3 ms·

>And there are a lot of us like this out there. Red 5 standing by - I can easily work 80/week on an interesting project

by divbit 10y ago

taneq 10y ago
Enjoy this while it lasts! Once (if) you add a partner and a couple of kids (especially ones who don't sleep through the night!) and your life will be very different.
- mdip 10y ago
  That's assuming quite a bit about the OP and myself, so I'll speak for myself: I'm married with four children. I love what I do and directly sought a partner that would fit with my life and a job that is flexible. I work from my home for a team that is located entirely in the United Kingdom (I'm in the US). I don't regularly do "80 hour weeks" -- it happens and it's almost always by choice -- but there are ways to work more than 40 hours and not have it affect your family. First, I eliminated the commute by working from home. This allows me to start work the instant I wake up, which I do every morning. A while back, I followed something I'd read on HN about 'how to wake up at 5:00 AM'[0] and have been doing it for so long now that I get up around that time every morning without effort and find it hard to sleep in at all. But I enforce an average 7 hours of sleep/day over a 5-day period[1]. When I work and where I work is flexible, but I'm always working until my team goes home. I also work entirely from my laptop, in the living room, all day. That means I'm basically with my family nearly all of the time in the summer (my wife usually sits next to me the entire day). I can close the lid when circumstances warrant. After that, it's a mix of day and night working (usually both). During downtime (which would otherwise be wasted by being dedicated to watching TV), my laptop is on my lap. My wife has her phone in her hands. She's always been like this and I've always been like this. I got lucky in that my wife and I share a brain on these sorts of things. When there aren't plans on the weekend, I'll work during the downtime. My wife is a full time mother, as well, so she handles the cooking (which I hate doing, anyway), grocery shopping and household related things. We both participate in homework, teaching, and enjoying our children. There are times when work is long and difficult and she's understanding that she needs to hold things together when those rare moments occur--I'm the only source of income for our family of four. [0] The short version of the technique is "force yourself to go to bed when you're tired (even if it's at 6:00 PM) and force yourself to wake up by 5:00 AM". The former is easy, the latter isn't but I added another technique: I did several dry runs the night before where I set my alarm 5 minutes in the future, laid myself down and jumped out of bed when it went off. For the first several days, I physically got up out of bed and ran to wake myself. Now I can grab my laptop off of my side-table and sit in bed feeling perfectly awake. I drink a reasonable amount of coffee, as well but no alcohol (I gave it up a while ago because my sleep was affected negatively when I drank and I didn't enjoy it much, anyway). [1] I've never been one of those people who can handle little/no sleep. I need 7 hours a night or I start to feel miserable and get crabby with my family, so I aim for 7.5 hours/night and enforce an average 7 over 5 days. I have bursts of creativity most often at night and if I'm having a particularly good time with code, I allow myself to stay up until productivity is affected by exhaustion. To make up for it, I will go to bed early the next day or grab a nap in the afternoon. As far as the whole "there's no way to make up sleep", that's not been my personal experience. I am right back to normal after a 4-hour evening if I put in a 10-hour night and I'm able to do it if I force myself to bed a few hours early. Because of "0", I haven't been able to reliably sleep in, so that's my only option left.
  - taneq 10y ago
    Thanks for sharing! It sounds like you have a great system going there. My wife and I both work full time (me from home with flexible hours, her with a ~1hr commute) and we have two young kids. We have a nanny who looks after the kids during weekdays. What makes it hard is that one of the kids is almost always up multiple times during the night. My wife and I take turns doing the night shift, so every other night has me up at least 3 times (last night was a 'good' night, I was up at 11pm, 1am, 4am). Like you, I don't function well at all if I don't get enough sleep - I can crank out boilerplate code OK but if I have to think then even 4 productive hours is a battle. Combine that with the fact that, working from home, I'm the default person to handle any number of work-time shenanigans and I almost never make it to 40 hours of work. The biggest factor here is the lack of sleep due to kids, so hopefully it'll be a whole different situation in a few years' time.
Piskvorrr 10y ago
I could work 80/week on an interesting project; for a few weeks, and if compensated accordingly (not necessarily with money: the team next door banged out a crisis response app literally overnight, to scratch their own itch). Alas, that's not a universal recipe for higher productivity, or even a long-term recipe: too many ifs and buts.
thenomad 10y ago
Question - have you split-tested your productivity over a few months working 80hr/wk vs working 40hr/wk? I, too, can easily work 80+ hours a week on an interesting project. But I generally discipline myself not to do it because my productivity, measured in actual results ($ or other project success metric) tends to be lower if I work super-long hours.
- divbit 10y ago
  I haven't split-tested, but a decent proportion of my work is theory work, so it's sometimes hard to measure objectively (compare to measuring e.g. lines of code / money)- also my super productive times tend to happen in a burst of energy so I'll spend a couple of weeks doing groundwork at a more leisurely pace, and then when once a bunch of little trouble-spots are done, I go all in and work really hard for a week or so while the critical ideas are all in my head so I don't lose focus
  - thenomad 10y ago
    Yeah, that's a hard one to solve. If you've got a pattern that works for you, then it works for you!

>And there are a lot of us like this out there. Red 5 standing by - I can easily work 80/week on an interesting project

by divbit 10y ago

>And there are a lot of us like this out there. Red 5 standing by - I can easily work 80/week on an interesting project

taneq 10y ago

Enjoy this while it lasts! Once (if) you add a partner and a couple of kids (especially ones who don't sleep through the night!) and your life will be very different.

mdip 10y ago
That's assuming quite a bit about the OP and myself, so I'll speak for myself: I'm married with four children. I love what I do and directly sought a partner that would fit with my life and a job that is flexible. I work from my home for a team that is located entirely in the United Kingdom (I'm in the US). I don't regularly do "80 hour weeks" -- it happens and it's almost always by choice -- but there are ways to work more than 40 hours and not have it affect your family. First, I eliminated the commute by working from home. This allows me to start work the instant I wake up, which I do every morning. A while back, I followed something I'd read on HN about 'how to wake up at 5:00 AM'[0] and have been doing it for so long now that I get up around that time every morning without effort and find it hard to sleep in at all. But I enforce an average 7 hours of sleep/day over a 5-day period[1]. When I work and where I work is flexible, but I'm always working until my team goes home. I also work entirely from my laptop, in the living room, all day. That means I'm basically with my family nearly all of the time in the summer (my wife usually sits next to me the entire day). I can close the lid when circumstances warrant. After that, it's a mix of day and night working (usually both). During downtime (which would otherwise be wasted by being dedicated to watching TV), my laptop is on my lap. My wife has her phone in her hands. She's always been like this and I've always been like this. I got lucky in that my wife and I share a brain on these sorts of things. When there aren't plans on the weekend, I'll work during the downtime. My wife is a full time mother, as well, so she handles the cooking (which I hate doing, anyway), grocery shopping and household related things. We both participate in homework, teaching, and enjoying our children. There are times when work is long and difficult and she's understanding that she needs to hold things together when those rare moments occur--I'm the only source of income for our family of four. [0] The short version of the technique is "force yourself to go to bed when you're tired (even if it's at 6:00 PM) and force yourself to wake up by 5:00 AM". The former is easy, the latter isn't but I added another technique: I did several dry runs the night before where I set my alarm 5 minutes in the future, laid myself down and jumped out of bed when it went off. For the first several days, I physically got up out of bed and ran to wake myself. Now I can grab my laptop off of my side-table and sit in bed feeling perfectly awake. I drink a reasonable amount of coffee, as well but no alcohol (I gave it up a while ago because my sleep was affected negatively when I drank and I didn't enjoy it much, anyway). [1] I've never been one of those people who can handle little/no sleep. I need 7 hours a night or I start to feel miserable and get crabby with my family, so I aim for 7.5 hours/night and enforce an average 7 over 5 days. I have bursts of creativity most often at night and if I'm having a particularly good time with code, I allow myself to stay up until productivity is affected by exhaustion. To make up for it, I will go to bed early the next day or grab a nap in the afternoon. As far as the whole "there's no way to make up sleep", that's not been my personal experience. I am right back to normal after a 4-hour evening if I put in a 10-hour night and I'm able to do it if I force myself to bed a few hours early. Because of "0", I haven't been able to reliably sleep in, so that's my only option left.
- taneq 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing! It sounds like you have a great system going there. My wife and I both work full time (me from home with flexible hours, her with a ~1hr commute) and we have two young kids. We have a nanny who looks after the kids during weekdays. What makes it hard is that one of the kids is almost always up multiple times during the night. My wife and I take turns doing the night shift, so every other night has me up at least 3 times (last night was a 'good' night, I was up at 11pm, 1am, 4am). Like you, I don't function well at all if I don't get enough sleep - I can crank out boilerplate code OK but if I have to think then even 4 productive hours is a battle. Combine that with the fact that, working from home, I'm the default person to handle any number of work-time shenanigans and I almost never make it to 40 hours of work. The biggest factor here is the lack of sleep due to kids, so hopefully it'll be a whole different situation in a few years' time.

Piskvorrr 10y ago

I could work 80/week on an interesting project; for a few weeks, and if compensated accordingly (not necessarily with money: the team next door banged out a crisis response app literally overnight, to scratch their own itch). Alas, that's not a universal recipe for higher productivity, or even a long-term recipe: too many ifs and buts.

thenomad 10y ago

Question - have you split-tested your productivity over a few months working 80hr/wk vs working 40hr/wk? I, too, can easily work 80+ hours a week on an interesting project. But I generally discipline myself not to do it because my productivity, measured in actual results ($ or other project success metric) tends to be lower if I work super-long hours.

divbit 10y ago
I haven't split-tested, but a decent proportion of my work is theory work, so it's sometimes hard to measure objectively (compare to measuring e.g. lines of code / money)- also my super productive times tend to happen in a burst of energy so I'll spend a couple of weeks doing groundwork at a more leisurely pace, and then when once a bunch of little trouble-spots are done, I go all in and work really hard for a week or so while the critical ideas are all in my head so I don't lose focus
- thenomad 10y ago
  Yeah, that's a hard one to solve. If you've got a pattern that works for you, then it works for you!