

Startups And Work/Life Balance - revorad
http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/startups-work-life-balance/

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tptacek
Startup people: don't engage with this idea because it will "improve your
quality of life". Relax because it will probably improve your outcome:

* Contrary to popular belief, you cannot indefinitely push yourself like an undergrad cramming for finals week. The analogy to sleep deprivation seems telling: everyone thinks they can run on 4 hours a night, because their brain plays tricks on them. Like, "but I love this dorm-room atmosphere, and when I get stressed out I can go play foosball in the corner".

* Your idea is probably going to fail, because statistically most ideas fail. What if what matters is how you handle things when your project blows up? If you kill yourself trying to execute, you impair your judgement, make it harder to get back on the horse; you may even wind up back at a bigco.

* It's ludicrously hard to recruit and retain talent right now. I've spent the better part of two years with that as my number one biz objective. The 10am-10pm work culture is a market inefficiency. It biases recruiting towards people in their twenties, leaving experienced and capable family people on the table.

~~~
portman
>> _leaving experienced and capable family people on the table_

Can you elaborate? I'm a family people; hopefully experienced and capable, but
don't feel that I'm being biased against by the 10am-10pm work culture.

If anything, I find the typical late starting hours of twentysomethings (10:30
or 11:00) to be wonderful - I usually spend all morning with my kids.

~~~
tptacek
If your kids are in school and you work 10a-10p you will probably never see
your kids.

I did the crazy startup schedule when my kids were that young too. I hope
you're handling things with your partner better than I did. It sure seemed
like things were going OK at the time! Heh.

~~~
hugh3
Oh, in fairness I'm sure you'd get to see them for about ten minutes while
they eat breakfast, bleary-eyed, before trudging off to school.

Children aren't morning people.

~~~
elptacek
Neither is Tom. ;-)

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staunch
I've worked in Japan with the stereotypical salaryman "work ethic". I
completely agree that it's toxic and horrible. Truly horrible. (I eventually
rebelled and started leaving at 6PM, choosing to suffer the shame.)

But now I've found working _for myself_ 12 hours per day 5 days per week
completely sustainable, enjoyable, and productive.

I certainly never felt this way when working for other people though. I think
what makes it work is:

1) No external pressure. I could work 5 hours if I wanted.

2) Comfortable as possible office. I truly can't think of anything to improve.

3) Being able to take a bike ride or walk whenever I want.

4) Probably most important: a deep drive to work on my project. I can't wait
to get to work in the morning. This feeling only lasted short times when I
worked for other people.

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netmau5
I dream of the day I can have work/life balance. This is a huge problem for me
and it bleeds into my personal life, psyche, and creativity. Unfortunately, I
am a prisoner of my own obligations as I'm sure many are. Obligations mean I
need income means I need a job. That doesn't mesh well of my incredible desire
to run my own business one day.

My father and his father have run their own businesses. When I graduated
college, I made a strange departure from that norm to get a job. The thought
wasn't particularly exciting, but we had medical bills in the family that
someone had to handle. I hate it because I feel like I've let that magical
time where you have no bills and can live on the cheap pass by.

So I'm playing it the only way I know how. I work at day then come home to
work on side projects into the early morning. My hope is that one day these
can be used to convince an investor to float my living expenses so I can take
a real shot. Until that day, what options do those of us with jobs have?

~~~
nandemo
Do you still have medical bills? Why can't you live on the cheap for a year,
save one year worth of living expenses and then leave your job?

For instance:

1) If you live in a big city, live in a very small apartment. Use public
transportation and sell your car if you have one. (Yeah, I know this is hard
to do in many parts of US).

2) Cut unnecessary recurrent expenses like cable, netflix, gym, etc. You can
still buy movies once in a while. If you wanna exercise, just run outside,
play sports at public courts, etc.

3) Don't buy the latest gadgets. Unless you're making software for it, you
don't need the latest iPhone/android.

And so on. This is essentially how a junior Japanese salaryman lives. They
must, because they earn only around $25~30$k. So if you can earn more than
that and still keep a low living cost, you could save quite a bit.

~~~
netmau5
I had obligations but now I am essentially debt-free outside of a mortgage
(not underwater). I have been saving aggressively however I do spend some of
it funding my side projects. I've got around 8 months of expenses saved up and
hope to get to two years worth within the next 12 months. Without outside
investment, that is when I'll hit my personal comfort zone for going after it.

Until then, I'm focused on building the resume and resources I will need in
the future. In fact, that is part of the reason I'm working on Sparkmuse.
Working a day job and at night can be brutal but I have no regrets.

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balinvadasz
I have a few points:

* Your customers/clients don't care how much you work. The only thing they care about is whether you can help them solve their problems. If you do that consistently, you'll be fine.

* More work =/= more quality output; in fact I'd argue that after a certain amount of work, it is an inverse relationship.

* Find ways to solve more with less: write less code and still have features. Have fewer servers and still handle the traffic. Work less and still get things done. It's incredibly empowering.

* Knowledge, experience and honed intuition more than compensates for fewer hours of work. My suspicion is that a lot the extra work performed at startups is needed because of inexperience. I worked at a very early stage startup and it seems that a lot effort was spent on getting systems to work as they were supposed to (usually bleeding edge systems). We also spent a ton of time learning to deal with the data volumes we handled; in hindsight most solutions we arrived at were known and publicly available at the time, we just didn't know (enough) about them.

Background: I'm currently moonlighting on a startup idea while having a family
and working 9-5. It can be done but you need to leverage other people's work
as much as possible and need to be very disciplined. I use the best
systems/libraries/services I know to basically outsource everything that's not
core to my startup idea. I also consciously set aside time to be with my loved
ones: dinner, bedtime stories, weekend hikes and trips etc. Being successful
is only meaningful to me if my kids know me in person, not just as a distant
figure.

~~~
patio11
_Your customers/clients don't care how much you work_

This is one of the most important parts of this discussion, and I regret not
mentioning it in the post. Your company is a black box which exposes a limited
interface to the rest of the world, namely "What you make and what you say."
If it doesn't impact making or saying, _nothing_ matters.

The _vast_ majority of efforts in most companies don't matter. It is painful
to contemplate how much total waste goes on, and changing even a wee bit of it
(like, say, the Lean Startup movement is doing with regards to waste building
things that no one actually wants) is a mammoth undertaking.

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kolektiv
Excellent points in here. If you're planning on working until late tonight
because you think you have to (not for some specific item), don't. Go home
early. Start work tomorrow and try and analyse what went horribly wrong.
Chances are, nothing.

There are very few ideas around which will be world beating if done for 15
hours a day, but failures if done for 7.5.

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pepitablue
I agree with the points you try to make about the importance of a work/life
balance.

I don't come from any kind of start-up background, but I've found that even in
regular jobs there is a noticeable productivity cycle that I experience
mentally, making the argument for balancing work / life (ie rest).

What I experience is like a life cycle but for my attention span/productivity.
I start off fresh, become very creative, critical and able to function at my
optimum and then my interest starts to decline. Whenever I would find myself
crashing I'd follow my natural instincts and take a break. I'd chat with
coworkers or surf the net for something that interested me until I found my
interest in these leisure activities start to decline. Then I'd come back to
work, refreshed and re-interested. Needless to say that in my department I
held the highest amount of workload, I was the most productive and I had by
far the best attitude, which was the most important thing of all since those
with a bad attitude dragged down everyone else around then, decreasing others'
productivity potential, thereby creating compounded productivity problems.

I think this kind of attention-span or mental focus cycle is normal and
healthy. It's like our mental microchips over-heat if we dwell on a certain
thought train too long. I only wish someone with so-called credentials would
"discover" this and bring it to the attention of the human resources
corporate-culture gate keepers.

I understand productivity is key in capitalism, but if we're going to make
productivity the most important thing, while putting our own human needs
aside, then we might as well live in a communist economic system. Whether it's
about the "masses" or the "economy" it still all boils down to the same thing:
the entity who holds onto the net benefit winds up being the afore mentioned
curtains "the masses" or "the economy", not human beings. This inability to
enjoy the net benefit is supposedly the reason why we oppose communism as an
economic system. And no, stuff is not a net benefit; stuff becomes burdensome
due to maintenance needs, gets old and thrown out, and only provides momentary
satisfaction anyway. People should ask themselves why China has proven to be
the most successful economic power since the birth of capitalism (discounting
euro nations & US since they grew only because they siphoned other nation's
resources). It's because China fused together two effective resource-
allocation systems that are mirror images, complimentary and thus an
explosively productive combination: communism and capitalism.

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russjhammond
It is sad how many people wear exhaustion as a badge of honor. I was raised on
a farm where when certainly learned how to work hard but if we could ever find
a better or smarter way to do it we did. But even in busiest days, when the
dinner bell rang (literally) we stopped what we were doing and came to eat and
enjoy each other's company.

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spencerDC
Great post and good comments too!

