I’ve been doing work-from-home, computer-based social media research for the same company for over two years. The amount of work has gone up and down in that period of time, but since last year I’ve been working roughly 25 hours a month for them (in addition to my full-time nonprofit job and writing eight posts a month for BlogHer.com).

Their business is slowing down and they have other people who already work for them on a full-time basis, so those hours I’ve been working are being given to the other employees. I completely understand, and when I heard about it I realized that I’m actually not upset about it in the slightest.

I still have my full-time job, which is the most important thing. This social media job was something I was doing for extra money. While I’m sad about giving up the check that arrived in the mail every month, I’m actually very happy about the new increase in my free time.

See, I’d been thinking about quitting this part-time job for a number of months, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. They paid a good hourly rate; the work isn’t difficult (it just requires a fair amount of patience and attention to detail). However, because I was doing this extra work in addition to my regular job, there are times when I had to go right home in the evenings instead of accepting invitations to do something else, and I’ve cut short my time with certain people because I needed to finish my work before the deadline. While some of this will continue to be in effect because I’ll still be writing for BlogHer, I feel like I’ve taken the first step in reclaiming some of my time.

And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.