Stop doing side projects. You're doing work, but not getting paid. If your job is also your hobby, your life is going to get depressingly homogeneous. Take a hike or play with your kids instead.
Ask HN: Work-life balance?
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#228 Hrs max at the office, 5 days a week. Rest is mostly family and sleep. I cut down personal projects to a minimum after reading "Why we sleep", and it helps with overall well-being. Commuting via Bike is also a big health-win for me. One hour on most work-days (sometimes the temperature or other circumstances require the car).
Same here. Unless it's your own activity, you shouldn't work more than what's written on your contract. If you work more, you get abused and low-balled by salary negotiations
There's a fine line of course. Just like you don't want to be the guy working 20+ hours of free labor every week, you also don't want to be the guy who is out the door at 5:00:01 every evening and not a second before or after.
I think most people in most jobs will have something come up where they do a little extra, if only to help out a team member or something.
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#2330 days of vacation and I work only from 9 to 6, sometimes a little bit more, but not so much. Not really counted as overtime. Europe, ofc.
I go to gym and try to enjoy the summer as much as I can.
Productivity tips: organize your life and move to a decent country with a decent culture. American work culture is terrible, so is Asia. You can make 10 trillions of dollars, but there is no way you can buy the 30 seconds that it took me to write that answer. I think those bad ideas are contagious so if you live in America, it is very unlikely that you will be able to balance well your life as everything there is about consumerism and it will eventually get you, maybe more in the country side that might be possible, but I can't see that happening in a big city. Live a simple life.
Once you are dead, it is over, so enjoy your time.
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes Europe, I think it's pretty common around here not to overwork. I've had 3 jobs and all were similar. Do your work, no one checks your hours as long as you are not obviously underworking and on occasions you will have to stay a couple hours more just to make sure the servers don't die.
In Europe, this is very common to overwork. I am french and everybody that did not stay after 5pm was considered as "underperforming" and blamed for it. In the USA (at least after working in 3 companies in different states), if you stay after 5pm, it means you might not be able to complete your job in the allocated time and therefore, might be "underperforming". This is a simplification but this is the overall sentim…
It depends a lot on the company's culture.
I've never been in a company in France where working 40 hours (actually 35, 37.5 or 39 hours depending on contract and company size) was considered underperforming, for example. I've had two bosses who used to actually force some people to leave the office after 6pm or so (office time was 9-12/13-18) though I've never been one to stay longer than necessary myself.
In Canada however, I was expected to stay late in the evenings but that's just one company so I can't say it is representative of the whole country.
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#25This question seems to me like it is naturally self selective to those who have healthy work-life balances. I'd like to hear a couple from the 10-15 hour day workers.
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#26I'm a 29 year old freelancer / digital nomad, been traveling and doing high-profile tech contracts for last 5 years. I go with the flow. It really depends on the contract and what's currently going on in my life, or where I am.
Last summer I was in Europe and I've been working 10-12h per day in August (my peak month so far). June-November approx 4-6 hours a day.
Now I'm in Koh Phangan, Thailand and work few hours a month, but fully focusing on healthy lifestyle and training/meditation.
In April I go back to Europe and plan is to grind hard for the next few years. I work in bursts. My routine when I work full-time is having breakfast at my place or a coffee shop and working from there in the morning, hitting the gym around noon, then more work at home/another coffee shop, and unwind during the evening.
There are exceptions to this, if I don't feel productive in the afternoons, I postpone work for evening. I again tend to feel the "flow" of my mental productivity and organize around that. Never had any strict rules and it's been working pretty fine so far.
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#27I work 8 hours per day, study for an hour, work out for 30 minutes to an hour, and spend the rest with my wife or doing whatever.
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#28I work 8-5 as a software engineer (incl. lunch so only 40 hours a week) plus a short ~15 minutes highway commute each way. If there's an accident though that could easily be an hour, it's a congested area and there aren't many alternative routes. It's a crap shoot unfortunately but rarely an issue. My SO is a resident physician so averages 80 hours a week Mon-Sat. My "family" time is largely dependent on her schedule…
I like that, the Nike approach. I feel the same way.
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#29About 10 every single day, difficult to do more
I wake up, go to the gym (1h), then I go to work (8h +1h eating), come back home, work on my startup (2-3h).
On weekends same, except I'm only working on my startup.
It is a tough life, after 1 month of this schedule, I was exhausted, but the body is capable of adapting, and now I handling that easily. This is possible only because I use my bike as transportation system and thus it is very fast, and that everything I do is optimized.
Downsides is that I have almost no social life, I mean I could have about 1h of social life per day, but that would require too much energy. My health is good, but this is thanks to all the sport I do I think
Re: Ask HN: Work-life balance?
#308 hours max. My intellectual productivity peaks 3 to 4 hours after I wake, and it's pretty non-existent 7 to 8 hours after I wake.
It's not fair to yourself to work beyond a sustainable amount: once you pull a weekend shift or two, your boss starts to expect it even when you can't do it, and you set yourself down an unsustainable path. I make it clear to my bosses that I won't do this, and if they need me to, it's a sign of corporate disfunction, not my own.
Productivity trick: I diligently incorporate exercise into my commute: I either bicycle or run (with backpack) as part of my evening commute, roughly year round. Combining the activity with bus routes makes this feasible in most large cities, and the activity quickly becomes the most enjoyable part of my day.
I have a few hours in the evening designated as non-work time, and I never work weekends.