4 ms·

How to Work 80+ Hour Weeks

33 points by jmtame 18y ago

martythemaniak 18y ago
"The real truth is, entrepreneurs have a much greater respect for life and the purpose of a startup is to condense much of what would have been a very dull, very boring 9-5 for 40-50 years into a fast-paced, stress-intensive 4-7 year startup." The real truth is, that won't happen unless you hit a jackpot, so if you're actually banking on working 100hr weeks in startup, so you can relax later on, I suggest taking 30mins a week off and visiting the local lotto booth.
- axod 18y ago
  If you work hard, make good decisions, and think hard, it's not really a lottery. Everything in life is a risk, so it's better to try hard, make a real go of it, than to sit at the sidelines and never try.
  - Tamerlin 18y ago
    If all you're doing is working and sleeping, you're neither making good decisions nor thinking hard. You're just faking it and making up for your burnout by getting less done. That extra long hours speed the time to market is an illusion. It doesn't work. In the vast majority of projects, burnout hours are a direct result of a failure you can't admit to. I'm not saying this only because I don't like sweatshops, it's because I have yet to see quality code from a sweatshop. When I've worked in sweatshops, I've found that the most productive people were never the ones working the longest hours; on the contrary, those of us who were smart enough to do our jobs and go home and get some rest ended up picking up the pieces from the all-night crew every morning.
- hugh 18y ago
  I'd say it's not nearly that unlikely. If you're smart, you have a good idea, and you work hard on it, your chances of that kind of success (and we're only talking the $10 million payday here, not the $billion payday) are something on the order of one third. What I'm more concerned about is the fact that the guy said he tried a four-hour workweek but got bored, and now he wants to work 100-hour weeks so he can retire in seven years. What does he think he's going to do when he retires?
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    What does he think he's going to do when he retires? He's going to work 85-hour weeks, of course! One major theme of The Four-Hour Workweek is that, for many people, it takes practice and training to do less work. You get habituated to the stress and the pressure, such that life without it begins to feel wrong. You need to train up the areas of your life that fall outside of your career, or they'll atrophy, and you won't be able to stop working because your mind and body will rebel.
  - gizmo 18y ago
    Then you'll be forced to find something else to do. You can't watch TV 80 hours a week for a year - you'll go crazy. But you can watch 4 TV hours a day, every day, for the entire duration of your life. That is 28 hours a week. Or 1 year in 4. Probably the guy will take a break for 6 months after/when he succeeds, then do it all over again. Or he'll start doing something else obsessively. Either way he's not going to be bored.
    - rekcuts 18y ago
      1 year in 6.
      - gizmo 18y ago
        I subtracted sleep. 16 waking hours, 4 TV.
    - daniel-cussen 18y ago
      You can surf the internet for 40 hours a week, though.
  - martythemaniak 18y ago
    $10m company payday, or $10m personal payday? If you're looking for a $10m personal payday, your company needs to be brought at for quite a bit more (depending on number of founders and investors), so if we consider the set of smart, hardworking people, the percentage of those that sell their company for $50-100m is substantially less than 30%. Now, if you and the author are talking about $10m company payday (lets say $1-2m for yourself), that's about a decade or two of decent income (ie, not enough to retire) and as you mentioned, what would someone used to working 100hr weeks and labeling relationships as "distractions" do with their time? I'm really failing to see the author's point to all this.
- krschultz 18y ago
  The real question though is why you would WANT to retire in 10 years? He would be 32 or 34, and he will have spent his entire 20s elminating time for friends, relationships, and hobbies. So you get to the 30s, and suddenly you have 10 million dollars and what are you going to do? Stop working and do nothing? He already said he doesn't want to do that. And if you try to meet someone for a relationship - it is somewhat overshadowed by your money. Your friends (who you labeled a distraction in your 20s when you lived with them, how likely are they to be friends with you in your 30s?) will probably have moved on. You have no hobbies because you spend little time on them. So what do you have? A bunch of money and no life. My solution - find what I enjoy working on, work on it 60 hours a week, and enjoy the other 40 hours a week with my girlfriend, traveling, playing my sports, learning beyond just what I do for work. I don't watch tv, I don't waste time on a lot of silly things, but I do enough that I have a healthy balance. He struggled to uninstall his video games and he is going to tell me that is a healthy life balance when it includes no time for friends, family, or a girlfriend? I would rather work on what I like for 40 years, and spend the whole time enjoying it along the way, than work really hard for 7 years and hate my life during and after that. Just the fact that you have a large bank account does NOT make you happy. It is what you do with it that MAY make you happy, but even then - there are a lot of ways to be happy with less money than you think.
  - ph0rque 18y ago
    I think for me, the balance is somewhere in the middle: work 6 hour workdays at my dayjob (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231642 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231642), and work on my ideas part-time. If an idea becomes successful, that will become my dayjob, and I will continue working on other ideas, since they never really end, or do something else on the side (spend time with family, perhaps home-school my kids, etc.)
  - Hexstream 18y ago
    Myself, I want to "retire" early so I can start working more exclusively on what I love without having to worry when and how I can monetize my work. I'd rather have 500k in bank and complete independence than 100 millions and having to report to someone.
sdpurtill 18y ago
working more than 80 hours a week isn't sustainable over long periods of time, if anything it will just hasten a huge burnout. anyone can work 80-100 hours a week - it doesn't mean they're going to get more done. work in bursts when you are most efficient, that seems to work best for me.
- dhuck 18y ago
  Maybe for you, but some people can pull it off. Jeff Immelt, CEO of GEO (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_04/b3767079.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_04/b3767079....) boasted that he worked 100 hour weeks for two decades. I've heard plenty of stories of people working crazy hours (the Mint.com guy built his prototype doing 100 hour weeks I believe) and then pulling back to something more reasonable (or not.) Sure, it might not be sustainable in the long run - but hell, life in general isn't sustainable in the long run. Sometimes you gotta chase those dreams, regardless of the cost.
- swombat 18y ago
  Working for 80+ hours a week may not be sustainable, but doing something interesting, challenging and enjoyable for 80 hours a week certainly is. I consider working on my start-up to be something I do because I enjoy it, not because of external pressures. Building a tech business is just a very enjoyable way to pass the time. I'd be doing that even if I had $100m in the bank.
pbnaidu 18y ago
I think how many hours per week you can work is an individual thing. I need atleast 7 hours of sleep to think straight and produce meaningful stuff (code, designs, conversations, etc).
- 0x44 18y ago
  I don't need seven hours of sleep to think straight and produce meaningful stuff. I need seven hours of sleep to be able to convey the meaningful stuff to other people. I tend to talk a lot faster than people when I haven't gotten much sleep, and change subjects pretty quickly.
edw519 18y ago
Any coincidence that OP has exactly 168 karma (as of this post)? I clicked on this when I read "How to..." Nice stream of consciousness essay, but I'm still waiting for the "how to". http://www.stevepavlina.com/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/ has lots of good answers to OP's original "how to" question. I also love this quote: “Sincerity begins at a little over 100 hours a week. You can probably get to 110 on a sustained basis, but it’s hard – you have to get down to eating once a day, showering every other day, and things of that sort to really get your life organized to work 110 hours a week.” - Len Bosack, Cisco co-founder
- jmtame 18y ago
  I think I arrived at the same conclusion as you did... it's very difficult, and I'm not sure I have the one-size-fits-all answer. Would certainly be nice if I did =) And having 168 karma (the number of total hours available in a week) is no coincidence. I of course plan these things out well ahead of time. That's very observant that you noticed though.
  - edw519 18y ago
    I really like reading blogs of hn members. I usually click on their name to learn more about them and see how long they've been here (and to see if they became a member just to promote their blog). "168" jumped off the page. The universe must think you're on to something.
jobeirne 18y ago
Methamphetamine!
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
- breily 18y ago
  I think he meant out of the time you're awake - so if you're up for 15 hours a day, 4/15 > 1/4.
vaksel 18y ago
Personally I don't subscribe to the notion that you need to work 100 hours per week to be successful mentality. You do need to be serious and work on your start up full time, but you will most likely be able to get just as much done working for 60 hours as you do working 100. The reason for that is because you can actually stay focused on your work for 60 hours. Don't get me wrong if you actually have something to do, its perfectly fine working for 100 hours. But don't try to force yourself into working a 100 hour week, just to convince yourself that you are taking it seriously.
Mistone 18y ago
honestly i only got half way through - its really long and i cant be bothered to read long stuff unless its really good. this guys seems really motivated to succeed and not afraid of truly digging in to get what he wants, so of course, best of luck bro!
ibsulon 18y ago
The question I have, of course, is how does one keeps their mental clarity of working even 70 hours a week over a month? For all the workaholics I've seen, most are not able to do so, lose sight of the big picture, and end up doing worse work than if they'd kept a normal schedule.
- kirse 18y ago
  I never bothered to count how much I typically work in a week until I read this article. Usually my weekday schedule goes something like this: - 1hr in the morning for breakfast and centering for the day - 8hrs at the 9-5 - 1hr at the gym - 4hrs on the startup - 1hr to read, relax, and disconnect Total work time = 12 hours a weekday. On weekends I'll typically do 10-12hrs on the startup. So ~70-72 hours. So what helps the most? Good Sleep... and Timeboxing - Focus into an activity and disconnect when your time is up. I make sure my mornings take an hour, don't rush, and relax and center myself for the day. Going to the gym is an awesome energy boost and stress reliever. And finally, similar to my morning, I set aside an hour at night away from the TV, computer, etc. to just relax and disconnect from the day. I need sleep, and this gets me 8 solid hours each night. On weekends I'll hang out with friends at night and limit any drinking as much as possible. Really though the foundation is a good sleep... if I'm not getting the 8-9hrs I'll scale back everything and get my sleep in order first before resuming the busy work schedule.
mhartl 18y ago
If you're working 80-100 hours/week, what are you maximizing apart from time spent "working"? Even if you're trying to maximize productivity (and I'm not sure that's the right thing in life to maximize), I bet 80+ work-weeks are supra-optimal.
JesseAldridge 18y ago
hours spent working != hours spent being productive
quellhorst 18y ago
Work 80+ hours, get no exercise, put on weight, have no friends or a social life? You'll wake up at 30 and realize you are getting old and wasted the best years of your life for ideas that didn't make you rich.

33 points by jmtame 18y ago

"The real truth is, entrepreneurs have a much greater respect for life and the purpose of a startup is to condense much of what would have been a very dull, very boring 9-5 for 40-50 years into a fast-paced, stress-intensive 4-7 year startup." The real truth is, that won't happen unless you hit a jackpot, so if you're actually banking on working 100hr weeks in startup, so you can relax later on, I suggest taking 30mins a week off and visiting the local lotto booth.

axod 18y ago
If you work hard, make good decisions, and think hard, it's not really a lottery. Everything in life is a risk, so it's better to try hard, make a real go of it, than to sit at the sidelines and never try.
- Tamerlin 18y ago
  If all you're doing is working and sleeping, you're neither making good decisions nor thinking hard. You're just faking it and making up for your burnout by getting less done. That extra long hours speed the time to market is an illusion. It doesn't work. In the vast majority of projects, burnout hours are a direct result of a failure you can't admit to. I'm not saying this only because I don't like sweatshops, it's because I have yet to see quality code from a sweatshop. When I've worked in sweatshops, I've found that the most productive people were never the ones working the longest hours; on the contrary, those of us who were smart enough to do our jobs and go home and get some rest ended up picking up the pieces from the all-night crew every morning.
hugh 18y ago
I'd say it's not nearly that unlikely. If you're smart, you have a good idea, and you work hard on it, your chances of that kind of success (and we're only talking the $10 million payday here, not the $billion payday) are something on the order of one third. What I'm more concerned about is the fact that the guy said he tried a four-hour workweek but got bored, and now he wants to work 100-hour weeks so he can retire in seven years. What does he think he's going to do when he retires?
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  What does he think he's going to do when he retires? He's going to work 85-hour weeks, of course! One major theme of The Four-Hour Workweek is that, for many people, it takes practice and training to do less work. You get habituated to the stress and the pressure, such that life without it begins to feel wrong. You need to train up the areas of your life that fall outside of your career, or they'll atrophy, and you won't be able to stop working because your mind and body will rebel.
- gizmo 18y ago
  Then you'll be forced to find something else to do. You can't watch TV 80 hours a week for a year - you'll go crazy. But you can watch 4 TV hours a day, every day, for the entire duration of your life. That is 28 hours a week. Or 1 year in 4. Probably the guy will take a break for 6 months after/when he succeeds, then do it all over again. Or he'll start doing something else obsessively. Either way he's not going to be bored.
  - rekcuts 18y ago
    1 year in 6.
    - gizmo 18y ago
      I subtracted sleep. 16 waking hours, 4 TV.
  - daniel-cussen 18y ago
    You can surf the internet for 40 hours a week, though.
- martythemaniak 18y ago
  $10m company payday, or $10m personal payday? If you're looking for a $10m personal payday, your company needs to be brought at for quite a bit more (depending on number of founders and investors), so if we consider the set of smart, hardworking people, the percentage of those that sell their company for $50-100m is substantially less than 30%. Now, if you and the author are talking about $10m company payday (lets say $1-2m for yourself), that's about a decade or two of decent income (ie, not enough to retire) and as you mentioned, what would someone used to working 100hr weeks and labeling relationships as "distractions" do with their time? I'm really failing to see the author's point to all this.
krschultz 18y ago
The real question though is why you would WANT to retire in 10 years? He would be 32 or 34, and he will have spent his entire 20s elminating time for friends, relationships, and hobbies. So you get to the 30s, and suddenly you have 10 million dollars and what are you going to do? Stop working and do nothing? He already said he doesn't want to do that. And if you try to meet someone for a relationship - it is somewhat overshadowed by your money. Your friends (who you labeled a distraction in your 20s when you lived with them, how likely are they to be friends with you in your 30s?) will probably have moved on. You have no hobbies because you spend little time on them. So what do you have? A bunch of money and no life. My solution - find what I enjoy working on, work on it 60 hours a week, and enjoy the other 40 hours a week with my girlfriend, traveling, playing my sports, learning beyond just what I do for work. I don't watch tv, I don't waste time on a lot of silly things, but I do enough that I have a healthy balance. He struggled to uninstall his video games and he is going to tell me that is a healthy life balance when it includes no time for friends, family, or a girlfriend? I would rather work on what I like for 40 years, and spend the whole time enjoying it along the way, than work really hard for 7 years and hate my life during and after that. Just the fact that you have a large bank account does NOT make you happy. It is what you do with it that MAY make you happy, but even then - there are a lot of ways to be happy with less money than you think.
- ph0rque 18y ago
  I think for me, the balance is somewhere in the middle: work 6 hour workdays at my dayjob (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231642 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231642), and work on my ideas part-time. If an idea becomes successful, that will become my dayjob, and I will continue working on other ideas, since they never really end, or do something else on the side (spend time with family, perhaps home-school my kids, etc.)
- Hexstream 18y ago
  Myself, I want to "retire" early so I can start working more exclusively on what I love without having to worry when and how I can monetize my work. I'd rather have 500k in bank and complete independence than 100 millions and having to report to someone.

sdpurtill 18y ago

working more than 80 hours a week isn't sustainable over long periods of time, if anything it will just hasten a huge burnout. anyone can work 80-100 hours a week - it doesn't mean they're going to get more done. work in bursts when you are most efficient, that seems to work best for me.

dhuck 18y ago
Maybe for you, but some people can pull it off. Jeff Immelt, CEO of GEO (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_04/b3767079.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_04/b3767079....) boasted that he worked 100 hour weeks for two decades. I've heard plenty of stories of people working crazy hours (the Mint.com guy built his prototype doing 100 hour weeks I believe) and then pulling back to something more reasonable (or not.) Sure, it might not be sustainable in the long run - but hell, life in general isn't sustainable in the long run. Sometimes you gotta chase those dreams, regardless of the cost.
swombat 18y ago
Working for 80+ hours a week may not be sustainable, but doing something interesting, challenging and enjoyable for 80 hours a week certainly is. I consider working on my start-up to be something I do because I enjoy it, not because of external pressures. Building a tech business is just a very enjoyable way to pass the time. I'd be doing that even if I had $100m in the bank.

pbnaidu 18y ago

I think how many hours per week you can work is an individual thing. I need atleast 7 hours of sleep to think straight and produce meaningful stuff (code, designs, conversations, etc).

0x44 18y ago
I don't need seven hours of sleep to think straight and produce meaningful stuff. I need seven hours of sleep to be able to convey the meaningful stuff to other people. I tend to talk a lot faster than people when I haven't gotten much sleep, and change subjects pretty quickly.

edw519 18y ago

Any coincidence that OP has exactly 168 karma (as of this post)? I clicked on this when I read "How to..." Nice stream of consciousness essay, but I'm still waiting for the "how to". http://www.stevepavlina.com/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/ has lots of good answers to OP's original "how to" question. I also love this quote: “Sincerity begins at a little over 100 hours a week. You can probably get to 110 on a sustained basis, but it’s hard – you have to get down to eating once a day, showering every other day, and things of that sort to really get your life organized to work 110 hours a week.” - Len Bosack, Cisco co-founder

jmtame 18y ago
I think I arrived at the same conclusion as you did... it's very difficult, and I'm not sure I have the one-size-fits-all answer. Would certainly be nice if I did =) And having 168 karma (the number of total hours available in a week) is no coincidence. I of course plan these things out well ahead of time. That's very observant that you noticed though.
- edw519 18y ago
  I really like reading blogs of hn members. I usually click on their name to learn more about them and see how long they've been here (and to see if they became a member just to promote their blog). "168" jumped off the page. The universe must think you're on to something.

jobeirne 18y ago

Methamphetamine!

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

breily 18y ago
I think he meant out of the time you're awake - so if you're up for 15 hours a day, 4/15 > 1/4.

vaksel 18y ago

Personally I don't subscribe to the notion that you need to work 100 hours per week to be successful mentality. You do need to be serious and work on your start up full time, but you will most likely be able to get just as much done working for 60 hours as you do working 100. The reason for that is because you can actually stay focused on your work for 60 hours. Don't get me wrong if you actually have something to do, its perfectly fine working for 100 hours. But don't try to force yourself into working a 100 hour week, just to convince yourself that you are taking it seriously.

Mistone 18y ago

honestly i only got half way through - its really long and i cant be bothered to read long stuff unless its really good. this guys seems really motivated to succeed and not afraid of truly digging in to get what he wants, so of course, best of luck bro!

ibsulon 18y ago

The question I have, of course, is how does one keeps their mental clarity of working even 70 hours a week over a month? For all the workaholics I've seen, most are not able to do so, lose sight of the big picture, and end up doing worse work than if they'd kept a normal schedule.

kirse 18y ago
I never bothered to count how much I typically work in a week until I read this article. Usually my weekday schedule goes something like this: - 1hr in the morning for breakfast and centering for the day - 8hrs at the 9-5 - 1hr at the gym - 4hrs on the startup - 1hr to read, relax, and disconnect Total work time = 12 hours a weekday. On weekends I'll typically do 10-12hrs on the startup. So ~70-72 hours. So what helps the most? Good Sleep... and Timeboxing - Focus into an activity and disconnect when your time is up. I make sure my mornings take an hour, don't rush, and relax and center myself for the day. Going to the gym is an awesome energy boost and stress reliever. And finally, similar to my morning, I set aside an hour at night away from the TV, computer, etc. to just relax and disconnect from the day. I need sleep, and this gets me 8 solid hours each night. On weekends I'll hang out with friends at night and limit any drinking as much as possible. Really though the foundation is a good sleep... if I'm not getting the 8-9hrs I'll scale back everything and get my sleep in order first before resuming the busy work schedule.

mhartl 18y ago

If you're working 80-100 hours/week, what are you maximizing apart from time spent "working"? Even if you're trying to maximize productivity (and I'm not sure that's the right thing in life to maximize), I bet 80+ work-weeks are supra-optimal.

JesseAldridge 18y ago

hours spent working != hours spent being productive

quellhorst 18y ago

Work 80+ hours, get no exercise, put on weight, have no friends or a social life? You'll wake up at 30 and realize you are getting old and wasted the best years of your life for ideas that didn't make you rich.