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Comment by ht85 | Hacker News Reader

If you're talking about entrepreneur under the "startup" model, it seems like balancing work and non-work is a contradictory idea, at least if you want to be successful.

There are and always will be many people who are throwing themselves at a problem, taking big risks and completely ignoring the negative consequences a failure could have on their life.

If you don't do the same, your chance of succeeding will be a lot slimmer.

As someone who's built a successful company working 70-100 hours weeks for several years, I know that those hours were one of the biggest factors in being able to bootstrap and survive with the little means we had.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but I don't recall personally talking to someone who's built a stable tech business and didn't have to go through some insane grind.

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“There’s always someone working harder than you.”

People hate that it’s the truth... but I think it’s really about working smart, not hard. Recovery periods are important. If you can produce the same work product in 70% of the hours of someone else, you get more recovery time which is an asset.

It also seems the refrain of “70 hour weeks” often does not mean 70 hours of coding/producing, but 70 hours of availability to respond quickly to teammates, customers, investors etc. so that you keep everyone unblocked and moving forward.

I think the context is very important.

When you're an employee, while the quality of your work will affect your outcome, there is a "good enough" performance past which your efforts will have diminishing returns.

If you bootstrap a startup with a very small team, anything can make or break it. Any second, any thought, and ounce of energy you're not spending on it could be the demise of the whole project.

The amount of work the human body can produce in a survival situation is astounding. If you truly want to succeed, this is the state of mind you're going to be in.

> it’s really about working smart, not hard.

What about both?

> 70 hours of availability

For around 18 months, my day looked like that:

- 10h wake up, big breakfast, stretch, shower

- 11h - 12h talk with rest of team, figure out the most important thing to do (sometimes ignore that step and resume grind from previous day)

- 12h - 18h 90% coding, 10% infrastructure / research / testing / feedback

- 18h - 21h run errands, eat, help a bit around the house, spend time with girlfriend (now wife :)

- 21h - 4h 100% coding

This would be every single day, except for 1-2 days every other week that I would dedicate to socializing and relaxing.

I now work around 4 hours a day, fully focused, and I'd say it takes me 3 days to do what I would do in one 14 hours stretch back then. Productivity is slightly higher as I do less inattention mistakes, solve hard problems and figure out the right abstraction faster. That doesn't account for that much when you spend most of your time writing code and testing though.

I understand that’s the general idea, and that’s what every one out there says , but secretly I hope for some killer advice on how not to kill yourself doing a startup . Coz life’s short . Maybe there is some strong advice that would be really helpful

By no means do I have it figured it out, but my approach is somewhat balanced.

1) Expectations

Start with setting expectations for yourself, then with everyone who matters in your life.

2) Define

What is "work" to you? When do you work? How much should you work? For me, I'm mentally working nearly all day everyday... except for when I'm explicitly not. If I'm spending time with my wife & son, I'm 100% focused in on spending quality time with them.

I've chosen to spend high quality limited time > low quality abundant time with my family.

3) Prioritize

I've dedicated myself to 3 things in my life as it stands today: my family, my business, my health. That's it. I've painfully cut out friends from that equation (not friendships, but hanging out with them). I've cut plenty of other things as well, but it does take sacrifice at the end of the day in some dimension.

The only way is to have more resources so that others can do what you can't/won't in order to maintain balance.

You can balance some aspects of healthy life (sleep, exercise, eat right), but that is more about maximizing than balancing.

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