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

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

#21

Post by Harj »

jmtame wrote: post #13

"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington 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 l…

that's a very narrow and unrealistic view of a startup. some of the most phenomenally productive people i've known and worked with don't pretend to be working every hour of the day. they work in short intense bursts in the knowledge that they'll still get more done than the people who kid themselves into thinking that sacrificing everything so they can be staring at their screens for 12 hours a day is the only way to be productive.

the best blog post i've found on this is from naval ravikant, http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2005/11/29/the-80-hour-myt...

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

#23

Post by taylan »

jmtame wrote: post #13

"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington 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 l…

jmtame is right; work-life balance shouldn't be your top priority, it shouldn't make you question the time you are investing in your startup. as you make progress opportunity cost of your time increases, i.e. an hour of your time when you got funded is a lot more precious than an hour when you were just starting out. also, an hour you spend on the "life" side is an hour NOT spent on your startup, and the cost for this increases as you make progress.

luckily, things are dynamic and you don't have to choose between work and life or some arbitrary balance point and then live with your decision forever. rather, depending on your time constraints your radius of interaction widens or shortens. while working hectically on some feature you'll only interact with very few close friends or no one at all, and when things are going slow or when you need support, emotional or otherwise, you'll simply reach out to more people. thus, be flexible in terms of how you allocate your time but always with an eye on the prize.

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

#24

Post by gamache »

mattmaroon wrote: post #15
jmtame wrote: post #13

"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington 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 l…

That's so wrong in every way. A proper work-life balance makes you more effective at both. Hours worked is shown very strongly in studies to follow the law of diminishing returns, to the point of even turning negative. 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…

Not to mention that most of those Type A busybees' startups will fail. All the hours in the world can't erase the fact that even good startups often tank, and most startups are founded on pretty cockamamie ideas anyway.

Equating hours-per-week with value is naive at best.

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

#26

Post by ideamonk »

6am - 5pm : for college

5pm - 12am : trying to manage work/life balance

that 5-12 includes trying to take rest, managing college assignments if any... and basically trying to do too many things... so work/life balance hardly exists :(

If I play some backetball in the evening I haven't the energy to do much that night. the "/" in "work/life" sometimes seems to translate to "work" OR "life".. choose any :P

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

#27

Post by jamesbritt »

mattmaroon wrote: post #15
jmtame wrote: post #13

"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington 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 l…

That's so wrong in every way. A proper work-life balance makes you more effective at both. Hours worked is shown very strongly in studies to follow the law of diminishing returns, to the point of even turning negative. 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…

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

Is there are tangible evidence for this? I agree with the idea of diminishing returns, but also think that one needs to put in more than 40 hours a week. But so far, the arguments are anecdotal.

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

#29

Post by nostrademons »

mattmaroon wrote: post #15
jmtame wrote: post #13

"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington 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 l…

That's so wrong in every way. A proper work-life balance makes you more effective at both. Hours worked is shown very strongly in studies to follow the law of diminishing returns, to the point of even turning negative. 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…

I found it wasn't really the time that was a problem, it was attention. Even when I was at parties or with my families, I wasn't really mentally there, since there was always this cool algorithm or new approach that I was turning over in my head and wanted to try out. That tended to make parties not all that much fun for me, and me not all that much fun for the party. So even though I was only working 5-6 hours/day of actual coding, the mental effort spent thinking things through was all-consuming. It was depressing enough that I'm going back into the corporate world again - I'm not much of a work/life balance guy by nature, but I'd like more work/life balance than I had as a founder.

FWIW, none of the startup founders I know have much in the way of work/life balance, at least for the first 5 years or so of the company's life. It was not uncommon for them to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and take their first vacation when the company was about 4 years old. This doesn't mean it was a daily grind - just that their life became the company, and that's what they wanted to be working on even when they weren't officially at work.

Edit: I should make a distinction here between startups (organizations that are intended to grow really fast) and small businesses. I know several small business owners with good work/life balance: you kinda need it, since a small business is a long haul that'll consume you if you don't have some other sort of life. I don't know any startup founders with a life, during the startup phase.

Know what sort of business you want and be honest up-front with family, friends, investors, employees, and yourself. You aren't going to get rich in 4 years with a small business. But you can make a good living for yourself, sacrificing less of your personal life, with significantly less risk. If you're going to shoot for the moon, figure out what it would take to prove that you're aiming right, and bail out before you sacrifice too much if you're not.

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