I'm in much the same boat. Just starting my first 'real' startup, and am coding my ever-living ass off on nights and weekends. I'm not yet successful, so if y

I'm in much the same boat. Just starting my first 'real' startup, and am coding my ever-living ass off on nights and weekends. I'm not yet successful, so if you hear contradictory advice, weight mine less. 1) I take breaks. Lots of them. I get up, I pace, I walk around. I'm working with a number of new technologies in my venture, that I have zero experience with (Tornado, SQLAlchemy mostly) and they're a pain sometimes. Getting up and walking around gives perspective (at least to me) when I'm stumped. I've had many a Eureka moment while walking around talking to myself that invalidated questions I'd just posted to StackOverflow. 2) Work on something else. I've got a very simple Tadalist of all the tasks that I know of that I have to do. Some of them are critical, most of them aren't. If I'm stumped on something, I just move to something else for a bit. Something easier to tackle. Ideally, I try to do the grunt-work that's boring (writing a terms of service, for example). The accomplishment lets me leave a session feeling accomplished, even if I didn't get anything more than a simple cookie-based login written. 3) Pay attention to your family. Your marriage / relationships are probably worth taking the occasional night off and catching a dinner and movie. I recently took a week off work and went out of town for a wedding. My wife was able to consort with all her old friends, and I was able to get some quality hacking time in. Win/win. For wedding festivities, we'd meet up at nights and just enjoy ourselves. Though it may take some sacrifice, just be aware that ideally, you'd like your success to be shared with your current family. 4) Aside from that, yeah, a startup is a big deal, and it takes a lot of dedication, conviction, perseverance, yadda yadda. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't enjoy the process. It's going to be stressful, but it should also be fun.