Poll: How many hours do you work a week? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How many hours do you work a week?

19 pointsjamiequint32 comments

This question is mostly targeted to those who run startups full-time. If you do a startup in your spare-time include time spent at both that and your full-time job in your choice.

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Anecdotal evidence from my own experience if anyone's interested.

I was waking up at 10-11 AM worked through the day without breaks until 5-6 PM, had dinner with my better half, watched some TV, met with friends, etc and then typically resumed working at around 10 PM for another 4-5 hours. That works out to about 11-12 hours per day. Plus another 10-12 hours per weekend -> a bit over 70 hours per week.

I was going at this pace for close to 2 years. The work included designing and coding the product (windows/linux/osx clients, the backend server and the web interface), graphic design (incl. website), system administration and support of a live server cluster, support (ouch), busdev, etc .. pretty much everything except for the accounting and legal/IP stuff.

Stressful, but totally doable. YMMV of course.

Hey rescue time folks: how many hours do known YC people work per week?

Do you have data for any people post acquisition?

Custom queries FTW!

I said 60-70. I'm a grad student so I basically spend 50-60 of those at school, and probably another up to another 10 over a weekend working on stuff. Technically however, learning, attending class, and doing homework isn't work.

I do however spend about 10+ hours working as a TA for my dept.

My existential dread prevents me from working more than 40 hours a week.

The weeks I do more than 40 are followed immediately by a week of 20, or less.

Some weeks 20, some weeks 80. Going with the flow.

For years I tried to force myself. Work longer hours, be more productive, get more done, yadda yadda. Don't know about others but when I'm being forced -- by myself or others -- I automagically go into "stale mode" and refuse to do anything other than the most menial motions. Haven't really found a 'fix' for this but accepted that I don't work under compulsion (even self-imposed) and now go with the flow. I found that's the only choice left for me, other than completely resign from self-dependent work. After a relaxed summer and too much freelancing before that for the last 1-2 years I'm now only carefully and slowly going back to building stuff, and only up to the level that I enjoy doing it. It's been going up steadily ever since. But still a far cry from 100 hours a week, to be honest.

How do you count a work hour? I answered 40-50 because I count only the 'productive' hours in which I'm doing something specifically for my startup. If I include the hours I spend reading, learning new technologies, networking, and attending presentations then my answer would be 70-80.

I would say 50-60 but sometimes pushing into the 70's

At work it's generally about 40-44 hours a week give or take. I used to stay longer at work but when you have a loving girlfriend at home and your own personal projects to work on (not really a startup persay) then it's hard not to go home once it hits 5pm ;)

At home, it varies by the week. Right now I'm in the push mode for one of my projects and am trying to get it done by end of week so I'm doing about 2 hours a night on it, and more on weekends (This Saturday I did a 5 hour sprint, was fun!)

I don't consider the latter "work" though because I really love it, but it's still something I hope will benefit my resume. Making money would be a nice side effect though

I work about 100 a week, with probably 20% of that spent in semi-down-time (i.e. reading news.YC and other tech news, editing Wikipedia, etc.).

100 really is doable if you like what you're doing. I don't really get the "you can only be productive 40 hours a week" people. Really? You can only be productive with less than a quarter of your time? Seems suspect. I can see it being a fair limit for work an employer, but when it's your own baby, if I'm not working, I'd probably rather be. You end up wearing such a variety of hats as a founder that it certainly lacks monotony.

I do try to take at least one decent block of time a week to unplug and go out, usually dancing. :-)

Whoa. Someone who needs 8 hours of sleep a day has 16 hours left. Considering that just the basics of eating 3-4 somewhat healthy meals a day and some hygiene can easily eat up 1-2 hours a day, your daily average of 14.3 hours is almost unbeatable. I take it you don't allow for that much sleep to be able to sustain your 100 hours. Envy! :)

Hey Phil -- I minimize stuff like shopping and eating -- I basically know exactly what I want from the store and live on simple, healthy stuff like sandwiches and müsli. I maybe spend 15 minutes a day messing with food. I sleep about 6 hours a night. So that still leaves like 24 hours a week for meeting up with my friends, etc. It's really not that grueling.

Tonight however is an exception to the cooking rule. Tonight I will be cooking Tex-Mex (fajitas, I think) for about 5-8 people from the local startup scene. You're welcome to drop by if you're in Berlin at the moment. :-)

I think I have an ideal schedule:

Most weeks, I work 9 or 10 hours a day, (5 on the weekend days). This is a completely sustainable pace.

When my wife leaves on a business trip, I sprint for 12 to 14 hours per day.

Because I'm forced to take time between sprints, and because I anticipate them coming up and get excited about them, I manage to get into the "programmer flow" on almost every sprint.

I don't believe capping your work week at 40 hours (as recommended in many books) is the right way to maximize productivity because sprinting can be useful and fun. But you can't try to sprint every day, either.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the people working Time Ferris Style.

I read the book, and what I understand is that he started working 4 hours a week AFTER years of very hard work until he built a profitable business. The really hard part is getting to that point. The book is still a good read, though, and highly recommended.

Makes me a bit sad to see this poll because I don't actually think about it-- when you enjoy being productive it doesn't really sink in that you're "working" quite so much.

Doing some back of the napkin calculations, I work ~80 hours a week on average. At least 60% of the time it's doing things I enjoy a great deal, though.

We're launching a new version of our service this week, and maybe I'll be able to cut some of that down a bit for a little while. It's hard, though, because there's a lot of stuff that needs to get done.

http://lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf

More hours doesn't mean more progress.

I work 168 hours per week. I don't spend all of those hours sitting in front of a keyboard; I don't spend all of those hours consciously thinking about what I'm doing; for that matter, I'm obviously not even awake for all of those hours.

But at some subconscious level, I'm always thinking about work -- even when I'm sleeping. I've lost count of the number of times when the solution to a problem has come to me in a dream.

Oh, I get it. 168=24*7 :P

You're not really answering the question in the spirit it was asked. At the very least I don't think you should count the time you spend on YC News as work (unless you're actually pg or your work somehow relates to it).

I'm appreciative of the answer though, because it raises a distinction between work in an aesthetic, at your desk between the appropriate hours and dressed professionally sense, and work in the sense of really thinking about and solving outstanding problems, and formulating new ideas. These two time periods are not mutually inclusive, and can be mutual exclusive depending on the environment in which one works.

EDIT: typos.

It would take a fairly ridiculous amount of money to convince me to work more than 40 hours a week.

Even 40 seems like way too much. I'm going to 20-30 as soon as I'm making enough hourly to meet my investment goals with it.

If you're doing the >40 hours a week purely for the money, then chances are you're doing it wrong.

Agreed.

lawyers and doctors typically work 60 hours a week or more. I seriously doubt that the money isn't a huge factor in working so hard.

Where's the option for "Not Enough"?

Not enough, around 44. 12 hours a day on weekends, 5 hours a day on the weekdays during hs.

I normally work 40-50 hours at my day job (early-stage startup) and 0-20 on personal stuff.

I study/work/hack 15 hours a day 7 days a week == 105 hours a week.

work work, or just the time that is set aside for "working" some of which gets spent on reading HN etc?

I voted each one up.

Why?

A few reasons:

* To demonstrate the usefulness of a poll widget

* To mess with people

* To argue that the results are probably well off the mark

* To get downmodded for the first time in a while

> * To mess with people

Please do not troll.

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