Work and rest in a startup | Hacker News Reader

Work and rest in a startup

joel.is

42 pointsjoelg8714 comments

A bit of personal experience to relate to the article: in recent years there were certain obligations that demands distraction from my normal startup duties (in my case a part-time teaching job). I didn't really need that money, and at first I feel disturbed because most advices here tells you to put 24x7 into your startup, and I felt like a mother separated from her baby. But soon I find that when I come back from these short distractions I find myself more efficient and more energetic in what I really love to do. When I was doing startup-work completely full-time before, I will often hit those days when I am totally unmotivated and get nothing done the whole day. I never hit such a day since I "distracted" myself. I always find myself thinking "wow I can finally work on the startup again!". I think the magic is that I used some external obligations to "pull" myself away from startup to rest and recharge, rather than (wrongly) expecting myself to take breaks voluntarily.

Of course, I believe some people can really work 24x7 on ONE THING without any burnouts. But clearly not me.

I have been training for a marathon while doing a startup. It is a substantial time commitment each week and while you might think running would be a great time to ponder startup problems, I tend to focus completely on the run. This break also let's me come back more efficient and more energetic.

I believe our cases strikes a counter-intuitive point about what constitutes 'rest': despite the fact a distractive teaching job or marathon training can be taxing mentally and/or physically, they have shown to be good type of 'rest' for the entrepreneur. Strange creatures we are.

Absolutely. I think the word "renewal" is probably better then. I used both in the article, but "renewal" really makes sense.

I see 2 nice ideas in thinking about productivity - which are novel at least to me: managing energy instead of time and being able to disengage from your main project (it being a startup or s.th. else).

Does anybody has ideas on how to measure energy [what gets measured, gets managed -T.Ferris]?

FYI that is typically attributed to Peter Drucker quote, not Tim Ferris :)

You're right, sorry about the wrong information.

Try The Energy Project [http://www.theenergyproject.com/] or the older book The Power of Full Engagement.

Great piece. Your write ups are educative. Keep it up

Note: this account was created for the above comment only.

Hmm, ok, I can totally understand where you are coming from with your comment and I do believe that these things happen in a negative form, which is what you are hinting at I think.

I think this is also not a bad approach though. If you sign up for a service because you wanted to comment somewhere, than yes it is for the first time and starting out somewhere always happens like that.

If it is done in a spammy manner I agree it's not cool, the above comment seems fine to me as a first time comment on a platform you just discovered. No? Would love to hear what you think about that :).

I've also met Joel irl, great, honest guy.

I've no doubt this is a genuine comment from someone who lurks but appreciates Joel's posts (which appear in HN pretty much every Sunday about this time).

IMHO, the original comment doesn't add to the discussion, and discouraging such comments is a good move to lower the "background noise" and keep the signal to noise ratio high on a site like this. The parent may be a bit harsh to a first-timer, but it's not much different from many other forums where replies of the form "me too", "neat", "I like" are discouraged.

I intentionally gave only the facts earlier, but I'll expand a bit here. Note that this has nothing to do with the particular comment(er) I replied to. (So if I'm wrong, please don't feel too insulted!)

New members really are welcome; however, HN frowns on content-less comments (including "you rock, great article"), and someone interested in HN would soon discover that.

On the other hand, the article author Tweeted "My latest blog post is live - "Work and rest in a startup". I'd love your thoughts! - http://t.co/pdE3cpy (HN: http://t.co/lYEbjnI). Suppose some Twitter follower decided to help the HN submission out a little. Doesn't that seem more likely to produce the comment I replied to?

I'm not accusing anyone of being evil: I just think the commenter almost certainly cares more for the article author than for HN, and that pointing this out - on HN - may help keep the comment section clean. Note that, given the apparent importance of Twitter etc in getting the first few upvotes quickly, informally asking authors not to Tweet HN links may well result in most of the compliant ones never getting anything to the front page again.

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