I really respect your choice to optimize for balance and enjoyment.
My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!"
Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day!
When I was a corporate engineer, I would get the sunday scaries every week and find any excuse to push back bedtime another hour. But now, I wake up excited and energized to work on a project I love... and maybe someday I'll give myself permission to do that less than 7 days a week.
Anyway, I digress.
I'm so happy to hear your SaaS is going strong after 9 years. Cheers! And here's to 9 more!
I'm absolutely convinced that burnout is a function of spending time on things you loathe to do. Not how much time you spend on something you love doing.
Most people I know that actually work all-the-time, not self-proclaimed "I work X hour weeks people that say it to sound 'cool'" people. Never have a burnout.
Most of those people also go on extended vacations of say 5-7 weeks. But still work 2-3 hours every day.
Burnout seems much more common in the average worker that only works a 9-5.
The commonality of burnout in some form to full burnout seems to be roughly 75% for employees[1] and roughly 70% for executives[2] and 25% ~ 75% for entrepreneurs[3].
That's a match for my experience so far. Never could have worked this hard for someone else.
Having full creative control, uncapped upside potential, and truly enjoying the work make it a lot easier to do every day.
As a long-term goal, I would like to restore better work/life balance.
But first, I'm trying to make hay while the sun shines, to hit escape velocity from corporate work permanently. Now that I've tasted freedom, I really don't want to be dragged back...regardless of the outcome with my current business.
To me, burnout is putting large amounts of mental and emotional energy into an activity where you don't have much agency on how it is done, or the outcome. That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life. The actual amount of work leading to burnout is only a small component IMO.
Spot on. You don’t get burnout from boring tedious work. That’s a completely different form of exhaustion.
> That can happen in entrepreneurship, but much more common in corporate life.
Yeah but it’s not at all limited to traditional work. A common source of burnout is family issues. People burn out taking care of others, especially someone with psychological or substance abuse problems. Or co-dependence, terminal illnesses. Those things can become worse by trying harder, and that’s a potent recipe for burnout.
Can confirm, I work a 9-5 and have absolutely had projects where writing code felt like pulling teeth and I very much experienced burnout as a consequence of that.
Even now I have a project where I have to fix a bunch of hastily written code and while I’m making progress and it’ll eventually be fine, it’s quite unsatisfying.
That’s an important point. Stress is a key contributor to burnout. It’s very plausible that working 5 unstressed hours 7 days a week doesn’t lead to burnout, while the same amount of work that is stressful and leaves you think about work all day even “off the clock” does lead you to burn out.
Yeah, I don't know. If I love playing guitar, doing it 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, is going to get old. At some point it becomes counterproductive. Sometimes I sit in front of a screen, and I WANT to do something, excited even, but my brain is just not sharp enough.
With coding, it's also a matter of quality of work. You need to step back so you can look at your work with a fresh perspective, and oh, there are ALWAYS horrors you will find, the ones you created when tired.
Not an expert or anything, but when I looked into burnout it was predicted by lack of expected reward. So there's two things you can change. The expectation or the reward.
This matches siblings comments where employees experience burnout more probably because employees are rarely rewarded for their best work. But executives and entrepreneurs are.
I suppose even if the reward is intangible that protects from burnout.
Until they are not. The most promising entrepreneurial project can take an unexpected turn south, and if you’ve worked yourself past the burnout threshold at that point it can be hard to come back.
Useful and important certainly I agree, but it is not blocking you in your work if the SaaS provider goes down (unlike a payment provider, a hosting company, a CRM, etc…)
That's a skill you can work on. You can also progressively structure your business so that you never need to be working at a given time.
It took a me few years of observing what brings my attention back you work and what controls my schedule the most, and many little practices to deal with that. Now the thing runs itself, and I can take much longer vacations. It was worth the effort.
> If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!
A company, by definition, is a group of people. Of course it is possible to register company and never hire employees, but it is not relevant now. The point is when you say "the company stand still" it effectively meaning "I am standing still". Either normalize it for yourself, or hire someone)
My journey as a solopreneur is similar, but I still struggle with giving myself permission to rest. "If I take a break, the company is at a stand-still!"
Despite the self-imposed pressure and anxiety though, it is still a dream come true. I actually had a shocking realization recently that mornings are now my favorite time of day!
When I was a corporate engineer, I would get the sunday scaries every week and find any excuse to push back bedtime another hour. But now, I wake up excited and energized to work on a project I love... and maybe someday I'll give myself permission to do that less than 7 days a week.
Anyway, I digress.
I'm so happy to hear your SaaS is going strong after 9 years. Cheers! And here's to 9 more!