Ask HN: What to do if you are ridiculously burnt out?

I have a day job at a startup (maybe 45 hours per week) and I also have my own side project (about 30+ hours per week on top of that) - So I'm working a lot but these 30 extra hours are easy because I literally work on my laptop from my bed.

Because I know that I only have 30 hours per week for my side project, I am very careful about how I choose to invest my time.

You need to be thinking about how you can make the most of every line of code that you write. You have to reduce your project down to the simplest form that will still meet your goals. This could mean reaching a certain number of users, becoming profitable, etc...

Note that better funded competitors are always going to be able to get more work done than you will - So if you want to compete with them, you have to make sure that your product is simpler than theirs and try to use that simplicity to your advantage.

If a simple solution is just not viable in your chosen area (if you can't break your project into smaller, individually marketable parts), then you should cut your losses and choose a different area altogether.

If you have funding then you should think about hiring people to whom you can delegate some of your workload.

Honoring commitments is important, but so is adjusting to new information, even if it's only new information about your own productivity and mental state, or the revealed imbalance in critical-path-tasks and hourly commitments between partners.

OP may need more time away from the project, or may need more teammates with the right tech skills to help on current-bottlenecks.

Maybe knowing that 10 paying customers are lined up would help, as motivation and improved confidence in the partner's ability to equally contribute. (Maybe it's allow recruiting more technical help.) But maybe more people waiting for the completion would only add to the pressure and anxiety; he'll have to think about that.

I strongly suspect a major part of the problem is that OP has no peer technical help on the critical-path – all his partner can do is ask, "is it done yet?" That's a broken team.

http://revistapegn.globo.com/Como-comecar/fotos/2014/11/conh...

Technical projects always take more time than expected and I've not seen one that actually finished in time. The key here is to manage expectations of the rest of the team (note the word "manage"). In order to do that well you need to learn how to manage your own expectations first, think about all the times you said it will take you X hours/days and it turns out to take much longer. If you're not convinced of this you can write down all the occurrences you remember that you estimated and how long they actually took.

The reality is that you're almost always out of bounds (5 minutes takes an hour, 30 minutes takes 2 hours,...).

So one approach you can take is break down the project at all into tasks you should be able to delegate e.g. "implement create company page from mockup". Then list them up in a google spreadsheet and sort the list more or less according to stage (alpha,beta,stage) and then estimate the task length using half-days as a unit. e.g. This will take me 3 half-days to complete. Only use fibonacci numbers when estimating to take into account that bigger tasks carry more inherent uncertainty.

The idea is that some simple tasks will be over-estimated and that other tasks will be underestimated but it will even out so you're estimate is more accurate and you can say that it will give-or-take a few days X working days to complete.

Bear in mind that you just estimated the creation of the first version and that it is impossible to know how many revisions will be needed before it is production-ready.

In summary, don't kill yourself over expectations.. take some time off to recover and then do a full project estimation to better manage their expectations (and your own). If you're going to survive working independently you need to make sure you are on a weekly schedule that your body can deal with and not working weekends works for the majority of the population.

If your situation is anything like mine was then I really feel for you. You probably feel trapped right now, and that adds to your stress which compounds your mistakes.

Maybe read The Dip by Seth Godin. And good luck!