Working Ridiculously Long Hours is a Sign that Something is Wrong
blog.netizencorp.com
blog.netizencorp.com
You could do things manually and inefficiently, i.e. the "harder" way, or you could do it "smarter" and save hours of your time to work on other tasks, thus accomplishing more in the same amount of time or less.
(1) You need to be good enough at something to recognize smarter. You need to do the work. For most non-trivial efforts, this means harder.
(2) Smarter is a process, not a destination. Once you have leveled up to be able to work smarter, not harder you probably need to work harder at something deeper to keep growing.
Agree. Let's take it one step further.
Let's say you want to win the game. And one of the ways you do so is to convince the other players of the game (and business is a game btw) to not work as hard. [1]
I see this quite a bit with this meme. People telling other people that they don't have to work hard.
[1] This is really the reverse of the mindgame that the US military plays with all those really cool documentaries about US Military force. They do that to make our capabilities look so totally overwhelming at the risk of disclosing something that we might not want the enemy to know that we have. The weight the pros and cons and disclose what they need to to achieve the goal.
It's not about convincing others to work less, but it is bringing to light the problem of people and businesses correlating raw hours to productivity. Working harder does not mean you are getting more done. Hard work is a given and it is required for entrepreneurs especially, but it shouldn't be harder than it has to be for no reason. Simply working more hours for the sake of bragging rights is going to cause you to fail miserably.
I find it hard to believe that people are working more hours for bragging rights. (Because it doesn't seem to make sense that for whatever you get in return for those hours is more or less the good feeling from thinking that others think you are so great for doing so, right?)
Otoh I definitely do believe that people brag about something that they do for another reason.
Now if you told me someone went to the flower store to get their spouse flowers so they could then brag that they got flowers I would believe that. Because that doesn't take that much effort so the payoff in your mind would be pretty good for the time spent. Make sense?
I've experienced it, that's why I wrote it.
What do you mean exactly by "long term sustainable value creation"? Examples?
I'm quite partial to big plodding corporate R&D labs as a model for technological development. These efforts are marathons, not 100m dashes.
I'd also argue it requires a long term focus on personal l&d, strong family and friend bonds, time for reflection, and some time to yourself.
So lets look at a sustainable high performance day: 8 hours sleep 1 hour relax time 1 hour reflection 1 hour exercise 1 hour food prep/eating/housework 1 hour with family/friends 2 hours l&d/side projects
So without taking work into account we are looking at 15hours/day worth of important tasks. That leaves ~9 hours for work including commute time. Surely short term you can sacrifice on a few of these tasks but which ones can you ignore long term and still have a happy, healthy, and productive life?
You can also "optimize" a few of these such as by using your commute to exercise (cycling, walking, etc) or having most of your friendships at work or hiring someone to do the cooking and housework.
I'd also argue that sometimes it is worth it to sacrifice some of the above in the short term if you are getting sufficiently compensated. But id put that compensation at a likely multimillion exit, a million/year salary, Or achieving a lifelong dream.
Maybe it should be work smarter, then harder, then repeat?
Trying to double that up leads to problems because working smart takes foresight and planning.
I know in my earlier 20's I didn't have much more to my life than coding. I wasn't as well rounded and did not know that my time away from the keyboard made my work at the keyboard twice as fast.
Maintaining that fine line of efficiency is key -- I've found being married to the right partner who gets the crazy runs, but ensuring it comes back to a norm is in place.
I find I'm able to get done in hours by preparing and thinking a little what can take days of trying haphazardly and burning the candle at both ends, but everyone's mileage may vary.
It is, however, very good advice. The truth is that it's relatively easy to exchange your time for money, what's very difficult is to set up a system which makes money without taking up all your time.
I would say it's far more worthwhile to learn how to do that, even when the numbers (ie. actual money being made) are small, because it creates the freedom to experiment with other, more ambitious projects.
Also, if you're in the habit of "working hard" you may not realise that you're wasting your (finite) time and (finite) energy on something that has little chance of succeeding.
I liken "work smart not hard" to not buying the biggest house you can possibly buy based on how much you can borrow. If you are constantly "mortgaged to the hilt" in terms of your time and energy expenditure you are setting yourself up to make bad decisions and miss opportunities when something that is genuinely worth all that time and effort comes along.
You should never run any system at "full capacity" for very long.
As an aside, I don't know if it's true for early-stage startups that "processes make or break your business". That might be true for large, mature companies, but it seems prima facie false for early-stage startups.
Unless your office has 20% time or some variation in which case you are only really working 8 hours anyway.
Unfortunately, in my experience I've found in fast paced environments you learn the minimum to get the job done.
Sure I could switch companies every 18months in order to keep learning via work or i could add a ton of business value at my current company by working a more reasonable number of hours and focusing on my personal development in my own time.
Could it be that those failing are failing because their ideas are just not as great as they had imagined?
But as a project wears on new code more often than not is to repair broken aspects and not so much to build the new and exciting features. Constantly switching gears between different parts of the code base can be hard to maintain that beloved flow.
I can do PCB routing, design and layout till 5am in the morning, but the day after I need to sleep well to do more conceptual work, or else I'll forget what I'm working at.
[0] - as long as it's not Work. I'm a sad case of extreme intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation issues; my best well-rested extrisincly motivated hours are about 25% as productive as sleep-deprived intrisinc-motivated ones. I have no clue how to fix this.
People are tired and start making more and more mistakes or less then optimal decisions. Or they spend more time chatting with colleges or staring into screen without doing much or do longer meetings cause they are only option for socialization.
The root of all of this (IMHO) is that our managers are currently incompetent. Good managers, motivate people, get their people to deliver on-time, and adapt the environment to make all of this happen. There is a difference between managing an organization ("You can't manage anything you can't measure") and managing people. The latter, I believe, is the problem.
It all comes down to the managers, who, unfortunately, are often influenced by this "longer hours must be better" mentality which is simply not true.
John Carmack can pull insane hours and retain productivity. Also, Usain Bolt can run hella fast. If you think that anybody can run as fast as Usain Bolt if they just suck it up and try hard, you're going to be very disappointed.
If you really want to help your company grow, you should not be taking as much load as possible onto yourself because you will quickly become the bottleneck. You should care about spreading the load as evenly as possible. On HN many of us understand the obstacles to software scalability, yet when it comes to people scalability we tend to ignore those observations.
I can tie many of the things that I have today to the wide net I cast in earlier years and the excess hours I put in trying different things until something stuck (many years later in a few cases). Forget vacations and weekends. That was for me. You may be different and be able to pull it off with less hours.
This blanked "smarter not harder" is just that. It's a blanket statement that could be correct in some cases and not in others. So it is essentially worthless. Do you know if it applies to you? Sure many years later you will. Do you want to take that chance? I didn't and I'm glad I didn't.
Otoh when I worked for someone else many years ago I was always amazed at how people would eat lunch in their cars and schedule really early meetings which I felt were counterproductive (given the amount you stood to gain in that particular situation). But even in this case it's a total YMMV.
So my advice is to work hard and work many hours if you are an entrepreneur and need to try to get a business to work or keep working. If you are doing something else (programming) that may not be the case. Remember what PG said about "staying alive". What if he had cut back and hadn't had something to sell? We wouldn't be reading HN today would we?
One last example. I learned Unix's in the 80's while running my own business in my spare time which led to being able to do many things on the net in the 90's. Had I not put in those hours (and it was working by the way) I would not have been able to take advantage of some of the things that I did.
Of course if you can't work hard for some reason (health, family etc.) than you can't. So there is nothing to discus. And you have to accept that fact.
And written first (which had to take time as well).
Obviously not all of this is going to stick. And the consultant could be quite successful without going to the trouble of writing a blog post and trying to get it on HN (or elsewhere). But the extra effort in this case worked (it seems) and it is drawing attention no doubt to the consulting services which I had never heard of before.
Since it got the required attention it probably shows a bit that the effort and extra work payed off.
And if the OP worked every single weekend doing the same thing (here and elsewhere) that extra work could land "the big client". This, from my experience, is the way things like this work.
It wasn't planned or put up with the intent to advertise. The whole post took no more than about 30 minutes to write, I just happen to have strong feelings and a lot of experience on the subject which made it easy to put together.
But likewise you should also realize that working long hours or "all the time" to some people is not really always work. I've had people do a "tisk tisk" he is working and I say "I like what I am doing so don't feel bad for me". I'm sure I'm not the only person who is like this either. For one person traveling on business might be something they hate and another something that they get great joy from.
Anyway they might not be really suffering that much. [1] (I speak from my own point of view and assume that others may feel the same way.)
[1] Also they could be escaping something else that is much less desirable perhaps. "Help me clean the house" as one example!
How often we get into a state of flow is probably a better predictor of how productive our time is, not whether we spend six or twelve hours at it.
It is possible in the case of a CEO that you would be able to spend more total time. Sure your performance would still suffer but it could be that just being able to get through every meeting that you want to have could be enough.
Programming is a bit different in that the work you are doing when tired could well end up having to be rewritten down the track.
When people are engaged and things are going well, people get a lot done. Sometimes, that involves longer-than-usual hours and sometimes it doesn't. But for the purpose of honesty, it's worth staging that long hours are sometimes a sign of something good-- a lot of opportunity.
However, it can mean the opposite. When a team or project or company is in trouble and it looks like failure is imminent, people ramp up the hours, not because they think it will prevent failure, but because they don't want to be blamed, sacrificed, demoted or fired when things go wrong enough for the knives to come out. When things go to shit, the people thrown overboard first are the ones who seem to be suffering the least.
When someone's working a lot because he's engaged and loves the work, that's not a bad sign. When people are visibly competing on hours, that means (to me) that they expect the project to fail. It looks like the opposite, but it's actually a vote of no confidence. As often as it means anything else, a person putting in long hours means, "I'm shoring up my image for the inevitable political fight, because shit's about to get nasty".
There's more to that picture. The best people, when they see what's happening, tend to disengage a bit and start thinking about other opportunities. Working 60+ hour weeks when the "prize" is an inferior version of the job they formerly had, that just doesn't appeal to them. They'd rather get away, and while they're putting themselves at some higher-than-normal risk of getting canned, by not competing on hours, they already have exit strategies in place. The ones who stick around tend to be, more often than not, the mediocre and political people.