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I have been working full time and working on my startup for over a year now. I think the most important thing for you to consider is the concept of diminishing
by keefe 17y ago
I have been working full time and working on my startup for over a year now. I think the most important thing for you to consider is the concept of diminishing returns. How productive are you in hours 0-70 vs hours 70-90? I spent a lot of my time living inefficiently and churning rather than optimising my lifestyle. Do you really need to do all that consulting or can you reduce your expenses and work less? I also believe that productivity is a function of our emotional, intellectual and physical selves. Being physically exhausted and emotionally stressed will not let your intellectual self work as effectively. I think about it as a marathon, not a sprint. I work 10 hour days, every single day. I exercise, every single day. My schedule is relative, where 0:00 is wakeup time :
0:00 - Wake, breakfast, email, news, exercise, transport to work if necessary.
1:30 - Work shift 1 (4 hrs)
5:30 - Lunch Break
6:30 - Work Shift 2 (4 hrs)
10:30 - Dinner Break
11:30 - Work Shift 3 (2 hrs) Usually meta, planning work.
When things are extremely busy, I will do a final shift of 2 hours instead of 4 hours. I think writing software, particularly as the principle of a startup, is a creative effort and my observation on writing code is that it is about avoiding errors, not churning code. I am a bit disturbed by your tone throughout this post. I suggest you take 4 days off to rest, relax with your wife and plan out a meal, exercise and work plan that will lead to maximum productivity. Remember, you are a human being not a software writing robot! You need balance in your life or there's no point in living it and I think once you are balanced, you will find you are actually more productive, even if you work less hours. Writing software is not like building tables, you know? You need insight, not throughput. For me, coding is 90% contemplating 10% coding the final solution.
- rjurney 17y agoI do consider the diminishing returns. I consult a lot because of the hole I dug myself into financially in my last startup, not because I want to. When I'm done with that, the only way to get to work on my startup is to rack up the hours.
- keefe 17y agoSo, maybe the right thing to do is concentrate on solving your financial problems and only do high level planning on your startup? I found myself in a similar situation and have been working for a couple years to shore up finances before doing the big push on my work. I knew that I couldn't work a full time job and do top notch creative work, so I simply put myself in tool sharpening mode and waited it out. I feel that in the end, my final result in a long term view is going to be much more favorable with this extensive preparatory period than if I had attempted to serve two masters during this time.
- rjurney 17y agoI have been, for the past year. I'm just getting out of the hole.
- keefe 17y agoSo like, why are you working so many hours? I was trying to say that if your main focus is making money, maybe startup work has to wait or be seriously de-prioritized. In the last year, I worked perhaps 50-60 hour weeks at my current job at a startup and spent the rest of the time focusing on stuff like optimizing eclipse, understanding scalability in web apps, understanding the relationship between data modeling and data structures and algorithms and software engineering best practices so on. Now, I am relatively young (28) and I skimped on some of these topics in school, so I felt like it was clear that even though I was not working on my specific application, I would be more productive concentrating on putting my mind into the right state and sharpening my tools. I don't know how you are, but if I regularly work more than 70 hour weeks my emotions start to get frazzled, I get irritable and I start making mistakes. I find that making mistakes in writing software is like building a house on the sand, so they absolutely must be avoided. I think you should basically take a few days off of anything that is not absolutely NECESSARY and relax and make a plan for a routine that will maximize your long term productivity. I feel like in the function of your productivity over time, you are using some greedy algorithm to maximize productivity locally and you are not optimizing your productivity over time. It feels like you are somehow not working hard enough when you are relaxing, but this is still absolutely necessary for doing creative work. Writing some revolutionary software is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to pace yourself and keep your emotions and physical body in a positive state. Your original message shows stress and worry and this is not a productive way to live life. Just my opinion, for what it is worth...