I now no longer even read the title when I see a "steveblank.com" url - I just click it, because I _know_ it's going to be good, and just overflowing with honest-to-goodness Wisdom (with a capital W). Not sure if Steve reads here, but I want to put my thanks out there for each of his postings.
I have to say I sometimes feel guilt when I'm not working on my start-up. I know how long the to-do list is, but however much time I do put in, I also know that sometimes I just need to take an entire 2-day weekend off, and not think about it. I'm pretty sure the benefits I get from the break outweigh the "lost" time I wasn't working.... but I still feel the guilt sometimes.
Burnout also seems to be a function of age. I'm nearly 45; I don't have the stamina I did at 35, let alone 25. Nor do I have quite the same degree of mental agility. What I've got now that I didn't have back then is experience -- the aphorism "work smarter, not harder" springs to mind.
Also: why work hard? Do you live to work, or work to live? That's a value judgement only you can make for yourself; but when you stop to think about it, try to separate out your personal feelings from the prevailing herd wisdom (which is that of course you must live to work, and anything else is somehow subversive). You've only got the one shot at life: are you sure you're using it wisely?
This is an important message for people like us. We can easily work too hard, but we shouldn't. Not only for hippy-bullshit reasons like quality of life, but also because the data shows that we're looking at diminishing returns if we work more than 40 hours a week.
It's very telling that the US is losing technology leadership in so many areas, and instead of opening our eyes as a group and trying to improve, we're just going down the same road of putting in long hours.
I guess when you're raised in a culture that rate the number of hours you put in ahead of how much you get done and how high the quality of your work is, you end up being a butt-in-seat staffer rather than someone who just gets things done.
As far as I can tell, we aren't losing technology leadership to countries that have shorter workweeks than ours. If anything, the opposite appears to be true to me (India, China, nations from the former USSR).
it creates the culture as seen in the office space movie "in a given week, I do about 15 minutes worth of work".
Take a simple form, and a programmer in a corporate environment will tell you that it'll take them a week to finish. That same programmer, working for themselves would finish that same form in a couple of hours.
There's some evidence Americans are working fewer hours; for example figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey shows a slight decline in hours worked from 1975-2003:
Still, do you want people to be forced to work fewer hours (as in some other countries), or simply to have the option?
Because if you want to maximize your leisure time, you can make certain career and consumption choices to do so. For example, if you wanted to live with only the amenities people had in the 1970s or 1950s, you could choose to work significantly less than 40 hours a week.
Absolutely. To push some anecdotal evidence on top of the heap, my job has a Light side and a Dark side.
When the Light side is in effect, I generally work 8-9 hours a day at my day job (basically until I feel my focus start to drift, or until I'm no longer involved in discussions). I then go home and exercise + relax + cook dinner for a few hours and then launch into my personal project. Every now and then, I'm able to spend a morning or an afternoon writing scripts or elisp programs that will be productivity wins over the long run. All told, I meet most of my deadlines in this phase.
When the Dark side is in effect (around twice a year, lasting for a month each time), I'm on an insane death march for a demo that is slipping. Sometimes it's my fault, sometimes I'm put on one that's already falling behind. My work days are 12 hours, I sometimes come in on the weekends, and I'm bitter 24 hours a day. My diet, exercise, and sleep habits slip. I spend much of the next few weeks refactoring the code that I write in this phase, because when the deadline is fast approaching, it matters a little less that you use a global variable to transmit state. To use a Jeff Atwood phase, I accumulate most of my Technical Debt in this phase: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001230.html.
In the long run, I'm not getting any more done in the burnout phase, but it definitely gives me a lower quality of life and a lower quality of software.
Many times, the reason some people put so many hours at the office is because they feel guilty about going home while the rest stick behind. Sometimes, the people who stay behind don't really get to accomplish much, but in terms of social dynamics, the bunch who "hang out" at the office get the political spoils. Group leaders need to ensure that reward is given based on delivery, as opposed to face time in the office.
As someone freelancing to unrealistic deadlines, studying full-time (overloading courses), working full-time, trying to develop a couple of start-up prototypes, maintaining a healthy relationship etc. this post really hits home. Looking forward to the continuation of this story.
Same here, but not as bad. I'm holding a 9-6 job, doing part-time studies(down to my final project, which is a full-fledge web app, not difficult but tedious) and doing a freelance project(web application also).
Its one of those things which just happened and got out of hand real quickly. I wake up at 7am and reach home at 8am. By the time I reach home, I'm already drained from work that I could do neither my freelance nor my school project.
Weekends are the only time I have to do my non-work stuff and I'm trying to figure how I can fit in a social life while I'm at it.
> Besides seeing my housemates in Palo Alto I had no social life.
If you can look at yourself and say that, its time to sort out the social thing immediately IMHO. No project, success or amount of money is going to make you happier than having fun with your friends.
Personally, I cannot even imagine working 70 - 80 hour weeks, I have no idea how folk can do it!
I have to say I sometimes feel guilt when I'm not working on my start-up. I know how long the to-do list is, but however much time I do put in, I also know that sometimes I just need to take an entire 2-day weekend off, and not think about it. I'm pretty sure the benefits I get from the break outweigh the "lost" time I wasn't working.... but I still feel the guilt sometimes.