Young Aussie worker reveals how she snagged a four-day week job at 23

A young worker earning a six-figure salary has revealed exactly how she negotiated a four-day week when she was only 23.

A young Aussie has revealed the secret to negotiating a four-day work week, a change she believes the majority of industries across the country could employ if they really wanted to.

Demi Kotsoris lives in Melbourne and works in the marketing space. She only works four days a week but brings in a healthy six-figures each year.

The 29-year-old has been working a four day week since she was 23 after realising very early on in her career that sitting in an office from 9am-5pm, five days a week wasn’t for her.

Ms Kotsoris started in the industry when she was 19, initially working as a freelancer, before getting her first contract role with a company at the age of 21.

“I worked there for eight months, five days a week and I just found myself going from freelancing, where I was doing everything for multiple businesses, to doing my selected role, and I felt like I had nothing to do a lot of the day,” Ms Kotsoris told news.com.au.

Demi Kotsoris has been working a four-day week since she was 23. Picture: Demi Kotsoris/Instagram

She decided early on in her career that working in an office five days a week wasn’t for her. Picture: Demi Kotsoris/Instagram

She said from 9am-2pm she was able to busy herself with work, but after that she felt like she was just “waiting for the clock” to run out.

Ms Kotsoris said once she completed her set work, she was unable to pick up anything new because it would have been perceived as “jumping on other people’s toes”.

“I don’t know if it was the nature of the business, but I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what a nine to five must be like’,” she said.

Having had the experience of working in an office environment five days a week, she was reluctant to continue this trend as her career progressed.

When she was 23, she had interviewed with a new company and knew she was one of the preferred candidates.

She wasn’t 100 per cent set on the role, which presented her with the perfect opportunity to negotiate.

“I just said to them, ‘I’m really productive at what I do. Would you be open to me working four days a week instead of five?’ And they said yes. And from there, I was just like, ‘oh, well, if you ask for something, maybe you can get it’,” she said.

She was paid a day rate and was earning about $80,000 a year at the time.

Since then, she has carried that mindset throughout her career and has managed to maintain her four-day week.

Ms Kotsoris has done a combination of freelance and contract work over the years and has found, with the latter, employers are often happy to accommodate her four-day a week request.

She did note that in the majority of places she has worked, she has been paid pro-rata.

So while she is still earning six-fgures, it doesn’t mean she is working four days a week but getting paid for five.

The 29-year-old said she is lucky to work in an industry where working four-days a week still allows her to earn a comfortable salary.

“In saying that though, once you build trust with a company and you can show them that your four days is still five days worth of work, then you have bigger grounds to be able to negotiate more,” she said.

Despite loving her four-day a week arrangement, she said she hasn’t completely ruled out returning to a regular five-day week in the future if her circumstances changed and she wasn’t able to structure her work the way she does now.

She also noted that she was in a privileged position to be able to ask for a four-day arrangement in the first place.

She thinks that working four days a week should be the norm. Picture: Demi Kotsoris/Instagram

“I think to have the guts to ask for working four days a week is a privilege in itself,” she said.

“I obviously was a lot younger then, so that’s why I say I kind of fell into it because I didn’t care if I didn’t get the job. I was living at home and I was young, so it didn’t really bother me in that way.

“Whereas, if I was if I was in my forties, had kids and a family that I need to provide for or my partner had just lost their work, then I would be working five days in an office and just doing what I’m told, you know.

“I definitely think it’s circumstantial.”

She believes that the four-day work week should be the norm in Australia, noting that it is an arrangement that can work in a lot of different industries.

“I think it makes people more productive and happier, and I think that it could be a transition that almost everybody could make,” she said, adding that accommodations could even be made for shift workers if companies were committed to the change.

She noted that advancing technology is also making it to increase that productivity, and that should be used to reduce pressure on employees.

Ms Kotsoris said if you added up the time employees spend procrastinating by talking to colleagues or dragging out work because they are burnt out, then introducing a four-day week and seeing productivity increase as a result makes sense.

“If you have to fit things into four days, you will make it work. So and if you’re working overtime, then you’re probably doing three people’s jobs, which is not really sustainable in itself, anyway.”

Originally published as Young Aussie worker reveals how she snagged a four-day week job at 23