Weekdays: Wake up. Quick run. 4 to 5 hours of WFH (work from home). Office from 11 to 6. Gym. Dinner. Unwind. 1-2 hours catch up on work. Read something non work related for 30 minutes in bed. Sleep. Rinse Repeat.
Weekends: 4 hours of work catchup each day on Saturday and Sunday.
Well, we all work for someone. I work for our investors. But yes, I'm the founder of my company, so I work for myself and because I love what I do. Realistically I'd say I do about 80 hours per week. But when you love what you do it's not work.
Thanks. I hope you dont take my query the wrong way, I was just concerned that how well your efforts are tied with (potential) rewards. Good to know they are tied well enough.
6am I lay in bed going over emails (my co-founders are GMT -6 while I am in the UK so most emails come in over night for me) so I don't wake my other half.
7.30am ish I'm at my desk till noon. If it's a gym day then I'll be out till 2pm, otherwise I tend to only take 15 mins for lunch.
Conference calls at 3-5 every week day, I then take an hour or so for dinner and then work till 10 or 11 at night.
Sat/Sun I tend to work 2pm till 6 and then a couple of hours in the evening.
When I worked for big companies I was a proper 9 on the dot, organise my day so I got out at 5 or 5.30 on the dot and drop work thinking like a heavy coat as soon as I was out the door. It's amazing what believing in what you do can do for your mental reserves though. The hardest part is convincing my partner that it's how it has to be for a while.
Has working with this type of schedule made any sort of negative impact on your social life? I'm kinda settling into a similar routine with my work hours slowly creeping up, and I'm afraid that some relationships might suffer in the long haul.
Working for a German company in 2009 really taught me a lot about vacations. They gave me something like 6 weeks of vacation and I used about 5 weeks of it...
A couple years when I moved back to freelancing, and working on my web apps, I instituted a pretty strict rule of ending at a normal time, and no working on weekends. It works most of the time :-) but has definitely kept me sane, and made the people around me calmer. It also forces me to take time to think, which I wasn't doing when I was just working all the time.
I think the best schedule would be a mix of enforced office hours (Monday through Wednesday, for example) combined with letting employees work from home (or coffee shops, etc.) for the rest of the week if they so choose.
The enforced office hours would keep the team close to each other and on the same page. The flex time would allow employees to work wherever and whenever they deem most efficient for themselves. Set goals on Wednesday, recap on Monday.
Results (not office/face time) should always be the final metric in judging employee performance.
I learned that she had a 2 hour commute to work every day, which was killing her … because the company had a formal no-work-from-home policy. Needless to say I created a new policy and she was granted work-from-home Wednesdays.
Why was the no-work-from-home policy ever created? Did employees just stay home and lie about their work?
I take the 37Signals-type approach on anything like this, don't create rules or policies until they solve a real problem (not just a hypothetical problem).
Some cultures are more strict about office hours than others. In German culture it is normal to expect someone to be there on time and leave on time, and to never stray from the norm. I had to shake that up a bit.
Standard office hours are from noon to two, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. All meetings should be scheduled during those times. Other than that, people can work where and when they'd like.
This system has a lot of flexibility, encourages people to be in the office a few days a week, but doesn't force them to commute at the same time as the rest of the world.
1/ Don't add process until it's necessary. Why have office hours, a vacation policy, or any rule that requires employees to expend mental capital on superfluous issues?
2/ If you're to the point when that process is necessary, you probably hired the wrong people (especially in a startup).
I don't agree so much with point 2, but I do think that it's smart to figure out what people actually need to be in the office for and plan around that, rather than assuming some kind of window. Maybe the lunch meeting at one startup is the 4pm at another.
my personal philosophy is try to come in at least three to four days a week (say between 12-5), because it helps keep the team connected. other than that, work when you want, where you want, as long as the work gets done.
My thoughts, based on a few startups I've observed among my friends: once a startup gets to 2-3 full-time founders, the probability that it will fail because people aren't working hard enough goes near zero. The company might fail for other reasons, but once you have 2 or 3 dedicated, full-time founders, "lack of effort" is not even on the list of the top 20 things that can kill it. Occasionally, an individual person might drop below acceptable effort levels-- that person usually leaves for a more stable job in a month or two. It just doesn't make sense to work for a startup if you're going to put in a half-hearted effort, so the less committed people usually leave before they become a problem.
What I said above is untrue for some 1-person startups that are effectively abandoned, and for startups where people stay in their day jobs and therefore really aren't able to contribute enough to get the thing off the ground. But when you have 2 to 4 people working full-time on a startup, there are still a lot of things that can kill it (bad product, poor team dynamics, bad investor relations, just plain bad luck) but a lack of aggregate effort is very, very low on the list.
What seems to be far more common are hours- or sacrifice-related squabbles, and these can utterly break a company. Let's say two founders are working 80 hours per week and one is working 50, but they're all about equally valuable and productive. What happens if, when it's time to split equity, the third founder gets a smaller share? Possible fight. Or worse yet, what if he ends up with lower status within the company and is treated more like an employee, because he didn't "pull enough weight"? This is where fatal fractures happen. Nothing goes wrong because there wasn't enough effort, and nobody put in such a low level of effort as to cause problems, but the perception of unequal sacrifice and dedication has spawned a very nasty conflict that is destined, at some point in the future, to create a fight that could damage (or ruin) the company.
People tend to think of rules surrounding office hours and vacation allotments as exploitative in nature. They can be, but they're also there, in an odd way, to protect people against certain kinds of social dysfunction. Working from home, for example, is great when you have a good working culture, because people can work more productively and are happier. If the environment's dysfunctional, to have people working from home is going to make it a lot worse, because of the distrust that it will breed. In a dysfunctional work environment, it becomes important (until you've made your exit) to be cautious and show up at "normal" times, because the perception of working hard becomes more important than actually working hard.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] thread1. Working all the time is not sustainable. 2. There's always more work, and getting it done sooner isn't as helpful as you think.
Nowadays, I'm a proponent of basically exactly what the linked post says.
Weekdays: Wake up. Quick run. 4 to 5 hours of WFH (work from home). Office from 11 to 6. Gym. Dinner. Unwind. 1-2 hours catch up on work. Read something non work related for 30 minutes in bed. Sleep. Rinse Repeat.
Weekends: 4 hours of work catchup each day on Saturday and Sunday.
6am I lay in bed going over emails (my co-founders are GMT -6 while I am in the UK so most emails come in over night for me) so I don't wake my other half. 7.30am ish I'm at my desk till noon. If it's a gym day then I'll be out till 2pm, otherwise I tend to only take 15 mins for lunch. Conference calls at 3-5 every week day, I then take an hour or so for dinner and then work till 10 or 11 at night.
Sat/Sun I tend to work 2pm till 6 and then a couple of hours in the evening.
When I worked for big companies I was a proper 9 on the dot, organise my day so I got out at 5 or 5.30 on the dot and drop work thinking like a heavy coat as soon as I was out the door. It's amazing what believing in what you do can do for your mental reserves though. The hardest part is convincing my partner that it's how it has to be for a while.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_emplo...
The enforced office hours would keep the team close to each other and on the same page. The flex time would allow employees to work wherever and whenever they deem most efficient for themselves. Set goals on Wednesday, recap on Monday.
Results (not office/face time) should always be the final metric in judging employee performance.
Why was the no-work-from-home policy ever created? Did employees just stay home and lie about their work?
I take the 37Signals-type approach on anything like this, don't create rules or policies until they solve a real problem (not just a hypothetical problem).
Standard office hours are from noon to two, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. All meetings should be scheduled during those times. Other than that, people can work where and when they'd like.
This system has a lot of flexibility, encourages people to be in the office a few days a week, but doesn't force them to commute at the same time as the rest of the world.
1/ Don't add process until it's necessary. Why have office hours, a vacation policy, or any rule that requires employees to expend mental capital on superfluous issues?
2/ If you're to the point when that process is necessary, you probably hired the wrong people (especially in a startup).
What I said above is untrue for some 1-person startups that are effectively abandoned, and for startups where people stay in their day jobs and therefore really aren't able to contribute enough to get the thing off the ground. But when you have 2 to 4 people working full-time on a startup, there are still a lot of things that can kill it (bad product, poor team dynamics, bad investor relations, just plain bad luck) but a lack of aggregate effort is very, very low on the list.
What seems to be far more common are hours- or sacrifice-related squabbles, and these can utterly break a company. Let's say two founders are working 80 hours per week and one is working 50, but they're all about equally valuable and productive. What happens if, when it's time to split equity, the third founder gets a smaller share? Possible fight. Or worse yet, what if he ends up with lower status within the company and is treated more like an employee, because he didn't "pull enough weight"? This is where fatal fractures happen. Nothing goes wrong because there wasn't enough effort, and nobody put in such a low level of effort as to cause problems, but the perception of unequal sacrifice and dedication has spawned a very nasty conflict that is destined, at some point in the future, to create a fight that could damage (or ruin) the company.
People tend to think of rules surrounding office hours and vacation allotments as exploitative in nature. They can be, but they're also there, in an odd way, to protect people against certain kinds of social dysfunction. Working from home, for example, is great when you have a good working culture, because people can work more productively and are happier. If the environment's dysfunctional, to have people working from home is going to make it a lot worse, because of the distrust that it will breed. In a dysfunctional work environment, it becomes important (until you've made your exit) to be cautious and show up at "normal" times, because the perception of working hard becomes more important than actually working hard.