out of curiosity, how do you count 80-100 hours a week? Do you keep timesheets? 100 hours is 14 hours a day, every day.
Nah, no tracking. But maybe I should, that would be interesting. The reason I make those claims is because I don't do much else at the moment except "work" (which for me equals fun). I don't play any video games anymore except the one I work on, and even then it's usually only once a week. I don't use facebook. Etc. Hacker News is my outlet, typically before bed (like now). Think of it this way... there are 168 hours…
I got a sore right wrist during a Diablo 2 weekend, and it persisted for about 4 years.
In the end I had to get a chair of the right height, a desk of the right height and a wrist rest.
Take it seriously, the most important thing is an ergonomic work setup and some breaks.
Is it about your side-project? You really should only be doing a side-project for your enjoyment and the challenge. However, if you stress about your productivity you might lose sight of the reason you started a side-project. I am the person who can concentrate 16 hours a day, or even days on end without sleep or breaks (in fact, i'm well known for it). It doesn't mean my projects get done faster, the real result has…
Your last word worries me, because I've seen insomnia and it's a killer. Like you I often have trouble shutting off my mind, causing me to continue working on problems in my mind while I'm supposed to sleep. Sometimes productive, but you will crash in the end, especially as you get older. When it gets really bad I force myself to sit down & meditate. When I do that for a few days I know I can find a healthy rhythm ag…
You are absolutely correct. I’ve never met anyone else with my level of concentration. So other than what I experience first hand, I’ve never seen anyone suffer from fatigue. But, while others can seem jealous about my small accomplishments, I actually get jealous that they have lives.
Right I call it the "no or grow" decision, I chose the latter, I just found out that the grow decision is a difficult one to make, we are working through it but it take time.
You only want to grow your business based on sustained clients with a lot of work. Do it very slowly and carefully, one of the most common ways for a business to fail is to get too big, too fast. Are you totally certain that you will have a lot of work 3 months from now? 12?
That is the point of contention and why I said it is a difficult spot. We are taking a very pragmatic approach to growth but that means that for the time being, that we have to pull a lot of hours for a time to ensure that we are at a point to sustain another hire, when the numbers reflect a sustained volume then we can justify the hire. It also means that because we are growth oriented that we have to take the projects to grow. After we move through this critical point the reserve starts to stack up so that another employee is not such a risky venture. The issue is not only is it bad to burn a client, but it is also just as bad to burn a good developer with on again off again employment. So we want to ensure that once we pick one up that we keep them for the long haul. We have a great reputation as a development house from both clients and employees and we intend to keep it that way. We have to stack up the reserve to do so. The hope is to build the development house on contracts and then pivot into a product company once we have amassed a solid team. That will be the next difficult transition for us and we are already laying plans for the time when revenues and growth can sustain that transition of business models.
You only want to grow your business based on sustained clients with a lot of work. Do it very slowly and carefully, one of the most common ways for a business to fail is to get too big, too fast. Are you totally certain that you will have a lot of work 3 months from now? 12?
That is the point of contention and why I said it is a difficult spot. We are taking a very pragmatic approach to growth but that means that for the time being, that we have to pull a lot of hours for a time to ensure that we are at a point to sustain another hire, when the numbers reflect a sustained volume then we can justify the hire. It also means that because we are growth oriented that we have to take the proje…
Sounds like you have a solid idea of where you are going. Well done.
Doing the overtime to justify the new hire sounds like a good, low risk approach. Congrats on putting in the hard yards now to enjoy the growth soon. :)
Sometimes it confuses me when people say they code this huge number of hours per week.
To me a large portion of coding (over 75%) is just sitting down and thinking about the problem. Most of coding these days is about researching libraries, designing, playing around rather than typing.
Try to be more effective in these bursts. Use tools that help you get ideas to code faster.