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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I read the comments before clicking the link, and found myself agreeing with commenters who complained about this line:

> In addition, if people are working less than 8-10 productive hours per day, then they are clearly not being as productive as they could be.

I almost dismissed the book as a "yet another VC-driven, work-your-people-to-burnout story" but really, there's more to that. I've found it an excellent read so far and it's very concise, it wastes zero space on nonsense. I realized that I don't have to agree with everything an author writes to be able to get value out of a book. Warmly recommend you check it out.

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Steve Blank has an awesome anecdote on this: https://steveblank.com/2016/09/07/working-hard-is-not-the-sa...

"Our team knows this isn’t a 9-5 company. We stay as long as it takes to get the job done."

“Let’s just wait across the street from your company’s parking lot and watch the front door."

"a first trickle of employees left. I asked, “Are these your VPs and senior managers?” He nodded looking surprised and kept watching. Then after another 10-minute pause, a stream of employees poured out of the building like ants emptying the nest. Rahul’s jaw dropped and then tightened. Within a half-hour the parking lot was empty."

American work culture, always trying to please the boss.

As I’ve heard very similar anecdotes from friends and coworkers all around the world, I’m going to offer an alternative phrasing:

> Modern work culture, always trying to please the boss.

I think you can skip the bits about work, and modern:

> Culture: always trying to please the boss.

> Humans: Always trying to fool the boss.

More like humouring the delusions of people who don't know how to measure productivity.

Eh, tomato tomato.

I'm fairly sure this is fairly universal. Even in socialist countries, your boss has enough power over you to do you harm.

Especially in socialist countries.

No, not especially: in socialist systems the power of individual workers is far greater, sometimes with bosses being directly chosen by their employees, or if not that, then stronger unions allow workers to enforce rules on things like their hours.

This is not an American culture. This is the nature of a human being.

Not just American. I saw this taken to an art form in Japan.

While part is showing effort when individual output is hard to measure, the roots come from more than impressing the boss. It’s also respect to company and peers, and being available in case you’re needed by someone whose time is more scarce and expensive.

But FaceTime as the end result in a corporate culture is awful.

Haha you should do some research on Japanese work culture and how it relates to leaving after the boss.

I've lived in Japan. You haven't. Americans are worse.

No, they're really not. You've probably worked at a company with an American culture, in Japan.

As a software development manager, I had to learn to go home early. I'm the type that enjoys work. I would work late till 8-9pm. My team would feel guilty and stay till 7-7:30pm. When I noticed this, I started leaving early 5-6. I would get in my car making a phone call and in 5 minutes, I would see everyone leaving. All I ask for everyone is 8 STRONG hrs everyday.

I track my productivity very assiduously. For some tasks, such as writing, it is next to impossible to be productive for more than 5-6 hours/day. Your brain gives up after a while.

As a founder you would probably spend more time on calls and other administrative tasks that don’t require much brain energy. That’s how you end up doing long hours.

However constantly switching contexts between different tasks is also very taxing...

The idea is two spend first half of the day braining and second half doing busy work. Also championed by pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I've taken to waking up at 6 to get a couple of hours of solid "brain work" before I start the day

I think this is an important comment. I used to be a late night worker but family and other commitments has made that impossible. I wake at 5AM to get a few solid hours of brain work in before the family stirs. This has been the best approach to retaining the 'late night work hours' and balancing family.

Second this. Morning is the best for clear thinking. Late night work is less productive.

It depends. I am a night owl and if I wake up too soon I am really useless for almost the whole day. Instead waking up later than usual (like 11-12am) makes me hyper-productive until late night.

I guess each person has a different time of best performance, the problem is when you get a job in a office without flexible hours.

I find my creativity peaks after 1 A.M.if I’ve been able to get into a state of flow. I’m certainly not at my most productive, but for work which isn’t time critical it’s a useful tool.

Edit: grammar

I tried to delude myself for years, telling myself that I'm not a "morning person". It was just an excuse to stay up late and watch garbage on the TV or scroll endlessly through Reddit.

Since I've forced myself to go to sleep no later than 11, I've realized that hey, I actually am a morning person.

It really depends on the individual. My kids wake up between 5 and 6 and some weekends I might just tap away on my laptop while I sit in the front room with them with cartoons on (they're still too young to get up unsupervised).

However despite a few years of this routine I still find myself more productive at night than I am in the morning (or even during the day, unfortunately).

The problem here is assuming only hours in deep mode are “productive hours.”

If you’re an engineer not all of your productive hours are writing code.

That's why i also charge clients for my "thinking" hours.

Right before that happens, eat a good meal then meditate or take a nap.

You'd be surprised how much more you can squeeze out your day.

Except my days are not oranges where I'm trying to squeeze every last drop of juice out of them, leaving nothing but pulp, peel and seeds before I throw them in the green bin.

Life is most certainly a marathon where pace of play is far more important than local maxima.

...or you can just do more everyday and live a better life.

How do you track it?

A combination of Toggl, Spreadsheets, and good old paper and pen. I keep a calendar that I mark every day as either green or red depending on whether I've met my threshold for a productive day (>6 hours of actual productive time - tracked using Toggl)

Great! I'd love to hear your thoughts on https://crushentropy.com/ (something I made for myself for this purpose)

If you'd like to chat more, please email me. My email is in my profile.

Man I love this. Very neat! Kind of like markdown for calendaring.

If you wrap this up in a more 'fashionable' ux, you'd have a big hit

I'd love to just upload a text file with my entire plans for the week.

Thanks! :-) Please email me if you can. I'd love to discuss more.

I think we have to stop looking at productivity as a universal metric. Each person defines his own way of being productive. Some people subscribing to deep work only consider deep work as productive work. If I can just write code in my comfort zone for 2 hours should I consider that productivity ? I'm not sure.

From my experience, a lot of a founder's time is spent in non deep work. Taking calls, traveling, talking to users, understanding user feedback, writing product features and coding up some or most of the features. So the actual deep work is perhaps very limited - in desiging features and coding them up. How do you measure founder producivity when the tasks are so varied. IMHO such a measurement exercise is futile.

Why is everyone disliking this statement about 8-10 hours a day? Excluding weekends, this is 40-50 hours a week, nothing outrageous.

You're not that special folks, you have to work to get paid like everyone else.

It's almost impossible to be productive 100% of the time. Even with just 2h for lunch and all other crap, to get 9h of productive time you're taking about entering at 9AM and leaving at 8PM. No, thanks.

Being a founder isn’t about writing code all day - you don’t have to be operating at full mental capacity to be getting stuff done. You spend a ton of time talking to people, recruiting, writing emails, etc. IMO the notion that you can be more effective as a founder in < 8 hrs/day as if you work 8 hrs/day is a pleasant sounding falsehood.

I’m sure there are diminishing returns at some point, but I don’t think it’s before 8 hrs/day.

Being a founder is irrelevant, he's talking about pushing his workers to work those hours, not about his personal schedule.

Ok fair, but are you aware of any position that is devoid of administrative tasks or meetings?

The hardest part of being in a company is almost always coordination and communication.

That's exactly my point; he shouldn't expect 8-9h of productive time from his workers, because there are always administrative tasks and meetings (not to mention more lowly vital necessities), and so that implies they're basically living in the company.

The problem is that HN doesn’t consider “vital necessities” productive when the author does

Wasn't the author talking about all the people who work for him with "if people are working less than 8-10 productive hours per day"?

If so I think he was also pretending the whole dev team should have 10hours/day of real productivity

I think it really depends what 'working' means. If it means to pick up the phone when it rings, a lot of founders have no problem working 23 hours per day. If it means doing high concentration, high focus work then some founders don't even find the focus to do it 2 hours every day.

I think the main problem is that founders often don't have clear rules when they are 'working'. Especially, it is very hard to quantify the 'readiness' aspect of their work.

Nevertheless, in my opinion there is nothing wrong in trying to achieve the 8 hours per day (mixed focus work) while trying to explicitly define non-working hours to get the required rest.

Once again this reminds me how Basecamp was build in 10 hours a week.

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/870596974428508160

Basecamp was built 14 years ago. There was less competition and 37S a massive marketing channel. No disrespect to them but it was a different world.

They still executed in their environment and leveraged all they had built.

He didn't just build Basecamp in those days. He also built Rails.

So you're saying it's virtually impossible?

You're right, it was a different world. A different world entrenched in J2EE, ColdFusion, and classic ASP.

And yet, he/they came in and disrupted things with "10 hours a week" and a few good ideas.

The truth is almost nobody even works 8 hour days.

More than half the time is spent BSing, coffee breaks, lunch, browsing the internet.

Our culture equates presence with productivity.

This is key. I suspect one could start a really effective startup (while paying significantly below market for good talent) with a policy like "work six hours from 10-4 and then leave to do something that recharges you."

In practice that's what many engineers (and some non-engineers) would be doing anyway whether or not they're physically in the office.

Anyone with talent knows they can go get full pay in exchange for BSing for another couple hours a day and taking a long lunch. Easier to save that money and plan for early retirement.

We need to see a gradual reduction in expected working hours in the US. 30 is a good target.

Different people have different priorities; someone whose top priority is early retirement would take the extra BS hours, but someone who wants to have more free time now might take the company that offers shorter hours.

There's an advantage to a company offering shorter hours as long as there are fewer such jobs than there are people who want them.

I believe requiring 10 hour work days are 1. unnecessary and 2. immoral.

10 hour work days IS outrageous. Maybe it's common in this industry, but that doesn't make it any less wrong.

And considering that most tech jobs are exempt, this is just a way of getting you to work more hours for the same amount of pay.

During the last century, we all agreed that a 40 hour work week was the standard. Let's keep it that way. I don't want founders and VC creeps prying the overton window in their favor.

If the job is interesting, i don't care 8-14 hours a day. Its all about focus and dedication, well for me it is.

Do your relationships not suffer? My wife would be unhappy with me (and I would be as well) if I only came home to eat and sleep.

Completely agree based on my experience as a CTO. I didn't agree with all of it, but there is a lot of solid advice in here without a bunch of filler.

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