Sacrifice Your Health For Your Startup | Hacker News Reader

Sacrifice Your Health For Your Startup

building43.com

38 pointsdwynings26 comments

How much time does a bootstrapped company take? All of it.

Every successful bootstrapper I know puts work before self.

Which is funny, because I've been used by Jason as an example of a successful bootstrapper before. (+) I don't know if he knows my work habits, but here there are: over the last three years I have averaged less than 5 hours a week on my business. The most I've ever worked is during the week right before launch (my, ahem, entire development schedule), which was about 50 hours. (I was working a day job at the time, although it was fairly undemanding. Two jobs at once made me get sick. I promised never to do that again.)

A typical weekday sees me get up, check my email for 10 minutes, go to the day job, come back you-don't-want-to-know hours later, check my email for 10 minutes, and go to sleep. On the weekend I'll (sometimes) put in three or four hours on Saturday. When I get inspired by a project I'll split ten hours across Saturday/Sunday.

I know there are a million things to do. Believe me, been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Outsource, automate, eliminate.

Example: bookkeeping. In a traditional small business, bookkeeping can actually take time. For most of us, on the other hand: use the computer, that's what it is for. 98% of the bookkeeping entries I need to make are done by a computer program. The other 2% I put into a web form. It took 2~3 hours to write the software (once, about 18 months ago) and about 5 minutes to do data entry every month.

I remain convinced that we create our own pathologies in this industry. It is like being a salaryman -- the lifestyle sucks so bad because everyone around you thinks it should suck so bad and if it isn't sucking you must be doing it wrong. Is there an objective justification for working 80 hour weeks? No. It is a social phenomenon -- you use "all my role models work crazy hours" to convince you to work crazy hours even if, in point of fact, your role models don't work crazy hours.

+ Citation:

http://www.building43.com/blogs/2009/09/14/too-small-to-fail...

Looking at the embedded sales graph there is seriously weirding me out, incidentally. "I remember when almost hitting $3k was a lot of sales! Wow, that's a blast from the past... wait, that was a few months ago?!"

Yes, there is an objective justification for working 80 hour weeks: You get more stuff done.

You say you do your work in <5 hours a week. Why so much? Why not make it 2? How about half an hour a week?

I'm not being snide or a jerk. The idea that almost any smart person can achieve their goals while working tiny fractions of their available time is lunacy. It's great that you are talented enough and your goals are modest enough that this is possible for you, but it's not the norm.

It's not about working hard. Not everyone hates working tons of hours. What it is about is focusing on a problem. When Einstein was developing Special Relativity, he wasn't thinking about it 5 hours a week.

I get why people are so inspired by the "you can get more done in less time" credo, but the problem is that it's a happy lie. At least, if you're going to promote this, be careful to explain that you need to adjust your expectations. It's completely worthwhile to say "if you're talented, you can achieve above average financial success and still have lots of free time and a balanced life". It's not fair to say "even though you only got 1300 on your SAT, you too have a good shot at a 20 million dollar buyout on 5 hours a week of work as long as you use Mechanical Turk".

Neither the evidence of history nor logic supports working fewer hours as a viable life strategy for over-achievers.

I want my health regardless of my wealth.

With (true) respect your business is generating $3-4k/mo after nearly 3.5 years in operation, according to the stats on http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month That's definitely an accomplishment to be sure. Still, that's not even enough to support most single people who live in a place like SF.

I also agree you don't have to kill yourself, but I can't help thinking that you'd be much further along if you quit your day job and were doing 60 hours/week on BingoCardCreator (or something else).

With respect to y'all who live in San Fransisco, Rails doesn't throw HouseholdIncomeInYourPrefectureIsLowerThanMyRentThatJustAintFairException.

s/single in SF/family almost anywhere/; What about my main point: do you think you would be further along (maybe even 2x or 3x revenue), if you had been working full time on it over the last 18 months? My feeling is that there's almost always dozen good (but time consuming) things you could be doing to increase revenue, that you're not doing if you're busy elsewhere. Do you really not think so?

I think you think I'm saying something that I don't have any recollection of saying. What I'm saying is "You don't have to work 80 hour weeks to be successful." In demonstration of that, I offered that you can have at least one flavor of successful for 5 hours a week. I'm pretty sure there are other flavors of successful available at 20 or 40 hours a week. (There might even be flavors of successful for some people available at 80 hours a week. I'd be constantly miserable, personally.)

There is a red X on my calendar. Feel free to ask me 18 months after it if my opinion has changed on the matter.

I really do look forward seeing what happens with Bingo Card Creator, or whatever you do, once you're on it full time. Good luck.

I think the spare-time business is forcing him to be very methodical and it's making him tolerant of experiments that take weeks to run, and that's also influencing his judgement and the solutions he's finding.

We have the opposite attitude, which is why I feel like I'm learning so much from reading him.

A line my 63 year old dad recently told me: "People spend first half of their lives spending health to earn money, and the second half of their lives spending money to recover their health"

Or don't. You'll probably work yourself to death building some stupid piece of technology that won't make a meaningful difference in anybody's life. Another social news aggregator aggregator? Why kill yourself over that? On the other hand, if your work is going to make a real impact, then by all means put it ahead of yourself because by doing that you are putting others ahead of yourself.

You will never know with 100% surety that your work will make an impact unless you produce that work. Mental simulations may or may not be correct, so the only way to test the hypothesis to produce something and see if the world likes it.

"Let me tell you about the history of one guy who bought the greatest apartment in the 80th floor of a super moder building, thinking it would make him happy.

But then he discovered that every morning what he saw in all that luxury was a high place to jump."

Never let your work consume you. Never let anything consume you, because then, well, there would not be a you to enjoy anything afterwards.

Well, Jason, we work hard --- harder than most people in 9-5 jobs, to be sure --- but we all have work lives and home lives and things we do besides work. And we're doing pretty well.

37signals at one point was officially working four days a week.

So there's two counterexamples.

Submitted as evidence for my side of the argument: all the startups that killed themselves working 90 hours a week, and took their companies with them.

Is there an underlying need to justify workaholism that leads to these types of articles?

Frankly, I lean in this direction, and at age 31 I realize how it can be a form of escapism and that there is a sweet spot in terms of productivity. If I work 60 hours a week and am highly motivated I can get a shitload done, but if I crank it up to 70, 80, 90, I start seeing diminishing returns no matter how motivated I am. Maybe this is different on the business side where you spend more time on soft activities that don't require full-on brainpower for 6 hour stretches at a time.

Time off leads to renewed energy and fresh ideas. It also keeps me more in touch with normal people, which is invaluable when trying to build a product where intuition of customer behavior is the biggest shortcut to success.

If you're in a serious relationship, the 80 hour work week will also backfire by alienating your partner, which will create problems that come to a head at the least convenient times.

The best term I've heard used to describe working hard with an end income goal in mind is 'time compression'.

For example, my friends who are doctors in residency are going through time compression in that they have given four years of their youth and their life to medical school. However, when they finish their residency and pass their boards - they will earn many multiples what most people make.

Maybe the lesson to take away from this article and the comments here on HN is that there are several paths from A to B..

Some founders are notoriously obsessive and others are much calmer and methodical...

Some might argue that if you could only spend 10 hours a week vs spending 80 and have a successful startup then the obsessive method must be flawed.. But one could also argue that history's greatest figures seem to favor the obsessive.. Einstein, Gandhi, & Beethoven are just a few examples which spring to mind.. All of them brilliant, all of them obsessed. More recent figures would be Steve Jobs, Kubrick, & Philip Glass.

I am obsessed with the project I'm working on. It's just the way I work best. It is not something I strive for just so I can be more like my role models.. As far as I'm concerned I don't have a choice.

This is not as effective for knowledge work as working 40-50 hours. Two citations:

   http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
   http://lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html

This also applies to how you treat your employees, see http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/28/offer-scope-for-empl...

This is old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679045

Deleted comment

Yeah. This article doesn't contain practical advice about reducing health risks to sane levels, though. Paul Graham, on the other hand, has given lots of practical advice for living healthy (but not optimally so) like eating beans and rice instead of junk food and being a smart procrastinator. I daresay people following his advice will on average age less than the typical unhealthy eater, even if they're stressed out a lot.

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html

Eh, i deleted it because i didn't think it really added to the discussion...I guess it did;

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"If $3 million a year seems high, remember that we're talking about the limit case: the case where you not only have zero leisure time but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health."

I have a very narrow range for the amount I can work. The number of hours per week varies, but there's a floating X for which working less than 0.9X (for more than a couple weeks) will make me bored and crazy, and working more than 1.1X will make be stressed and sick. I have a very narrow range. I can't work I-banker hours, but I can't not work either.

I think knowing yourself has a lot to do with maturity. Knowing people who respect your self-knowledge, that is happiness.

This could be my favorite quote on HN. I personally don't like to commute to work more than ~10 miles. Anything longer and it feels like a waste of my life to be doing twice every day. Cheers to knowing yourself.

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