazing.  The couple years of coasting across the finish line were some of the most enjoyable of my career.

This is great, and thanks also to @Loren Ver and @AccidentialMustache. I have been criticized for being inefficient and not delegating enough but then all this continual “cross training” of sorts has come in handy when someone is out or there is a crisis. I need to stop the cross training until people forget I know how to do a good chunk of everyone’s role.  I also need to let more and more non-high value add things slip.  I don’t want to push more work down to my subordinate and hopefully I can keep their workload more or less constant as I switch from 5k to marathon pace.

It also looks like there may be some thoughts to mine from the downshifting thread, I’d not seen that one before.  My caution on formally taking fewer hours or whatnot, which seems to be most of the discussion on downshifting, is that I’ve seen people try that and they take a 20%+ pay cut and it doesn’t impact their work load nearly as much as they hoped.

[FIRE 20/20]

It also looks like there may be some thoughts to mine from the downshifting thread, I’d not seen that one before.  My caution on formally taking fewer hours or whatnot, which seems to be most of the discussion on downshifting, is that I’ve seen people try that and they take a 20%+ pay cut and it doesn’t impact their work load nearly as much as they hoped.

I think this depends a lot on the individual circumstances, including the company culture, supervisor, the individual worker, and the nature of the work.  For my partner, she dropped to 32 hours and had a reduced workload that was appropriate to the time she had available.  She worked on a project where work could not be taken home, and her manager respected her available time.  I've definitely seen it work out the other way though.