A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

Well said; the problem is that worked hours is a useless metric of productivity. Even the horribly poor metric "lines of code written" is much better—at least I know that you have been producing work, not social media posts.

Agree that the # of hours worked in a week is by no means an indication of productivity, and sometimes perhaps a product of a misaligned culture.

However, I do find long hours may result out of necessity for the sheer work involved as well. Especially in the earlier days of a company, you compensate for an initial lack of resources and staff by performing multiple roles.

On the business side, you could easily see your mornings taken up by customer calls (especially if you have an international market), the afternoons spent on ad campaigns and marketing content, the late afternoons on general office management. In the evenings when there's less client interaction, I would spend time on product feedback, some data analysis and metrics reporting for the day/week's past. This could easily extend to a 60-80 hour work week, and I would consider fairly typical of early startups.

As you grow there's less need for sure to work so long, as the company grows and responsibilities become more focused. But overall, I think there are circumstances where a 60-80 hr workweeks are necessary, and not necessarily an indication of a problem.

For most people, I'd agree. But as a startup founder, given how resource constrained we are (and we've chosen the self-funded, bootstrapping model for now) I don't have a whole lot of choice if we're going to succeed. Especially when you factor in that I still work a regular job to pay the bills.

So, 40 hrs at the regular job + x hours working on the startup, where x consumes almost every evening and almost all day on Sat. and Sunday, I'm regularly doing 70+ hour weeks.

Humblebrag? I don't know, and I don't care. I just care about getting this damn thing going and achieving my dreams.

Luckily I enjoy this, because I'm working on something I am actually passionate about. Not that it doesn't get frustrating on occasion, but most of the time it's more pleasure than pain.

So why do all this? Well, as theorique says here:

It isn't about disrupting an industry. It's about money.

That's a little bit of an oversimplification, but there's a lot of truth there. There are things I'd like to do, dreams I'd like to live out, that I can't do at my present level of income. But it's more than that for me (and, I'm guessing, for a lot of other people). I work on building a startup because A. I enjoy the act of building and creating something, and B. as the founder I'm in control and get to call the shots. Here, succeed for fail, it'll be down to my decisions and actions, not some random $BOSS. (Yeah, yeah, go ahead and chime in "everything is luck" crowd. I don't care about you either).

Anyway, when I get tired of working I just imagine myself cruising through New York or London, driving a Ferrari while getting sucked off by a gorgeous readheaded supermodel, and remind myself that there are reasons for doing all this work...

An additional +10 goes to the fact that this awesome comment came from the nickname 'pizza234'.

I am divorced. I rarely see my family, and my cofounder is my best (and currently only real) friend. Everything is on hold until my product is done.

The time constraint is more motivating when you're working on your product full time and have not released yet (are not making any money).