
Work and rest in a startup - joelg87
http://joel.is/post/4491003987/work-and-rest-in-a-startup
======
asknemo
A bit of personal experience to relate to the article: in recent years there
were certain obligations that _demands_ distraction from my normal startup
duties (in my case a part-time teaching job). I didn't really need that money,
and at first I feel disturbed because most advices here tells you to put 24x7
into your startup, and I felt like a mother separated from her baby. But soon
I find that when I come back from these short distractions I find myself more
efficient and more energetic in what I really love to do. When I was doing
startup-work completely full-time before, I will often hit those days when I
am totally unmotivated and get nothing done the whole day. I never hit such a
day since I "distracted" myself. I always find myself thinking "wow I can
finally work on the startup again!". I think the magic is that I used some
external obligations to "pull" myself away from startup to rest and recharge,
rather than (wrongly) expecting myself to take breaks voluntarily.

Of course, I believe some people can really work 24x7 on ONE THING without any
burnouts. But clearly not me.

~~~
jaxn
I have been training for a marathon while doing a startup. It is a substantial
time commitment each week and while you might think running would be a great
time to ponder startup problems, I tend to focus completely on the run. This
break also let's me come back more efficient and more energetic.

~~~
asknemo
I believe our cases strikes a counter-intuitive point about what constitutes
'rest': despite the fact a distractive teaching job or marathon training can
be taxing mentally and/or physically, they have shown to be good type of
'rest' for the entrepreneur. Strange creatures we are.

~~~
joelg87
Absolutely. I think the word "renewal" is probably better then. I used both in
the article, but "renewal" really makes sense.

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mitko
I see 2 nice ideas in thinking about productivity - which are novel at least
to me: managing energy instead of time and being able to disengage from your
main project (it being a startup or s.th. else).

Does anybody has ideas on how to measure energy [what gets measured, gets
managed -T.Ferris]?

~~~
jaxn
FYI that is typically attributed to Peter Drucker quote, not Tim Ferris :)

~~~
mitko
You're right, sorry about the wrong information.

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Tosin
Great piece. Your write ups are educative. Keep it up

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Note: this account was created for the above comment only.

~~~
LeonW
Hmm, ok, I can totally understand where you are coming from with your comment
and I do believe that these things happen in a negative form, which is what
you are hinting at I think.

I think this is also not a bad approach though. If you sign up for a service
because you wanted to comment somewhere, than yes it is for the first time and
starting out somewhere always happens like that.

If it is done in a spammy manner I agree it's not cool, the above comment
seems fine to me as a first time comment on a platform you just discovered.
No? Would love to hear what you think about that :).

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I intentionally gave only the facts earlier, but I'll expand a bit here. Note
that this has nothing to do with the particular comment(er) I replied to. (So
if I'm wrong, please don't feel too insulted!)

New members really are welcome; however, HN frowns on content-less comments
(including "you rock, great article"), and someone interested in HN would soon
discover that.

On the other hand, the article author Tweeted "My latest blog post is live -
"Work and rest in a startup". I'd love your thoughts! - <http://t.co/pdE3cpy>
(HN: <http://t.co/lYEbjnI)>. Suppose some Twitter follower decided to help the
HN submission out a little. Doesn't that seem more likely to produce the
comment I replied to?

I'm not accusing anyone of being evil: I just think the commenter almost
certainly cares more for the article author than for HN, and that pointing
this out - on HN - may help keep the comment section clean. Note that, given
the apparent importance of Twitter etc in getting the first few upvotes
quickly, informally asking authors not to Tweet HN links may well result in
most of the compliant ones never getting anything to the front page again.

