Ask HN: How do you manage work/life balance?

The article was geared toward home workers and focused on tips and tricks to avoid getting stir crazy. But a lot of it talks about how to keep work and personal lives separate, which is especially difficult when your home is your office. So much of the post may be helpful to you.

Short version of my tips of things to do during the work day to stay sane:

1. Clearly define your work space. 2. Take a walk. 3. Take a nap. 4. Have lunch with a friend. 5. Join a local user group. 6. Engage with a community online. 7. Use Twitter. 8. Subscribe to a trade magazine. 9. Keep work and personal contact info separate. 10. Get a cat (or a dog). 11. Take regular breaks. 12. Schedule time off.

Mark Cuban was known for working 7 years straight on Broadcast.com (originally known as AudioNet) and that was at the time the largest IPO in history, sold to Yahoo for $6 billion in stock. He didn't take vacations, holidays, or leave work during these 7 years.

It depends on what you want out of life. I think too many people get into entrepreneurship because they think it sounds fun, but they don't realize it requires everything of you. If you're the CEO or President of your startup, you set the example. Every single person on your team will only work as hard as you will.

If you're unwilling to sacrifice friendships, family, weekends, holidays, then you're not very competitive to others who are. I'm not trying to say that in a sleezy way, I'm just stating the facts. A lot of people are willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, so if you only want to be self-employed and do your own self-startup, then you can probably get away with as much or little work-life balance as you want.

If you're sacrificing friendships and family, you're not doing it right. And not only that, even if you succeed you'll end up wishing you didn't. I've seen this happen.

For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week.