Working too much

Discussions
#21

No doubt, this is an ongoing struggle for sure.

Many times, it’s not so much the sheer number of work hours we put in, but the never-ending mental “chatter” about business/work that goes on in our heads while we’re not “at work”.

How many times have you been driving, or hanging with your family, or sitting n bed at night, and you’re thinking through business plans, decisions, technical hurdles, and the rest. That’s me all the time.

To keep my mind at ease, I try to get as much of that stuff out of my head and written down somewhere. Once I jot down that to-do list, or write a journal entry, or sketch a wireframe, it helps to put that stuff aside until later.

But ya… Still… Here I am checking emails and dropping into this forum. At 8:00am. On a Saturday.

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#22

It sounds rather insightful, doesn’t it? I’m rather pleased with it - it makes me sound much wiser than I am.

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#23

Too many, and not enough.

I try to do a minimum of one hour per day. I also try to do four hours a day five days a week. But travel exhausts ya, and simple but important things like finding a suitable workspace with adequate Internet connectivity takes time.

#24

See - that Buddhist culture you missed out today is still rubbing off on you!

#25

And then @SteveMcLeod was enlightened.

#26

All. The. Freaking. TIme. I finally pried myself away on Saturday during the fabulous weather and sat in a park while my kids played on the playground. I still thought about my current biz woes the entire time. Sheesh.

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#27

Paleolithic man probably spend all his idle time thinking about hunting.

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#28

And boobs. All the cave paintings are about hunting and boobs. The more things change…

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#29

Seen this pop into my inbox from Rob Walling - not listened though

http://zenfounder.com/

it’s focused on finding the balance between startups, relationships, and life.

I co-host it with my wife Sherry, a clinical psychologist, and the first … episodes are ripe with discussion about:

  • How to stay sane while starting up
  • How to structure an annual retreat

Though I have to admit its got to be pretty ironic taking advice on how to not working too much from Rob… :slight_smile:

#30

ya man that podcast looks incredible!

#31

That episode of bootstrapped caught my attention too. It made me realize that I used to be a lot more intense about work - basically not knowing how to relax. But over the last few years something changed and I’m a lot more laid back about it now. I normally put in 35-40hrs a week and don’t touch work at night or on weekends unless I’m at a conference or on-call.

Overall I’m pretty happy with this state of affairs. But it does feel kind of strange. I’m not sure if I should be trying to get back some of that intensity or what.

But I have noticed that with a lot of people, logic gets very fuzzy when they talk about work ethic. Especially in SF, people have an attitude that greatness in only achieved by extreme effort. But even if that’s true, most people aren’t actually working towards “greatness.” There’s a big difference between John Carmack building Doom, and me building a saas app. Building a decent business is a much lower bar than “greatness” is - lucky for me. :wink:

2 Likes
#32

That’s interesting and refreshing to hear :). Sounds like the doubt over whether you’re doing enough maybe never goes away though.

Have you thought about how to address that question? Like for example if it’s a question of whether competitors are encroaching, perhaps that could be measured.

Also is 35-40 hours the minimum that you need to work to maintain the business or could you work less than that if you wanted to?

#33

The agreement we have between the cofounders specifies that we all work full time, so that’s the minimum I need to work. :slight_smile:

I imagine that if we went into maintenance mode we could reduce the total man-hours to 2 hours a day or so. But we could only keep that up for a month or two. Our market has a lot of competition. Plus, we’d all get bored. :slight_smile: