Anne Marie Bowler was featured in the Wall Street Journal in an article on work-life balance.  May, 2012

Anne Marie Bowler left work one day last week to enjoy dinner with a friend at a sidewalk café “before the sun went down,” she says. Recently she ducked out of the office to attend a charity golf outing. And Ms. Bowler also likes to make time for long evening bike rides through Central Park.

She could never have done these things at her old job.

Ms. Bowler worked 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. or later at a big law firm in New York City for years. The daunting workload often forced her to cancel plans with friends or time at the gym, and she yearned for more control. At age 30, she and a colleague who had just returned from maternity leave quit to start their own law firm.

Being single takes a lot of time. There’s no one else to pick up milk or take out the recycling on the right day or wait at home for the plumber. It’s just you. Sue Shellenbarger explains on Lunch Break. Photo: Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal.

She is still immersed in clients’ cases and often works long hours. But “I wanted to have a life—a full life—which meant not just always working,” says Ms. Bowler, now 36.

It’s the refrain of millions of working mothers across the country who exit fast-track careers in their 30s. But Ms. Bowler is single.

Much of the research on work-life conflict focuses on harried working mothers trying to juggle everything, desperate for more time, with lots of reasons to leave work early. But an even higher proportion of single women yearn for more free time; 68% of childless women say they would prefer having more time over more money, compared with 62% of women with children, according to a 2011 More magazine survey of 500 college-educated professional women over 34.

“People talk about, how do working mothers do it? But how do singles do it?” says Sherri Langburt, founder of SingleEditionMedia.com, a New York agency that advises brands on marketing to singles and runs a network for bloggers on singles topics.

On the way to work, she stopped at a local coffee shop, where she could also spend time catching up on email.

Without a partner to help, singles must “get the laundry done, get to the gym, buy groceries and get to the job,” plus plan social activities or volunteer work and sometimes care for aging relatives, too.

“No one is focusing attention on those women or men, who are achieving such great levels in their careers, all alone,” Ms. Langburt says.

As more young adults delay marriage into their 30s while career demands intensify, many increasingly feel overloaded. Many set high expectations for themselves, dating, staying in shape, doing volunteer work, and helping family—while still getting stellar performance reviews.

Conflicts with child-rearing duties are often cited as the reason large numbers of women quit corporate jobs midcareer. But many single women without kids also consider quitting for personal reasons. In a recent McKinsey & Co. study of 60 companies for The Wall Street Journal, researchers surveyed a small sample of women who were planning to leave their companies in the next two to three years and found surprising similarity between reasons cited by mothers and non-mothers—a desire to gain more control over their personal schedules and needs.

When it was time to go, she rode her bike to the law office she and a co-worker started so they could have more work-life balance. Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal

Even though she left the big law firm, Ms. Bowler still takes late-night and early-morning calls and handles complex litigation. On a recent golf outing, she checked and sent email every hour and called her voice mail twice.

But “my schedule is much better. I’ve made it better,” she says. She has freedom to attend more professional networking and education events, and to explore new areas of the law that interest her, including a seminar this summer on fashion law.

She travels more, including vacations to India and Brazil. And she enjoys being able to “have a steady schedule, making social plans with people and keeping them,” says Ms. Bowler. On days she and her partner, Sari Gabay-Rafiy, leave the office before dinner, “We say, ‘Oh, it’s five o’clock. That used to be snack time’ ” at their former law firm.