The Way I Work: Matt Mullenweg
inc.com
inc.com
In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors -- a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.
What does this actually mean? A Mac with a virtualized Windows instance on one of the monitors?
I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office -- just all the time. Our business is 24 hours. Our guys in Europe come online at midnight. Sometimes, I will go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 a.m., and then go to work.
This has to take a toll, right?
Me too, but Synergy finally convinced me that it's possible to build amazingly good software that lasts.
* Make it peer to peer instead of client/server, keyboard & mouse events from all peers are shared, not just the server's
* Use mDNS (e.g. Bonjour) to auto-detect nearby peers and auto-connect to known ones. Also, use some kind of authentication - you don't want random people on a public wifi to be able to get access to your clipboard because you forgot to quit your synergy client.
Alas, I haven't had the time. Maybe this summer...
I'm trying to decide between 2x30" and 30" + 2x20"(in landscape) on either side.
I slept at very normal times, but nowhere near enough, while launching my first start-up on the side of a full time job, and that definitely took its toll.
Anyone who has the luxury to choose what to do with his/her time is extremely successful or at least happy.
And also the quality of sleeping is more important than the quantity. No point sleeping 2 more hours if you feel rested and rejuvenated after only 4-5 hours. And again, lucky is the one who can get to the "office" at 4 AM or 1PM whenever he/she is awake and feel like working...
For a while, a friend and I went on a "steal sleep" schedule. We both underslept, got like 4-6 hours per night, and then stole sleep whenever we had nothing important to do. Sleep 10 minutes in a taxi, 20 minutes on a subway ride, 1 hour between meetings when you're in the middle of the city... surprisingly, it actually works, and you can go into deep sleep pretty quickly whenever you want when you're constantly underslept.
Now, I don't do it these days, and don't really recommend it, but if your schedule is crazy enough, it might be the answer. I was full-time running one company, building another, and studying full time. Also was dating two girls and had a couple hobbies. So basically, I did stuff every hour I could, and slept every time I couldn't do something. It's crazy but it kind of works.
Edit: I didn't mention my biggest takeaway from the experiment. We waste a hell of a lot of time, all of us. Like a ridiculous amount. 3-7 hours per day at least, between tasks, waiting in lines, in transit without reading or working on anything or sleeping, etc. A hell of a lot. I kept the habit of cutting down "dead time" as much as possible now that I'm more aware of it.
You can see this when Wall Street traders blow $100,000 on a night of entertainment, and you can also see it on a smaller scale when excessive financing through a VC reaches a company which then sometimes wastes the excess money.
Coming back to this article, Matt seems like a nice, productive guy, so this wasn't really a good example of what I'm talking about. There are some people in the Bay Area, though, who are in the "startup scene" largely to party, socialize, spend lots of money in extravagant ways, and attempt to get rich quick -- this is the "bubble lifestyle" I referred to. I know there are at least a few others here on HN who have seen firsthand what I'm talking about, because it's been mentioned before.
So, when I saw the mention of dual 30" monitors, 2 laptops a year, prime SF real estate, eating out all the time, etc. I was reminded of the bubble lifestyle. Sometimes, for people who are used to being frugal, this kind of thing just jumps out at you. Many hackers are frugal people -- PG seems to be one of them, because I remember him saying something about being impressed that a Yahoo co-founder went poking around Viaweb servers to see if there was any unnecessary use of resources, even though Yahoo was already big and he was already rich.
Before someone downvotes this comment, I want to reiterate that I don't mean to denigrate Matt at all. In Matt's case, it could very well be that the expenditures are worthwhile and even necessary. But I was just reminded of others who are just in it for the lifestyle.
Maybe not, if he's getting some benefits of ad-hoc polyphasic sleep?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652650
The theory is that one should be able to train one's body to enter deep sleep immediately (that's the kind of sleep that matters) and get along with just several 20-minute naps throughout the day.
"I decided to do it because I was worried about my mom. She hadn't started a blog yet, but I had this crazy fear that when she did, she'd be bombarded by spam for Viagra and think that had something to do with what I did all day."
Matt's reason for creating Akismet.
And I like the way he ends up.
"My mom started a blog a couple of weeks ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my mom to use."
Increase usability. A goal any product should try to gain.
"People write a lot of comments on my blog, and I actually read and manually approve every comment before it gets posted. I think the broken-windows theory -- that a broken window or graffiti in a neighborhood begets more of the same -- applies online. One bad comment engenders 10 more. I'll happily approve a comment from someone who completely disagrees with everything I believe in, but if I get a positive comment with a curse word in it, I'll edit it out. My blog is like my living room. If someone was acting out in my house, I'd ask that person to leave."