Well, that depends. For those of us doing the "bootstrap while working a dayjob" thing, yeah, it basically does become a nonstop grind. Well, nearly nonstop. Everybody has to take a break sometime.
For me, I allocate damn close to every hour I have outside of my dayjob to working on Fogbeam Labs. Take out sleep time, and time to eat (plus occasional diversions like grocery shopping, etc.) and it's basically:
1. get up and go to the dayjob
2. leave the dayjob and drive to Starbucks or Panera Bread
3. sit there and work on the startup for 4-5 more hours
4. drive home, eat, sleep
5. lather rinse repeat
6. Except Sat. and Sun, which is pretty much:
7. work on the startup all day
Fun? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Healthy? Probably not. Necessary? Well, I think so or I wouldn't be doing it.
My cofounder, on the other hand, doesn't go to quite the same extremes I do, which is fine. I tend to be a little extreme by nature, and I don't really expect anybody else to do the crazy shit I do. :-)
Well, that depends. Right this minute, basically no, but that's because I'm working on the road for my dayjob, and when I fly in for the weekends, I don't get home until around 1:00am Sat. morning, which inhibits me from getting up early enough for what would otherwise be my regularly scheduled mountain bike group ride.
But, yeah, when I'm in town fulltime, I do about a 2 hour MTB ride on Sat. mornings, weather permitting.
And, during football season, I do take out time to go to a sports bar and watch the Dolphins game on Sundays. But even then, I take my laptop so I can work during the breaks, or if the game turns into a blowout.
Beyond that, though, not a whole lot. I'm almost 40 and I'm running out of time to achieve some of my dreams... so it's pretty much "nose to the grindstone" right now.
But like I said... everybody needs a break every now and then. I will infrequently just take a random day off and do no startup work at all,and just kick back and watch movies, or go to the hackerspace and tinker with some Arduino stuff or something. I don't do it very often, and I feel somewhat guilty when I do, but I usually feel a bit recharged after one of those days.
No, haven't tried that. I don't think it would work for me though. I'm a night owl by nature, and I tend to do my best work at the end of the day, as opposed to the beginning.
You can bootstrap a startup quite successfully just using a few hours a week. But not all startups. Depends what you're doing.
I guess that's true, when you consider something like patio11 and his BCC. It doesn't sound like he was pouring 60+ hours a week into that (or maybe he was, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, please).
But I'm also guessing that the set of startups that you can build with that small a time investment, is pretty small. Especially if you're talking about something that's intended to be a scalable startup, something that can be a billion dollar business someday.
if time was fungible, then working 40 hours instead of 60 hours would only make it take 50% longer in calendar-time to get the thing done. And if you have some other income stream, then that extra time might not matter much.
And if getting enough sleep and seeing your family makes you mentally healthier the calendar-time penalty might be less than 50%. Maybe a lot less.
In this podcast (http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/19/patio11-part1/), he says that he worked about five hours a week on it as a side project (although it also talks about how he would work on weekends, so maybe it was a little more than that.)
I'm going to ignore your "fuck"s and "this is retarded", and ask why you chose 50+ as a number?
From your profile, you're working at night attempting to become ramen profitable, which would mean that yes, you need to work your ass off.
But not everyone is in your situation, so please quit the "this is retarded" sentiment. It's childish.
For example, I'm part of a 6-person team at a startup in SF and I do not work 80 hours per week. I get to work at 9 and I leave at 6. And we're doing just fine.
What makes you think that you do? I too once worked at a defense contractor, I just didn't let their billed hours == productivity myth infect my thinking. I'm in my second serious startup and neither did the startup grind and both were doing amazing work. Roughly 50 hours a week is the norm which is hardly unsustainable.
Meanwhile my girlfriend and two of my best friends work at a 3 different startups doing the total grind 70+ hour/week schedule, and their results do not seem better. In a lot of ways those companies are doing worse because they are super focused on working harder not working smarter.
> I too once worked at a defense contractor, I just didn't let their billed hours == productivity myth infect my thinking.
Count me in this group as well, though what contractor did you work for where you actually billed all your hours worked? The place I was at previously only allowed us (and required us) to bill 40 hours per week unless otherwise authorized. Such authorization was a rare occurrence.
There was still significant pressure to work 50+ per week, though. The attitude there was this weird mix of "if you don't do this you aren't loyal and committed" and "you should be lucky you have a job in this economy".
I've always admired people who get more done in less time. We're in hustle mode in our startup right now but I still try to block out time that feels wide open to keep an eye on where we're headed and wind down a little. No use in racing ahead if it's a dead end road.
To continue the vehicular metaphor, it feels like hustle culture advocates burying the needle in the red zone, even though that's the least efficient point on the power curve. And even though that's less a predictor of success than what direction you're headed in.
There are absolutely times when you and your team need to live in the red zone of your tach. But really that's a temporary solution to being caught in the wrong gear. Amazing opportunity, can't upshift = gotta floor it anyways. But curves ahead = can't floor it. All depends.
It's also better to drive slowly towards your goal than to speed in the wrong direction and never look at your map to get your bearings. After a few side projects that never went anywhere, I spend more time taking walks and just thinking about the direction I'm going and I'm spending less time doing unnecessary work as a result. Sometimes you need a break in able to come back to the project refreshed with a new outlook on things.
I've also found walks to be super valuable. They're times where you can't get distracted because there's nothing else to do but think, like in the shower (which is why so many great ideas happen in each). They also get a little physical activity into your day which helps the brain work.
When I take walks with my wife we have great convos that won't happen on the couch when we're exhausted. We walk this circular path around Duke's East campus, which is about 2 miles. Having a defined path like that helps too- you don't have to get distracted by where you're going or be temped to end it early.
The reason this meme exists is that there is a huge economic benefit to (some, not all) founders and VCs to perpetuating it.
It attracts only young impressionable shutins to the startup and they feel like if they aren't working 18 hours a day they are slacking. Plus there is the "Stanford/Google effect" in play where everyone claims to be studying/working all the time but aren't if you factor out the foam dart / BBQ / bro time.
Oh god, all my life I've seen people waste so much time and then claim that they're so busy. It has developed into a huge pet peeve of mine, especially when they get pissed when I arrive to work at 8 AM and get up to leave at 5 PM. And I've done more in those 9 hours than they've done in their last two 16-hour days.
Coincidentally, you'll find that it is impossible to spend more than ~6 hours of focused time on a single type of task. If you have different types you might be able to stretch your total focus to about 8 or maybe 9 hours.
So if your main job is coding, you can probably spend about 6 real work hours on that. This leaves you with another 3 hours to spend on stuff like email, or writing or whatever. Certain types of hobbies do count into this as well.
I've found I can hack this -slightly- if I get up early, knock out five hours of work, goof off for a few hours, eat a good meal, maybe throw a nap in there, and then come back for another 5 hour stretch.
But I've really only gained 2-3 hours over one 7-8 session. 12 or 16 hours is completely unsustainable over more than 2-3 days.
"Coincidentally, you'll find that it is impossible to spend more than ~6 hours of focused time on a single type of task"
I'm not sure who did this research, but I can tell you from personal experience that this is simply not true. Maybe I'm a freak of nature but when I was first learning how to code I would hold one man hackathons in the summer from the moment I got up until deep into the night. Similarly, when I was younger and played a lot of RPGs, I would play quite literally all weekend, pausing only for sustenance and a little bit of sleep, and usually multitasking on the food part, far surpassing 6 hours of focus time.
You're a freak (your word, so no acting like I attacked you). I used to game all weekend, from Friday night to Sunday night. Most folks were there for, like, part of Saturday. Only a relatively small number of folks could sustain the marathon gaming. The group had a regional reputation and some folks came to town once a month just to participate.
Most folks cannot sustain focus for super long periods.
I have participated in or witnessed multiple gaming groups in different states/countries and read some articles, etc. The first (marathon/hyperfocused) gaming group I participated in was not the norm.
I suspect the "must work 24/7" thing is probably rooted in the fact that some folks are just like that and those folks are often crazily successful. But I think the inference that high number of hours worked is the thing to shoot for isn't really accurate. Some folks don't need a lot of sleep. Some folks can focus for long periods. Someone who has both traits may well be brighter than average.
Their phenomenal success isn't necessarily rooted in any one thing. Putting in the hours if you aren't that bright and actually need more sleep may be a recipe for disaster instead of a recipe for success. However, people like Bill Gates do tend to work crazy long hours. You can't ask to be born with his brains -- you have whatever brain you have -- but you can try to emulate his work habits and hope that's the most important piece. But I see no reason to believe it is. Perhaps long hours are a good idea. I just have yet to see good data which proves that. I have seen more data that for most people job performance improves if they cut back their hours and are working when fresh and focused.
I suspect the "must work 24/7" thing is probably rooted in the fact that some folks are just like that and those folks are often crazily successful.
Are they? What if you just don't notice the unsuccessful ones; they're at home spending ten hours a day drawing pictures of butterflies, or they're down at the gym obsessively lifting heavy things over and over again, or any one of a number of other obsessive activities that don't bring success.
I stand by what I said. But I would be perfectly happy to frame that as running in the other direction: That folks who are crazy successful often have this group of traits. Since we have whatever brain we have, articles often focus on the fact that they work long hours as the thing others have a hope of emulating, as if that's all that really matters. I see no reason to believe it is.
When I was younger I could do it easily too, hack through the night with the power of some caffeinated cola drinks, easily doing 12h hackathons. When I was 16 to about 20 years old, that is.
Nowadays it's a bit different. My body just can't take the sitting in front of the computer for so long. Maybe it's a good thing though, but it really makes me want to think about how I spend my time on the computer and seek those creative hours when I am able to get into the zone and just code.
Usually I find myself doing from anywhere to 2 to 4 hours of concentrated creative work a day, and that's it.
After speaking with a couple of people that have ADHD (I've never been diagnosed, though I probably would have been with my behavior and inattentiveness during my school years), I've worked up a pet theory that so-called "ADHD" or "ADD" is what allows people to hyper focus like this. Granted, of the people I've talked to, including myself, that hyper focus really only extends to things they are truly interested in, but it's real nonetheless. I found this out for myself when I got into programming (as stated above).
As for me, I've noticed the amount of time I can focus on something go down a little over the years as well, though I still occasionally get inspired and hyper focus like I used to.
That's not just your pet theory, it's commonly accepted by psychiatry.
One of the defining characteristics of ADD/ADHD is ability to focus for extended periods. The main reasons ADD gets a bad rap is that people (often children) are either focusing on something that adults don't want them to focus on, or there is nothing interesting that holds their attention so they become easily distracted.
300 years in the future kids will be in school, uploading into their brains the story of how in the early 21st century leading psychiatrists and willurd independently discovered the fact that ADHD is actually a super power. Or so I imagine...
The system is biased against letting people work a shorter work week in the US for professional positions. a) Health insurance is partially paid by employers, creating a lot of overhead for each employee, and the cost is the same whether they work 20 hrs or 60 hrs. and b) most professionals are exempt from paying OT to salaried employees, so there is no disincentive to not push your employees to work longer than 40hrs/wk
Thank you! I hear this all the time and it drives me nuts! "Omg, I'm sooooOoOooO busy.... I've been working (on my facebook profile) for 10 hours today :sadpandaface:"
I have no problem with posting cat videos to facebook, more power to you, but don't claim that you're busy when your not.
My fav is the "I didn't have the time (enter any task here)" forgetting that the two of your are friends on facebook and you can see the 189321983729 icanhascheezburger photos that were shared during the "busy" time.
The most annoying is the 'Staying alive' response when you ask how someone is. Really common from Stanford grads. Basically they are trying to say they are soooooo busy and important. The most successful people I know all get the balance right. They focus and work hard, but also know when to focus on play (and keep them very distinct)
It attracts only young impressionable shutins to the startup and they feel like if they aren't working 18 hours a day they are slacking.
And the 40 year olds who haven't accomplished anything yet, and hear the clock ticking, and realize they are running out of "at bats".
The reason this meme exists is that there is a huge economic benefit to (some, not all) founders and VCs to perpetuating it.
Yeah, I mean for a founder. I wouldn't expect an employee with minimal or no equity to go all that. What the heck would be their incentive to do it? I do it because A. I actually enjoy it in a way, and B. I stand to become very wealthy if we succeed.
That's the right reason to work hard - because you are enjoying it and stand to become wealthy.
The thing is, most employees with some paltry 0.5% won't, but peer pressure makes them feel like they need to keep up with the 5% founding employees and 30% founders in hours.
Most startups fail. That's scary. The natural response to fear is to run harder, run faster. And when the ride isn't scary, it's really exciting. Who can sleep when the growth curve looks like that?
And all this trickles down to the employees. And up to the VCs, the dumber fraction of which will try to measure progress by hours spent. If you aren't sweating, you aren't working, right?
Honestly, I think there's little economic benefit to all those hours put in. Especially for people writing code, where I think it's incredibly easy for tired people to be negatively productive. It's fear, excitement, and macho bullshit, not rational self-interest at all.
I work at a YC startup, and we don't work a 24/7 grind. The VP of Engineering believes that it's not sustainable to work like that, and you can't build a successful company by burning out your engineers. Sure, when there are site issues, it's all-hands on deck, and if you need to get something in for the next push, then definitely you need to work your butt off, but that's just being professional. For the most part, the pace is really great, and we are all very productive.
You know, there exists a technique that makes "get something in for the next release" obsolete.
Basically: have the marketing and sales people sell and market the thing your engineers wrote last week, not the thing you hope they will write next week.
That works once you have discovered your customers and market fit. Until then, you need to sell first, then build.
An acquaintance of mine built her company by selling her idea all over town. She got a few local businesses to sign on, and told them it would be a month of set up time. Over the course of a month she got the business setup, hired employees, bought computers, etc... 5 years of hard work later she sold the business and is currently vacationing at some random place in the world.
It doesn't, but it does too. Time is 24/7 and never stops even if you do. If you have a great idea and you believe that in it, you will be fueled to go 24/7. If you are afraid other's might beat you to it, you will have no choice but to go 24/7. The worst feeling in the world is having a great idea, slack at it, and having others thoroughly beat you and stomp you to the ground. While they are gaining traction, you are playing catch up. And you never catch up. No founder wants to experience that, this is why startup life for most is a 24/7 grind.
Because the prize most are after is the highest level. If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level. It's like preparing for the Olympics.
In everything in life, there are exceptions. But such are not the norm or the rule.
Not sure why you got downvoted for that. I can see how a reasonable person could disagree, but your position is certainly not outlandish. In fact, I - by and large - agree with you. Especially this bit:
If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level.
Yeah, if your ambitions are that grand, you can't really expect anything to come easily... personally I feel like you have to be willing to scrape, kick, scratch, claw, bleed, hustle and basically battle your ass off if you're going to get there.
My start-up is also not a grind. My wife and I are the founders, and we put in our hours early on, but now we work a very regular 9-5 schedule. At least one of us has to leave around 5:15 to pick up our son.
Our employees are also not asked to work crazy hours - we don't rush to get releases out, we're profitable and growing, and we're not concerned about flipping the company tomorrow. Our employees are also now in their late 20s, and we expect them to have children and normal lives too, and we want them to stick with us through that.
That's incredibly interesting. I'm actually working on a startup with my SO too. It's been a trip so far. I really feel like we're growing closer because of it. Plus she doesn't bother me about working odd hours because she's next to me :)
Our founders have been true to their promise of work/life balance, and I believe this contributes greatly to our team's success. We're quickly expanding around the country without any VC breathing down our necks and growing at a quicker pace than competitors who try to emphasize the usual work hard play hard mantras. Some of the other comments on here ring true when they suggest that certain kinds of investors benefit most from employees burning themselves out. I think our well rested team with plenty of time for friends and family tackles problems with healthier vigor than our tired competitors!
I'm all for not burning out, but I feel like there's something missing from all these articles admonishing people to work less.
It's great that people can work 5-6 hours a day, no weekends, and still build a great business. But if that's truly more efficient, should we expect to see some massive billion dollar companies run that way? How much did Bill Gates, Larry & Sergey, Jeff Bezos, etc. work when they were getting their companies off the ground? When they look back, do they feel the time was wasted, or do they feel it was necessary?
Or to the Metalab example, who's to say that the success Andrew experienced when he cut back on his work was not due in part to the long hours he had put in previously?
Not trying to admonish people to work more - just saying there's some missing analysis here!
We think of productivity as "how much can you get done in an hour" * "how many hours you work."
Unfortunately, as humans, we need recharge time. If I code 80 hours this week, the first twenty hours will be very productive, the next 20 will be slightly less productive, the next 20 will be significantly less productive, and the last 20 might be hurting more than helping.
After a day of rest, I might be back at the same productivity as I was for the middle 40 last week, and degrade from there.
The irony is that the more hours I work, the less I get done, the less difficult problems I can tackle.
Meetings take less out of people, be we still make poorer decisions by tiring our brains rather than taking passive time to rest, and using spare cycles to reflect on how we can squeeze more productivity out of the time we can work.
This, of course, ignores that some people burn out easier than others, and some have higher peaks than others. Working a truly focused 20 hours is more exhausting than 50 hours of semi-focused work for many people, and isn't rewarded in many corporate cultures. Find your own personal style.
I think the difference is what you're building the startup for.
Many startups aren't built to last. They're built to get to a certain size and then sell off their product and make a decent profit from it all. In this case, burnout isn't a worry because, if you get to the point where you're burnt out, your startup failed anyways (in that it didn't achieve the goal of attracting the attention of a larger startup-eating company). It's in these environments that the 24/7 grind is most apparent. Or companies that started with this model and then realized they couldn't sell and now have to try to turn their quick-buck idea into something that lasts.
Some startups, though, are built to last. These are places where burnout is a concern because they plan to be around for 10 - 15 years and they don't want to have to replace their entire staff every two years. In these companies, getting a good work:life balance is important for attracting and retaining talent.
People tend to think that if you're passionate about what you do (or love what you do), then you want to spend every waking hour doing it. But this kind of behavior is self-destructive. Even if you think you want to do it now, it will eventually wear you down and be unsustainable. Everyone needs to take breaks and have other interests and activities. And sometimes you have to force yourself or your employees to strike that balance.
Can't recall the study but a researchers analyzed optimal work behavior. They found that the most/best work is produced when an individual works 7-9 hours per day. The more creative the task (ie coding) the more skewed the optimal time is towards 7 hours/per day. You also want to break the day into 2-3 segments with breaks in-between.
At the end of the day it's just not one size fits all. Kobe Bryant sleeps 4 hours a night (he just tweeted that a couple weeks ago), and plays a ridiculous amount of basketball every day. If I tried to do that I would end up in the hospital. There's some people that will be able to work 12-16 hours a day, and there's some people that can get things done in 6. Execution is ALL that matters. Get it done in 6 hours or 15 minutes, just get it done.
The (original) article references Aaron Levie of Box, and how he works all day long and doesn't take vacations. Box is valued in the billions, MetaLab is not. Is there some correlation there? I'm not sure, but most of the "famous" founders encouraging long hours tend to have had larger companies.
This is exactly what Mike Alfred of BrightScope tells entrepreneurs, particularly the young ones just going through school and figuring out where they want to be in the scope of things. Until reading this, I'd hardly heard anyone speak out this way. I think it's particularly important to put this bug in kids' ears early; it's not sustainable to live and work like that, and eventually it destroys friendships and relationships and takes a toll larger than initially perceivable.
If it happens that 24/7 weeks exist for a little while, it happens. I get that. But I think what bugs me most about this "24/7 grind" attitude is that it's not a magic pill for a product that doesn't work or isn't destined to become profitable (and I'm using 'destined' lightly here). I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs go all-in on something and fail not because they didn't put the work into it -- but because it wasn't a product that could succeed, even with a tough grind.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] threadFor me, I allocate damn close to every hour I have outside of my dayjob to working on Fogbeam Labs. Take out sleep time, and time to eat (plus occasional diversions like grocery shopping, etc.) and it's basically:
1. get up and go to the dayjob
2. leave the dayjob and drive to Starbucks or Panera Bread
3. sit there and work on the startup for 4-5 more hours
4. drive home, eat, sleep
5. lather rinse repeat
6. Except Sat. and Sun, which is pretty much:
7. work on the startup all day
Fun? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Healthy? Probably not. Necessary? Well, I think so or I wouldn't be doing it.
My cofounder, on the other hand, doesn't go to quite the same extremes I do, which is fine. I tend to be a little extreme by nature, and I don't really expect anybody else to do the crazy shit I do. :-)
But, yeah, when I'm in town fulltime, I do about a 2 hour MTB ride on Sat. mornings, weather permitting.
And, during football season, I do take out time to go to a sports bar and watch the Dolphins game on Sundays. But even then, I take my laptop so I can work during the breaks, or if the game turns into a blowout.
Beyond that, though, not a whole lot. I'm almost 40 and I'm running out of time to achieve some of my dreams... so it's pretty much "nose to the grindstone" right now.
But like I said... everybody needs a break every now and then. I will infrequently just take a random day off and do no startup work at all,and just kick back and watch movies, or go to the hackerspace and tinker with some Arduino stuff or something. I don't do it very often, and I feel somewhat guilty when I do, but I usually feel a bit recharged after one of those days.
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/groove
If you haven't been paid in 6 months, and you've got a 2 month runway you're going to be working long hours.
This is retarded. Ya, you can start relaxing a bit when your company is 50+, but when you startup is just beginning, before profit, then fuck yes.
You can bootstrap a startup quite successfully just using a few hours a week. But not all startups. Depends what you're doing.
I guess that's true, when you consider something like patio11 and his BCC. It doesn't sound like he was pouring 60+ hours a week into that (or maybe he was, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, please).
But I'm also guessing that the set of startups that you can build with that small a time investment, is pretty small. Especially if you're talking about something that's intended to be a scalable startup, something that can be a billion dollar business someday.
From your profile, you're working at night attempting to become ramen profitable, which would mean that yes, you need to work your ass off.
But not everyone is in your situation, so please quit the "this is retarded" sentiment. It's childish.
For example, I'm part of a 6-person team at a startup in SF and I do not work 80 hours per week. I get to work at 9 and I leave at 6. And we're doing just fine.
Is your start up funded? Mine isn't.
Meanwhile my girlfriend and two of my best friends work at a 3 different startups doing the total grind 70+ hour/week schedule, and their results do not seem better. In a lot of ways those companies are doing worse because they are super focused on working harder not working smarter.
Count me in this group as well, though what contractor did you work for where you actually billed all your hours worked? The place I was at previously only allowed us (and required us) to bill 40 hours per week unless otherwise authorized. Such authorization was a rare occurrence.
There was still significant pressure to work 50+ per week, though. The attitude there was this weird mix of "if you don't do this you aren't loyal and committed" and "you should be lucky you have a job in this economy".
To continue the vehicular metaphor, it feels like hustle culture advocates burying the needle in the red zone, even though that's the least efficient point on the power curve. And even though that's less a predictor of success than what direction you're headed in.
There are absolutely times when you and your team need to live in the red zone of your tach. But really that's a temporary solution to being caught in the wrong gear. Amazing opportunity, can't upshift = gotta floor it anyways. But curves ahead = can't floor it. All depends.
Hmm. That metaphor actually did OK.
When I take walks with my wife we have great convos that won't happen on the couch when we're exhausted. We walk this circular path around Duke's East campus, which is about 2 miles. Having a defined path like that helps too- you don't have to get distracted by where you're going or be temped to end it early.
It attracts only young impressionable shutins to the startup and they feel like if they aren't working 18 hours a day they are slacking. Plus there is the "Stanford/Google effect" in play where everyone claims to be studying/working all the time but aren't if you factor out the foam dart / BBQ / bro time.
Oh god, all my life I've seen people waste so much time and then claim that they're so busy. It has developed into a huge pet peeve of mine, especially when they get pissed when I arrive to work at 8 AM and get up to leave at 5 PM. And I've done more in those 9 hours than they've done in their last two 16-hour days.
So if your main job is coding, you can probably spend about 6 real work hours on that. This leaves you with another 3 hours to spend on stuff like email, or writing or whatever. Certain types of hobbies do count into this as well.
But I've really only gained 2-3 hours over one 7-8 session. 12 or 16 hours is completely unsustainable over more than 2-3 days.
I'm not sure who did this research, but I can tell you from personal experience that this is simply not true. Maybe I'm a freak of nature but when I was first learning how to code I would hold one man hackathons in the summer from the moment I got up until deep into the night. Similarly, when I was younger and played a lot of RPGs, I would play quite literally all weekend, pausing only for sustenance and a little bit of sleep, and usually multitasking on the food part, far surpassing 6 hours of focus time.
Most folks cannot sustain focus for super long periods.
I suspect the "must work 24/7" thing is probably rooted in the fact that some folks are just like that and those folks are often crazily successful. But I think the inference that high number of hours worked is the thing to shoot for isn't really accurate. Some folks don't need a lot of sleep. Some folks can focus for long periods. Someone who has both traits may well be brighter than average.
Their phenomenal success isn't necessarily rooted in any one thing. Putting in the hours if you aren't that bright and actually need more sleep may be a recipe for disaster instead of a recipe for success. However, people like Bill Gates do tend to work crazy long hours. You can't ask to be born with his brains -- you have whatever brain you have -- but you can try to emulate his work habits and hope that's the most important piece. But I see no reason to believe it is. Perhaps long hours are a good idea. I just have yet to see good data which proves that. I have seen more data that for most people job performance improves if they cut back their hours and are working when fresh and focused.
Are they? What if you just don't notice the unsuccessful ones; they're at home spending ten hours a day drawing pictures of butterflies, or they're down at the gym obsessively lifting heavy things over and over again, or any one of a number of other obsessive activities that don't bring success.
Nowadays it's a bit different. My body just can't take the sitting in front of the computer for so long. Maybe it's a good thing though, but it really makes me want to think about how I spend my time on the computer and seek those creative hours when I am able to get into the zone and just code.
Usually I find myself doing from anywhere to 2 to 4 hours of concentrated creative work a day, and that's it.
As for me, I've noticed the amount of time I can focus on something go down a little over the years as well, though I still occasionally get inspired and hyper focus like I used to.
One of the defining characteristics of ADD/ADHD is ability to focus for extended periods. The main reasons ADD gets a bad rap is that people (often children) are either focusing on something that adults don't want them to focus on, or there is nothing interesting that holds their attention so they become easily distracted.
I have no problem with posting cat videos to facebook, more power to you, but don't claim that you're busy when your not. My fav is the "I didn't have the time (enter any task here)" forgetting that the two of your are friends on facebook and you can see the 189321983729 icanhascheezburger photos that were shared during the "busy" time.
And the 40 year olds who haven't accomplished anything yet, and hear the clock ticking, and realize they are running out of "at bats".
The reason this meme exists is that there is a huge economic benefit to (some, not all) founders and VCs to perpetuating it.
Yeah, I mean for a founder. I wouldn't expect an employee with minimal or no equity to go all that. What the heck would be their incentive to do it? I do it because A. I actually enjoy it in a way, and B. I stand to become very wealthy if we succeed.
The thing is, most employees with some paltry 0.5% won't, but peer pressure makes them feel like they need to keep up with the 5% founding employees and 30% founders in hours.
Most startups fail. That's scary. The natural response to fear is to run harder, run faster. And when the ride isn't scary, it's really exciting. Who can sleep when the growth curve looks like that?
And all this trickles down to the employees. And up to the VCs, the dumber fraction of which will try to measure progress by hours spent. If you aren't sweating, you aren't working, right?
Honestly, I think there's little economic benefit to all those hours put in. Especially for people writing code, where I think it's incredibly easy for tired people to be negatively productive. It's fear, excitement, and macho bullshit, not rational self-interest at all.
An acquaintance of mine built her company by selling her idea all over town. She got a few local businesses to sign on, and told them it would be a month of set up time. Over the course of a month she got the business setup, hired employees, bought computers, etc... 5 years of hard work later she sold the business and is currently vacationing at some random place in the world.
Because the prize most are after is the highest level. If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level. It's like preparing for the Olympics.
In everything in life, there are exceptions. But such are not the norm or the rule.
If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level.
Yeah, if your ambitions are that grand, you can't really expect anything to come easily... personally I feel like you have to be willing to scrape, kick, scratch, claw, bleed, hustle and basically battle your ass off if you're going to get there.
Our employees are also not asked to work crazy hours - we don't rush to get releases out, we're profitable and growing, and we're not concerned about flipping the company tomorrow. Our employees are also now in their late 20s, and we expect them to have children and normal lives too, and we want them to stick with us through that.
Any advice for someone starting down this path?
It's great that people can work 5-6 hours a day, no weekends, and still build a great business. But if that's truly more efficient, should we expect to see some massive billion dollar companies run that way? How much did Bill Gates, Larry & Sergey, Jeff Bezos, etc. work when they were getting their companies off the ground? When they look back, do they feel the time was wasted, or do they feel it was necessary?
Or to the Metalab example, who's to say that the success Andrew experienced when he cut back on his work was not due in part to the long hours he had put in previously?
Not trying to admonish people to work more - just saying there's some missing analysis here!
Unfortunately, as humans, we need recharge time. If I code 80 hours this week, the first twenty hours will be very productive, the next 20 will be slightly less productive, the next 20 will be significantly less productive, and the last 20 might be hurting more than helping.
After a day of rest, I might be back at the same productivity as I was for the middle 40 last week, and degrade from there.
The irony is that the more hours I work, the less I get done, the less difficult problems I can tackle.
Meetings take less out of people, be we still make poorer decisions by tiring our brains rather than taking passive time to rest, and using spare cycles to reflect on how we can squeeze more productivity out of the time we can work.
This, of course, ignores that some people burn out easier than others, and some have higher peaks than others. Working a truly focused 20 hours is more exhausting than 50 hours of semi-focused work for many people, and isn't rewarded in many corporate cultures. Find your own personal style.
Many startups aren't built to last. They're built to get to a certain size and then sell off their product and make a decent profit from it all. In this case, burnout isn't a worry because, if you get to the point where you're burnt out, your startup failed anyways (in that it didn't achieve the goal of attracting the attention of a larger startup-eating company). It's in these environments that the 24/7 grind is most apparent. Or companies that started with this model and then realized they couldn't sell and now have to try to turn their quick-buck idea into something that lasts.
Some startups, though, are built to last. These are places where burnout is a concern because they plan to be around for 10 - 15 years and they don't want to have to replace their entire staff every two years. In these companies, getting a good work:life balance is important for attracting and retaining talent.
People tend to think that if you're passionate about what you do (or love what you do), then you want to spend every waking hour doing it. But this kind of behavior is self-destructive. Even if you think you want to do it now, it will eventually wear you down and be unsustainable. Everyone needs to take breaks and have other interests and activities. And sometimes you have to force yourself or your employees to strike that balance.
The (original) article references Aaron Levie of Box, and how he works all day long and doesn't take vacations. Box is valued in the billions, MetaLab is not. Is there some correlation there? I'm not sure, but most of the "famous" founders encouraging long hours tend to have had larger companies.
If it happens that 24/7 weeks exist for a little while, it happens. I get that. But I think what bugs me most about this "24/7 grind" attitude is that it's not a magic pill for a product that doesn't work or isn't destined to become profitable (and I'm using 'destined' lightly here). I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs go all-in on something and fail not because they didn't put the work into it -- but because it wasn't a product that could succeed, even with a tough grind.