Ask HN: Can startup founders afford to spend time on "hobbies"? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can startup founders afford to spend time on "hobbies"?

51 pointswanderboy31 comments

I've been developing a Web application for the past three weeks or so, and as I near launch I find myself wondering whether this needs to take up all of my time in order for it to be successful. My number one priority is building this Web app into a viable startup, but I'm wondering if there's any room for a "hobby" in startup-life. One school of thought is that hobbies prevent you from burning out, but the other espouses the idea that the only startups that are successful are ones in which the founders are 100% committed.

I've been playing the piano for ten or eleven years now, and would like to keep practicing for 45 minutes - 1 hour each day. It's obviously doable at this stage, but if this start-up gets any traction, do I necessarily have to adopt an all-or-nothing approach?

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I think there's a difference between 100% committed and spending 100% of your time on your startup.

For example, would you say that 100% committed means 100% being awake? Probably not, given that you need sleep.

I think the same applies here. You probably need time away from your startup to allow your mind to work its own interior miracles. If I were you I'd play that piano, I bet it'll be a net benefit to your startup.

It absolutely will be a benefit if he enjoys it, plus the added benefits of training a part of the brain that is largely believed to be related to analytical thinking.

I personally find that stress, worry, fear are bigger enemies than anything else. If I find myself stressed, then I make mistakes and dig myself into the hole further. It takes a lot to just let things go, let it all go and only be in the moment going from where I'm at to where I need to be.

I'm fortunate in that my hobby is programming though :)

I think this is a pretty good article on the topic:

http://theholdfast.com/journal/entry/make-time-for-your-pass...

Family, religion, friends.. these are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. -- Monty Burns

Piano is not mentioned, so it's probably ok.

great quote :) anyone knows which episode this is?

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES GIVE UP THE THINGS THAT MAKE YOU HAPPY

Your work may bring you satisfaction, joy and the desire to work long hours; but that ebbs and flows. Some weeks you'll be so excited to be eating ramen noodles and building something that is distinctly yours, the next you may be stressed out about the fact that you haven't figured out how to monetize.

This is why it's important to recharge -- even if you don't think you need it.

Me? I like backpacking. We were bootstrapped for 6 months before closing serious angel money and once a month I left friday night and came back sunday evening. Once a month I couldn't work on the weekend. And even though it was expensive at the time, it made me sane and filled up my gas tanks for a month.

Working 12-14 hour days is fine as long as you do something that makes you happy and refuels you when you need it. If 1 hour a day is what you need, it's an extremely small price to pay for peace of mind. Additionally, my bet is that you'll actually perform better at work.

I have a concept that I call "feeding my head" (guess what I was up to in the nineties) - which is reading, listening to and playing music, films , tv and not least spending time with the family.

I know from direct experience that if I neglect this side of things then my creativity - for development and tech and for business solutions to challenges and opportunities - drops off dramatically.

You need to find a balance and do what works - don't be guilt tripped into doing something that does not make sense to you. There are always vocal extremists - people who can get by on 4 hours of sleep, people who eat 1 yogurt a day and work standing up at their desk... you get the idea. And this may well work for them but its not for everyone. Find out what works for you and don't think you are worse for not being able to keep up with the outliers - its about running a business, not about being hard or cool or showing off.

What is NOT good for your business is you burning out and not being able to go the distance. And if there is one other thing I've learned - its going to be much further and much harder work than you think and you need to be able to keep on going.

A variant of this question was asked in "Sacrifice Your Health For Your Startup" at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679045 referring to http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/sacrifice-your-health-for-yo...

pg had a good answer at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679278

   I disagree with this. It's a net win to exercise. You're repaid for the couple 
   hours a week you lose with greater productivity during the remaining hours.
   This is the crucial mistake: 
   "How much time does a bootstrapped company take? All of it."
   That's not true. What a startup (bootstrapped or not) takes is 100% of 
   your performance, not 100% of your time. And optimizing for performance 
   means spending some time on maintenance.

I look at hobbies as maintenance for your mental and emotional health.

For me, the day-to-day flexibility and freedom is probably the primary advantage of working for myself. There's no doubt that I'm doing something business-related every single day (7 days a week), but the composition and time per day can vary tremendously. It's 11am Tuesday, and if these clouds clear up and I feel like going to the beach, then I might just go and ask if my co-founder wants to come along! This is not theoretical -- this is how we do it. (There are also 12+-hour workdays sometimes, but there's certainly no explicit calculation to try to make it all balance out. And to be honest, it rarely feels like "work".)

The flip-side of this is that if you value the flexibility of your time, you will spend time building systems that automate your required repetitive tasks. I recently spent a few weeks mucking around in some dirty old APIs to automate a particular part of our shipping & order fulfillment, and while that took a lot of effort, it has now cut a 1+ hour/day task down to maybe 1 minute/day. And now I don't need a PC to do that task anymore -- I can do it from anywhere with my iPhone. And we're quick to roll frequently asked questions back into our product, which reduces the time handling future customers with that question. That's how we can get by with two full-time co-founders plus a small staff doing product assembly and order fulfillment.

This is from the perspective of a bootstrapped (no other-people's-money), profitable, 2.5-year-old e-commerce site. If you have other-people's-money, or if your business model requires an acquisition or is advertising-supported, then I'd imagine that it's an entirely different game. But I love being able to work on what I want to work on on a daily basis, and if that sometimes means screwing around with an unrelated project or just going to the beach and "working on" my tan, so be it. That flexibility is worth a lot to me, and if you're choosing the startup route, my guess is that it's worth a lot to you too.

I'd contend if you don't keep up some semblance of a life (hobbies, friends, etc) while doing any work, you're going to burn out.

You can work * a lot * as long as you keep your life together via social and personal development activities (as well as exercise, don't forget that one).

I think that playing the piano provides some variety in your life, and -- from my experience -- variety helps me to be effective. I play the piano too (I have a diploma) and I find that it helps to relax my mind a bit because running a startup is really intense. You probably need some dose of escapism.

Don't worry about it.

The hobbies to watch out for are the ones that use all the same skills as your startup idea. I.e. the other programming projects that will drain your focus.

You're not going to accidentally spend 8 hours playing piano instead. Also, playing piano will help you maintain your focus.

I've been doing the startup thing for almost 3 years now, and I will absolutely and unequivocally say that not only can you afford to spend time on a hobby, you must if you want to avoid bottom-of-the-barrel burnout. I love what I do, but if I didn't have other things to do, I would have burnt out about two and a half years ago. Having distractions allows me to recharge and refocus.

I'm a father and a husband. I play the bass guitar, I mod games. I work on small exploratory projects. I hack on Android development. All of these things are important parts of my life - they anchor and stabilize me, and enable me to work for obscene amounts of time at a stretch. I will burn hard, doing 16 hour days for two weeks straight, in order to hit deadline X, but being able to switch directions allows me to escape burnout and continually enjoy what I do.

An important part of being a founder is knowing when to stop working and do something else. You're good to nobody if you're so mentally blasted that you can't function. It seems somewhat contradictory, but my productivity shot through the roof when I learned to pay attention to my body and my mind, to know when they were good to work and when I needed to stop and do something else for a little while.

Don't give up the piano. Not only can you afford to keep it, I don't think you can afford to lose it.

Do not adopt an all-or-nothing approach. All-or-nothing thinking is a highly destructive thought pattern. Simply weigh the returns at the margin:

ex.. If I put in 1 more hour of work today I boost my work output by 10% but piano time decreases by 100% or social time decreases by 33% etc. Then, just make the most reasonable decision by how much you value each.

You shouldn't deny your curiosities, because you never know what they'll lead to.

Steve Jobs once dropped in on a Calligraphy class, and fell in love with beautiful typography. It had no practical purpose to him at the time, but later in life, when he was building the Mac, he built that beautiful typography into it, changing computers into a design tool.*

Taking time to play the piano will help you relax and think more creatively. Additionally, as your mind makes connections between notes and identifies patterns, it will find parallels in the challenges you face in your startup.

*Story from Jobs's Stanford Commencement Address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

You really should have hobbies or you're going to get burned. It is ok to skip it for 2 weeks, maybe even for 4 critical weeks, but don't let "critical" be your startup status all the time. Do yourself a favor and keep your hobby.

This seems rather excessive. Extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts. Saying that, I see no problem taking the odd weekend off or leaving work early to play a round of golf. In moderation. It's easy to slip as have an unproductive month if you have no one working with you.

You will find many, many people in the industry who will try to suck your soul dry if you let them. VC's, angels, cofounders, coworkers, customers. You will, of course, have time for hobbies. But there may be some social consequences at work if your hobbies keep you from meeting someone else's definition of "committed". It's a stubborn form of machismo that needs to be purged from society, but it's real, especially with the "go big or go home" crowd.

Personally, hobbies take a back seat for me. Not because I don't have time, but because I don't have energy. Even a modest business requires quite a bit of effort.

The best way to look at it is instead of scheduling your work and fitting in relaxing/hobbies on the side, pick a few high-happiness activities and make /them/ your schedule. E.g., I will play soccer every Tuesday evening. Commit yourself to always doing them and try to not feel tempted to skip, or feel guilty for doing them.

This will significantly increase your ability to feel motivated working at other times (not just increased productivity, but ability to work longer hours other days)

I think you need some balance. Most likely, you are going to be working 7 days a week on this anyway -- you will need to do a few 'normal' things to keep yourself sane.

If you have been playing for years, then keep playing. Actually this hobby of yours may do your startup a lot of good. Think about it, sometimes you get stuck and you just can't find a solution. You take a break, go to sleep, work out or whatever and the solution always comes to you in those moments.

What you do need is a schedule of goals to accomplish daily. If you have accomplish your goal, then you can spend time having fun as a reward.

Absolutely.

I just spent three days in a row doing nothing but socializing after having been obsessively working for months, and wow, that was refreshing.

Sure you can afford hobbies anytime, startup or not. Startup is just your job. I sidetrack from my startup product sometime to work on small "fun" projects, like right now I'm making an Android game. They keep you on the edge and open up new things, and take your mind off from your main "job."

> Startup is just your job.

I disagree with calling it a "job". It makes it sound like something you don't want to have to do.

IMHO, I think you should be passionate about your startup. It shouldn't feel like a job but something that's enjoyable to work on.

But, back to the main question.. if playing the piano keeps you sane, do it. Stress relief is way more important and will pay dividends long term to both you and your startup.

You'll probably make more money if you can devote 100% of your waking hours to working on a startup. But you'll probably end up pretty unhealthy, mentally and physically. (Not to mention boring ;)

Definitely keep playing music, that one hour a day is not going to make or break your startup.

always make time for physical and mental health. make sure you exercise, socialize and spend some time on hobbies, even if you're specifically scheduling this time. you're most productive when you're happy, healthy, and able to focus.

You'll productivity will go through the roof if you focus on activities other than programming. For reference, I recommend that you watch this presentation:

http://blip.tv/play/Ace1YIa8BA

Good luck!

Hobbies are a good thing. They help exercise your mind and keep you stimulated and motivated.

Put it this way: if your company requires you to be working constantly to be successful, you are probably running things inefficiently.

In the best case your startup must be your hobbies, wife, girlfriend and lover too... but you still need a life.

Of course you can have hobbies.

startups _are_ my hobby/life/passion

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