The previous sentence makes it more egregious >Suppose you’ve been working all day at your startup, and someone gives you one tiny choice: for the next five mi

The previous sentence makes it more egregious >Suppose you’ve been working all day at your startup, and someone gives you one tiny choice: for the next five minutes you can either (1) keep working, or (2) goof off on Netflix or Hacker News. Which one do you choose? Suppose you've been working all day If you've been working all day then one of two things is true: * You're tired and the quality of your work is decreasing (as well as the risk being introduced increasing) * You're not tired and can continue The only real answer here is to judge yourself and do quality, risk-conscious work. If you've burned hard for six hours and know you're not going to be writing quality code for the last hour or two, maybe you're doing admin work, maybe documentation, or maybe you're goofing off. The idea that each minute is equal to each other minute is ridiculous, and it's entirely likely that average programmer gets five good hours a day of intelligent, aware, quality programming, and using tricks to turn that into 8 or 10 or 14 hours of coding only sacrifices quality and increases risk. But then again, he also says "start-up" so I guess concepts like work/life balance, healthy work environments, healthy work habits, responsible coding practices, real risk analysis, commitment to quality, etc are heavily selected against (or maybe I'm too much of a cynic)