Ask HN: How do you manage work/life balance?
I tried searching HN but couldn't see this discussion anywhere...
Wanted to know how you guys, particularly founders, manage work/life balance? In an ideal world, only people who actually successfully manage it respond...
42 comments
[ 3248 ms ] story [ 2175 ms ] thread8 to 2 life
2 to 9 sleep
Monday through Saturday, with Sundays off.
Sure if there is some emergency all bets are off, but I find that this gives me the most productivity, w/o really doing any damage to my personal life.
Efficiency: I keep my priority list in front of me so I'm always coding the most important things. I use a Lisp dialect so that I can make effective use of short coding sessions. A lot of my progress in the past few years has been during 35-minute train rides.
Period.
For example, I'm off liquor until the PhD's finished. Permanently: no delivered pizza, and nothing but regular coffee or espresso from coffee shops (specifically, no mochas, which I take like liquid crack).
I can ignore the rules for special occasions, which helps keep me in moderation even when I'm in these unusual circumstances.
Full-time founder: 9:30 to 11 work/coffee/eat, 11:30 to 3 work, 3 to 4 gym, 5 to 8 work, 8-11 eat/life, 11-1 work. Mon-Sat with Sunday usually being the most life and most relaxed.
You read that right... technically, I work the same or slightly less hours than with a full-time job and part-time founder responsibilities. Either way, it's about 60-70 hours a week.
3pm to 12am, founder stuff.
12am panic about homework
I don't have a separate office and I haven't been able to stick to any schedule more concrete than that.
Its probably not an ideal situation, but it seems to be working out pretty well so far.
The article was geared toward home workers and focused on tips and tricks to avoid getting stir crazy. But a lot of it talks about how to keep work and personal lives separate, which is especially difficult when your home is your office. So much of the post may be helpful to you.
Short version of my tips of things to do during the work day to stay sane:
1. Clearly define your work space. 2. Take a walk. 3. Take a nap. 4. Have lunch with a friend. 5. Join a local user group. 6. Engage with a community online. 7. Use Twitter. 8. Subscribe to a trade magazine. 9. Keep work and personal contact info separate. 10. Get a cat (or a dog). 11. Take regular breaks. 12. Schedule time off.
Mark Cuban was known for working 7 years straight on Broadcast.com (originally known as AudioNet) and that was at the time the largest IPO in history, sold to Yahoo for $6 billion in stock. He didn't take vacations, holidays, or leave work during these 7 years.
It depends on what you want out of life. I think too many people get into entrepreneurship because they think it sounds fun, but they don't realize it requires everything of you. If you're the CEO or President of your startup, you set the example. Every single person on your team will only work as hard as you will.
If you're unwilling to sacrifice friendships, family, weekends, holidays, then you're not very competitive to others who are. I'm not trying to say that in a sleezy way, I'm just stating the facts. A lot of people are willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, so if you only want to be self-employed and do your own self-startup, then you can probably get away with as much or little work-life balance as you want.
If you're sacrificing friendships and family, you're not doing it right. And not only that, even if you succeed you'll end up wishing you didn't. I've seen this happen.
For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week.
Equating hours-per-week with value is naive at best.
Is there are tangible evidence for this? I agree with the idea of diminishing returns, but also think that one needs to put in more than 40 hours a week. But so far, the arguments are anecdotal.
I believe there has been some evidence that supports the ~40 hour work week. I suppose 40 exactly is a tad arbitrary, optimal number is probably some strange decimal, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't really close to 40 for the average person.
Perhaps it depends on the individual, perhaps for some its 40 and for some its 50, etc. Maybe the latter group succeeds more. I feel like this is untrue, but certainly can't prove it.
FWIW, none of the startup founders I know have much in the way of work/life balance, at least for the first 5 years or so of the company's life. It was not uncommon for them to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and take their first vacation when the company was about 4 years old. This doesn't mean it was a daily grind - just that their life became the company, and that's what they wanted to be working on even when they weren't officially at work.
Edit: I should make a distinction here between startups (organizations that are intended to grow really fast) and small businesses. I know several small business owners with good work/life balance: you kinda need it, since a small business is a long haul that'll consume you if you don't have some other sort of life. I don't know any startup founders with a life, during the startup phase.
Know what sort of business you want and be honest up-front with family, friends, investors, employees, and yourself. You aren't going to get rich in 4 years with a small business. But you can make a good living for yourself, sacrificing less of your personal life, with significantly less risk. If you're going to shoot for the moon, figure out what it would take to prove that you're aiming right, and bail out before you sacrifice too much if you're not.
You can maintain a healthy social life, or marriage, or keeping in touch with family, and still succeed. Read Balsamiq's story: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=79 - It's not the largest sample size, but he's not the only one doing it.
Your family and friends should support you. My wife understands the life, she understands that when I'm in "the zone" to put my dinner in the fridge and I'll reheat it later. I gave my wife 12 hours notice that 3 other rails hackers would be in our house for a weekend for RailsRumble - she went out and bought groceries and cooked for us. When the internet went down that weekend, her father came to our rescue and opened his lawfirm's office for us to work from - the end result, we won RailsRumble 2008 - and we did it with the support of our families.
The fact that I have obligations (Mortgage, Student Loans, Car Payment) keeps me focused.
the best blog post i've found on this is from naval ravikant, http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2005/11/29/the-80-hour-myt...
luckily, things are dynamic and you don't have to choose between work and life or some arbitrary balance point and then live with your decision forever. rather, depending on your time constraints your radius of interaction widens or shortens. while working hectically on some feature you'll only interact with very few close friends or no one at all, and when things are going slow or when you need support, emotional or otherwise, you'll simply reach out to more people. thus, be flexible in terms of how you allocate your time but always with an eye on the prize.
I've never heard of broadcast.com.
Mark Cuban might have made a lot of money, but did he create something good that people know, love, and use?
Because I want to do the latter.
MicroSolutions was bought by CompuServe who you may or may not be familiar with. Have you heard the movies titled: The Smartest Guys in The Room or Good Night, and Good Luck? He was behind them.
I certainly get what you're saying, it's just that sometimes Cuban is wrongly portrayed as a one-trick pony. Also of note, I had never heard of lastminute.com until today. And even if i had, I doubt I'd know the person behind it.
But I have heard of Good Night, and Good Luck, and perhaps the other film, if you mean the Enron documentary (The Smartest Guys in the Room). Those, and reinventing a sports team would be achievements of which I would be very proud.
But I'll be glad when the freed up bandwidth can be used for internet.
Enjoy your work like you enjoy your life.
Step 2: I call it Agile Life Development. Apply the same principles you do to your startup to your life as a whole. Start with a routine you think might work, run it for a few weeks, see if it does. If you find it's not keeping you both happy and productive, and working toward your goals while keeping your priorities in order, try to determine why and make some changes. Test again. In this case your product is your life and your user is you (and friends and family) so good feedback is really easy to come by. And you're definitely making something you want.
It'll take a while, but you'll get there. Just don't stop working on it. I've been attempting it for ~7 years now, and I'm still not where I would consider it perfect, but it's pretty damn good.
I never work during sundays. That's my only limit.
5pm - 12am : trying to manage work/life balance
that 5-12 includes trying to take rest, managing college assignments if any... and basically trying to do too many things... so work/life balance hardly exists :(
If I play some backetball in the evening I haven't the energy to do much that night. the "/" in "work/life" sometimes seems to translate to "work" OR "life".. choose any :P