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Comment by tijs | Hacker News Reader

There is no rule that people working at startups need to work more hours than anybody else for the startup to 'be real'. Do yourself a favor and close up shop at 6 and have dinner with your family. Your weekly productivity will go up as your 'restless soul' finds the peace it needs. Your happiness levels will go up and your effective productivity will follow suit.

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I've worked in two early stage start-ups since I became a dad a few years ago, as employee 1 and 2. I do a few things to help me stay involved as a father:

1. Unless there's a real emergency, which is rare, I leave the office around 6-7, even if I still have work planned for today. It's not really early but it leaves me a couple of hours with my kids (I live really close to work, like a 10 minute motorcycle ride).

2. If I still have urgent work to complete, I just continue work from home after they are in bed and I've spent some time with my wife. If you have to work late, this makes for more productive midnight-crunching, because you're at home with your family, you've eaten a proper dinner and not some pizza, had a shower, etc.

3. Once a week I leave work early (around 4pm) and pick my kids up from day care, and I dedicate my entire afternoon to having fun with them. Of course not every early stage start-up would agree to that, but luckily both my last employers were start-ups founded by young dads as well, and they were understanding, and do this themselves as well.

6-7pm seems very late to me, but I guess it depends what time you start at, and what time your kids go to sleep at. That wouldn't leave me much time with my kids. I usually stop work around 4:30 in order to have enough time with the kids before bedtime.

I'm the same way (leave around 4:30). For awhile in my career I was coming home around 7, and my wife still reminds me about it from time to time, and is thankful I come home earlier now.

I'll be a father in a couple of weeks but I've been working on a "life/work balance" for quite a while now. If it ever comes up with a client I remind them that we're running a marathon, not a sprint, and that putting in a solid 8 (or 9), consistently, week in and week out can get a tremendous amount of work done. It's really easy to work too much and burn out, even if you have a lot of experience -- and 40 hours per week is a huge amount of time if you're making every hour count.

Kudos for making extra time for your kids. I plan on doing the same.

On down side though, time is one thing, what you make of it is another. It's hard to make an instant switch from thinking about that annoying bug or tough to crack algorithm, to playing with a toddler. I often find myself staring into thin air while they are talking to me, caught in a hard problem bothering me.

I completely agree.

Tho mine wasn't a "startup", I started a web design and hosting business when my son was 2, I worked ALL the time for a good year or 2. I had the luxury of working from home so I didn't really miss big moments, but I did put a serious strain on the relationships between myself and my family. I was even glued to hosting issues when we were on vacations, sitting at my laptop a couple hours a day.

If I could go back, I would definitely give myself 8-10 hours a day max, be home and present with my family by 6. On days where I needed more time, I should have woken up at 5.

I added probably 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, to be more productive back then, but knowing I had those hours, I probably slowed down 2 extra hours a day, and those extra six hours were tired hours, so I was probably only productive for about 3 of them.

The way I look at it, I probably maybe gained an extra week of work time a month back then, and every project I was working on I could have EASILY asked for 1 more week to finish.

Anyway, regret sucks, and looking back, I should have worked smarter and not harder.

Or 5, or get up early and be done even earlier.

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