Calling fellow HR people - am I crazy?! Sorry, bit long

[lionmummy]

I am an HR Director for Financial Services firm in the City - I head up the team internationally (although not the USA) and I cover about 1000 people in all. In isolation, it's a great job & I have been rapidly promoted and managed to keep my 4 days a week status as I've been given more responsibility...but, although the role is great in isolation - nice people, interesting work, good location etc, it's completely overwhelming in terms of workload. I work from 9->6.45 every day of my 4 days & usually do a few hours in the evenings pretty much every night in the week once dcs (2 & 4) have gone to bed and the night before my day off I am usually working until midnight & I still can't keep up with the work. I don't want to give up my one day with dcs, despite it being frequently nterrupted with calls. Workload only going to get worse as 2 really capable people in the (small) team will soon be on mat leave & will be covered by contractors who will take a while to settle in. My boss is in the US and not hugely supportive & just cares that the work is being done. I've only been with the company for 18 months but am I crazy to want to resign? I just don't think I can do it anymore. I'm interested in going freelance so I can control my work a bit more. I have done the full range of HR roles from operations to Comp & Ben & recruitment etc. What do you think? Appreciate any advice here.

YANBU.

You are clearly doing a full time job in 4 days a week and your situation doesn't sound sustainable to me.

I would be wary of assuming that going freelance will mean you can automatically control your work more. Once you get up and running, get a reputation and a porfolio of freelance work and can hopefully pick and choose assignments a bit more, then yes. But if you need to be earning a certain amount you may have to take what you can get for a while at least which will mean you may not be able to control much at all.

Less in terms of working very late or whatever if you are freelancing though normally, which is good.

I have my own HR consultancy company working mainly with small and medium sized businesses, however I'm lucky in that there's not a lot of pressure on me to bring in loads of cash so I've been able to build it slowly and not panic about desperately trying to get loads of work in immediately. It also doesn't matter for me if income comes irregularly which it may for you if you're going straight from a 'normal' job. I had some time off between so we were used to managing without my full time income.

At the moment I work a lot in the evenings and weekends because I have a 4mo baby and am also relaunching my website next month, but generally, I don't spend an awful lot of time working late or whatever.

Thank you FLowery; really helpful. I can live off my bonus for a bit which will take off the early pressure on cash. I think i've come to the conclusion (and feedback like this helps!) that it's just not sustainable and the balance is entirely lopsided in the wrong direction