Ask HN: Bootstrappers, what do you do during down time?

Then it goes from crazy busy to suddenly quiet.

I just don't know what to do with the down time. I get super uneasy and anxious. I try to do some content marketing but I make so little progress, it's hard to see any result very quickly, so I switch to optimizing the web or landing page and then get see how my PPC campaigns are doing and then reading HN or listening to podcast on bootstrapping etc. I feel inefficient and spread thin.

I feel terrible when things are quiet. I have an urge to start cranking out updates and new features on the product but I stop myself, as I only decided to create features that enough paying users request.

I have a terrible habit of playing counterstrike and checking HN and reddit obsessively until I get a phone call or an email and then I have to do some work. I'm on the computer almost 15 hours a day. Basically, I have no life except on weekends I go out with friends but I'm always ready to answer email or live chat on my phone. Some days I just wait around and end up playing games all day.

When I was developing the product it wasn't like this. Nose down, cranking out code, testing, but I'm doing much much less of that now and trying to meet my personal sales target, marketing (based on what little I know), fixing websites, talking to people.

If you are boostrapping your biz full time what are you doing when you are not talking with leads or busy? Is there anything else I should be doing? Am I going about this the wrong way? Really would love your inputs, especially if you are unemployed and you rely on your bootstrap business.

I struggle with that feeling. I've been bootstrapping my own business for years, and I have a strong inclination to feel guilty if I'm not "at work" while other people with more conventional jobs are at work. It can result in me spending a lot of unproductive time at my desk.

I recently took a year pretty much away from work, to do my house up (mostly building a home cinema, woo!). The business kept ticking over just fine with me doing 20 minutes of emails a day on average, and a bit more here and there to fix the odd pressing issue.

The time off reshaped my attitude to work-life balance quite considerably. After a year of not doing much work on my business, I no longer felt so guilty for not being at my desk. Now I go through phases of doing lots of work (I reckon that when the motivation is there, one should run with it), but I also try to do other things: meet friends for lunch, play tennis, learn Spanish, go on the odd little holiday. My instincts still tell me that I should be at my desk, working (or at least at my desk), but I've got better at seeing them as illogical and fighting them.

A huge perk of having your own small business is having the freedom to organize your time the way you want to. If you can have a successful business without having to put in lots of hours, that's great. But you have to give yourself permission to do this.

Sitting at a desk wasting time is pointless, but I can associate and I think it's a natural inclination. But it's a very unhealthy inclination, in my opinion much more so than the inclination to go and do something completely different, something fun.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't be able to find productive business-related things to do. Without knowing a lot more about what you do and what you're looking to do with your business I can't really comment on that. But with almost 15 hours a day at your computer, and "no life" (your words!) I do think you might do well to try and address your work/life balance, which may involve tackling the deep-seated feelings or instincts that have you sitting at your desk so long when you're not being productive.

The big benefit of building a bootstrapped business is that you're not accountable to anybody. When you get to the point where you're making a nice profit and things slow down such that you don't need to put in 40 hour weeks anymore, that's an indicator that you need to go rock climbing.

Or surfing, travelling, playing with your children, salsa dancing, counter striking, novel writing, or whatever it was that you were planning to do once you hit it big and didn't have to work anymore.

Bootstrapped SaaS businesses have the nice side effect of giving you small tastes of that success before you actually hit the point where you can do it full time. My advice is to take advantage of it.