Startup work-life balance

http://hippoland.tumblr.com/post/33235630505/youre-thinking-about-startup-work-life-balance-all

by hippo33 • 14 years ago

154 106 14 years ago

hippoland.tumblr.com

jbkring• 14 years ago

Refreshing perspective. I agree wholeheartedly.

drp49292• 14 years ago

Confucius said, "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

If you don't work, you don't have to worry about work-life balance.

jszmajda• 14 years ago

I don't think that's a fair argument. There's always a point in projects where you need to do something you don't want to do. At that point your work has become an obligation, which makes it something you don't love. You're forced to undergo the stress that we're discussing balancing. The key IMO is to find the right balance of working through that stress.

drp49292• 14 years ago

If you loath to do something then it induces stress. However, if you love your project then you're more likely to ensure that ship moves forward, even if it means doing tasks that you did not want to do originally.

khyryk• 14 years ago

What's missing is the admission that many people find out which job(s) they love once they've lived most of their lives and have attained a different perspective of what's important.

robryan2• 14 years ago

I think many people also find their ideal jobs right away though.

saraid2164• 14 years ago

Citation needed. Which book of the Analects is that found in?

Sumaso• 14 years ago

I didn't see the life part of her work life balance.

I always imagined that work life balance meant you had things that you wanted to do in your personal time, and you had the time to do them.

Not 'I love working so much that my balance is all work and little / no life'.

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

Yeah, I think the problem lies more for people who don't want to work so much but have to make huge sacrifices/give up job security to get that kind of freedom.

hippo3311• 14 years ago

Good point. Working on becoming a better blogger...

My situation these days is that I have a spouse, no kids. I didn't realize it at the time, but choosing a spouse to share a lot of the work-life with you is really important. We probably don't spend as much time together as other couples, but it works well, because we share the same kind of life. He works at a startup, and I have LaunchBit. So on a given weekend, we might spend time "together" by working on our respective work at his office. And our hours are roughly the same, which makes it easy to work a 10-12 hour day, because no one is sitting around waiting for the other to come home. I think most people would say that this isn't very balanced at all -- we're mostly working. But, it is balanced because expectations are set and met on both sides.

Now, to your question about wishing that you had more time to pursue other hobbies and whatnot. If that's what you need, then I think that's perfectly fine too as long as everyone else on your startup team is onboard with that: co-founders, employees, investors.

robryan2• 14 years ago

Not everyone will agree but I do feel that getting together for a work session like this can be a social thing, even though it is still work. You are likely a little more relaxed about the work at this time too.

mratzloff• 14 years ago

People don't exist in a vacuum, though. Unlike when he was a teenager, his workaholic attitude affects others in a workplace environment. It affects the company culture and puts pressure on people to work more to keep up. It makes otherwise good workers feel guilty that they don't work more.

hippo3311• 14 years ago

That is a very fair point. Still learning how to write better. (since I didn't spend a lot of time writing in HS :P)

I think that it's important to set expectations with your team: co-founders, investors, etc. If everyone on the team needs to play golf every afternoon at 3pm to stay balanced, then that's right for them. There isn't anything wrong with this as long as everyone is onboard with this plan.

As for joining a startup, finding the right company culture is super important, and there are definitely startups that don't have pressure-cooker environments with long hours and work weeks. It's just a matter of taking the time to find the right fit.

trhtrsh4• 14 years ago

They can look at his equity stake and take comfort.

jneen• 14 years ago

Thank you for this. I have a life and other priorities, and I find it difficult to work in an environment where everyone sticks around the office until 8pm. It's difficult to see how our behavior affects others, and how important it is to be a model of balance.

jusben13692• 14 years ago

It feels like the author picked the 8 hour work day. I don't see that as part of the overall discussion on balance.

The main point of balance is that you are a more complete human being when you participate in a wider range of activities. Even if that just means you're a better developer because you stepped away for an hour or a week and got a new perspective. Just because you're not miserable only doing primarily one thing doesn't mean you wouldn't be happier if you forced yourself to learn or see or try new things at regular intervals. You'd most likely be much more interesting to those around you too.

hippo3311• 14 years ago

Balance is what YOU as an individual need to be balanced. You are projecting your opinion on everyone else that you need to do other things to be happier. That is what makes YOU happy. So go do it! But, it doesn't mean that everyone will be happier doing that. The point of this post is that everyone needs balance and needs to do what they think will make them feel balanced. And rather than adhering to dogma of others, we should each individually do what's best so long as expectations are set with those in our company.

freshhawk7• 14 years ago

Nope. Balance has a reasonably well defined meaning.

You can argue that balance isn't necessary for everyone or that the "balanced life" dogma is wrong. That's an interesting conversation. Better than trying to redefine balanced to mean "either balanced or the opposite, whatever you feel like", that seems rather silly.

guylhem6• 14 years ago

Balance is like an indifference curve in a time allocation between various things (work, friends, hobbies) one chose or has to do.

Each one of us has its own indifference curve. And when we age and add new things, the indifference curve change and therefore the repartition of time.

I for one loved videogames and invested most of my time in it. Now that I have other options (other "things" to do), even if videogames are still fun, they represent a lower proportion of my time because other things are just bringing more satisfaction.

Maybe if I added kids to the "things", they would take a bigger chunk of time - most people say they bring more satisfaction than most other things.

prawks2• 14 years ago

In case people still don't get it, it's your life that you balance. No one but you can tell you what that means.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

That you are replying to every single comment with a defensive rationale tells me your motivations for posting this are not balanced with the interests of the site. Not to mention that you are offering dogma while saying you're trying to steer people away from dogma.

codegeek2• 14 years ago

Not sure if I agree with the author here. Yes it is true that if u love what u do, it doesn't feel like a burden and might have a feeling of balance there. But even then, I want my personal life which means being able to spend time doing other things and not just work.

The author talks about his teenage days when he would rather do math and not watch x files. That's fine. But what about ppl who have kids and want to go home and spend time with them instead of working which btw they love.

And that's my point. Just because u love your work, doesn't mean u have a balance. I will rather call it obsession.

aeturnum• 14 years ago

I think you're missing the point of work life balance.

People do not want a good "work life balance" because it's the "right thing to do." They're seeking to optimize their productivity and happiness. They don't want to wake up one day and have no friends, but they also don't want to wake up and have done too little.

The author's point is that there is no canonical answer. If your friend works 12 hour days (as I'm sure many of our friends do) you shouldn't just say, "Oh, well, you should work less." Everyone has their own happy zone.

Sometimes all people want to do is work 14 hours a day, and they love it. We shouldn't say that they're wrong for loving it. We should instead understand that what is balanced for us is not what will be balanced for someone else.

codegeek2• 14 years ago

"there is no canonical answer"

Agreed. But I got the feeling that the author was also advocating a zero sum game here for work life balance

crazygringo• 14 years ago

I used to program all the time in high school. I thought I was happy.

Then I went to college, met all sorts of people, had lots of experiences, and realized how narrow my life, and concept of happiness was.

So when I hear people talk about how much they love their work, that's their own balance... I can't help but wonder if they just haven't learned how great the other parts of life are. And how much a wider range of experiences can make their work part better as well.

hippo3311• 14 years ago

I think that's fair. I think what we need to stay "balanced" changes over time. Just because you don't want to program all the time now doesn't mean that you didn't enjoy your time in high school.

trhtrsh4• 14 years ago

I used to go out all the time in college. I got puked on by all sorts of people, had lots of frustrating experiences, adn realized how peer-driven my life, and concept of happiness was.

So when I hear people talk about how much they love their friends, that's their own balance... I can't help but wonder if they just haven't learned how to take care of themselves without external validation. And how working to accomplish something can lead to more meaningful relationships as well.

hoka• 14 years ago

I get the contrarian perspective, and partially agree with it. I think in both cases, however, you have to frequently make sure your reasons are ones you can live with.

Many people are concerned with how they appear to their friends and behave differently in the college/young professional scene you allude to. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking what you're working on is so important to YOU and that you don't need external validation. In some cases though, we assume we're already validated because WE know that our work is important. You're still relying on validation possibly; you're just getting it from made up people instead of real ones.

But as long as you truly believe in your work and aren't doing it to keep your head above everyone, props to you :-). I struggle to objectively examine where I'm at in my life at times and I think it's something we all need to do more of.

sneak• 14 years ago

> So when I hear people talk about how much they love their friends, that's their own balance... I can't help but wonder if they just haven't learned how to take care of themselves without external validation.

You espouse a false dichotomy.

There's more to loving friends than loving the external validation they may (or may not!) provide.

Go get some really extraordinary friends and try again.

guylhem6• 14 years ago

What if they are happy at a local optimum, and what if we human could only feel happiness on a scale between the best we've been and the worst we've been?

Sure then they may not be the happy at a maximum, but since they haven't found such a maximum yet their hapiness on a relative scale is 100%.

In other words, ignorance is bliss, and if you don't have "other experiences", it doesn't matter, you could still be just as happy - or even more!!

Considering I felt like the author, happier in the most work intensive years, and less happy afterwards, I have come to this theory of my own. It's not substantiated by anything but the famous "ignorance is bliss".

It has had one effect - stopped me from seeking "experiences" - because I want to maximize my relative happiness level. I noticed that when I did stopped that (buddihsm like), happiness happened (but didn't last - maybe there are disminishing marginal returns of staying at one level of "experience" - and we should gain experience, but little by little, to keep happiness maxed out.

grecy2• 14 years ago

> Sure then they may not be the happy at a maximum, but since they haven't found such a maximum yet their hapiness on a relative scale is 100%.

Interesting concept. That may have been true 50 years ago when it was not really possible to discover if other people were happier than your personal 100% level. Unfortunately, due to the internet, TV and Hollywood, it's extremely easy to discover there are tons of people out there happier than you.

After traveling the back roads of Central and South America for 2 years, it was amazing to show up in a dirt-street town where people were struggling to get food and potable water, and see them crowd around a TV and watch a blonde hair, blue eyed Jennifer Anniston complain about some trivial issue like her sofa not matching the carpet. Hollywood is an excellent marketing department, and purveyor of a "You are not as happy as you could be" mentality.

mberning2• 14 years ago

Absoutely. I was similar to the author all the through college. Then I got a job, which was a brutal entry level programmer job. It killed what little social life I had at that point. But the upside was that I was pretty good at it and started making some decent money. Over time I was able to use my professional capital to switch to a company with much healthier expectations. I was able to go out and explore the world after being caught up in the daily grind for years. I was able to associate with a much wider set of people. I got 'real' hobbies to replace my 'geek' hobbies. I got a girlfriend. One day I realized that I cared more about being a good person, a good partner, a good lover, a good friend, etc. than being a good programmer/scientist/etc. I realized that the chance of any 1 person making a breakthrough contribution to a company, science, or the arts is vanishingly small. The chance to be a good person and positively impact the people in your life and community is 100%.

I'm very thankful that my experiences have allowed me to put my professional life in perspective.

trhtrsh4• 14 years ago

Sounds like you had a bad job, not a bad time programming/sciencing.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

surio, your account was hellbanned 5 days ago.

electronous• 14 years ago

I actually think you might have the logic flipped here. The only thing that has a real chance of making a lasting impression on the world is science and engineering. Fulfilling your roles as a social person is highly ephemeral.

freshhawk7• 14 years ago

Exactly, saying that doing one thing or only similar things all the time is "my balance" is a strange, almost Orwellian, redefinition of the word balance.

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

To use an old phrase, I work hard and I party hard. I massively enjoy both aspects of my life, and whenever it gets "out of balance" (not enough working or not enough fun) I begin to feel bad. Everyone has their own balance to find, but I agree it's really important to experience both ends of that scale to work out where your own middle is. I've worked 9am - 3am before, which was too much work, and I took 6 months off work before starting at my current position, which was too little work.

nckbz• 14 years ago

I want to second this comment. I spent my high school, and college years programming stupid shit and I had fun, but if I could go back I'd slap myself and learn some basic social skills and just be a kid. My social circle now days consists of senior programmers, managers, and BA's twice my age. You have your whole life to build up wealth, but I really feel I missed the boat by not building up some really good friendships during my school years.

TL;DR

Lasting happiness is having social skills and quality relationships; not an advanced software developer skill set.

ogama• 14 years ago

Her high school life sounds sad. If she really had a fulfilling social life in high school she wouldn't feel the need to tell us all how great it was that she didn't go to parties. It reminds me of people who are constantly broadcasting to everyone how happy they are. Chances are, they're not.

hnriot• 14 years ago

Cognitive dissonance.

bduerst4• 14 years ago

Or confirmation bias / projecting.

"I didn't have a happy high school years so how can she?"

hippo3311• 14 years ago

Haha -- my point exactly. That's why I said that most people think that my life sounded horrible. But you are projecting your own definitions on other people -- precisely the point of this post...

guylhem6• 14 years ago

You're projecting your own judgement there!! What if she was indeed very happy? How can you know about her "internal state"? There are no ways to read thoughts yet, so believing what one is saying abouts one own feellings is usually best.

trhtrsh4• 14 years ago

Poe'd?

If you had a fulfilling life, you wouldn't feel the need to accuse other people of being secretly unhappy.

fr843• 14 years ago

The person simply sounds defensive, trying to convince themselves that not having fun was fun. So the reply made a good point.

philwelch• 14 years ago

Seriously? It sounds fantastic to me. I would have loved to spend less time in high school hanging out with idiotic, insecure teenagers and more time getting shit done.

eli_gottlieb3• 14 years ago

There's no such thing as a satisfying, fulfilling experience of high school. The grass there will always seem like it was greener on the other side.

The real reason for this is that we take such large jumps in maturity after school stops holding us back that, in retrospect, we realize that if we hadn't been such fucking idiots in high school, we could have had it all.

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

In my opinion startups are about speed. That doesn't mean you have to work 14 hour days 7 days a week. It does mean that if some obstacle clears at 5:05 pm on a Friday, then you do the work to get to the next obstacle, even if it means you miss dinner with the family.

But if you're ahead of the game on a Monday morning at 9am, then sleep in, or go to a movie, or whatever. Because the best way to go fast is to be enthusiastic about what you're doing.

hippo3311• 14 years ago

This may be true of YOUR startup. There are plenty of startups out there who have different thoughts about speed. And, so long as expectations are properly set with everyone on the team: co-founders, investors, et al, then whatever you need to do is the right thing regardless of what other startup founders around you are doing.

nugget• 14 years ago

This is why his startup beats your startup.

nkohari• 14 years ago

Unless there's an external factor that requires that you complete a task by a certain day, it's much healthier to think of a startup as a marathon than series of sprints.

nostrademons3• 14 years ago

That depends too - are you going to miss some opportunity because you finished your work at 11:00 PM rather than 10:00 PM? Because if you're not, why not take an hour out, have dinner with the family, and then go back to work for a few hours once the kids are in bed?

I have several people on my team that arrange their day like that, and if I had a family, I would probably do it too. Actually, I often do it anyway, ducking out of work for a late afternoon or evening social activity and then putting in a couple hours from home around midnight. I find that taking a break often makes that late-night work session a lot more productive than if I'd just worked straight through.

benthumb• 14 years ago

I'm glad someone has addressed this work-life balance canard. I would go further: getting hard things accomplished tends to take over one's life, and I don't think there's any way around it. Unless, of course, you live in Norway...

I also think humans on an individual basis are inherently unbalanced; that's why we're social creatures.

mapgrep3• 14 years ago

Wait, why is Elon Musk being used as example of someone who doesn't need vacations? We don't know what his personal life is like, in comparison to all we know about his professional life. There is no data.

Digging into his personal life is widely considered off limits. Reporting is not done on it. If I were, for example, to assert that Musk has had two divorces in 2.5 years and that this may in fact reflect that his personal life is a mess, I'd probably get voted down. And maybe that would be fair, because who knows, maybe in that scenario both he and his ex wives are happy to end the lifetime marriage vows early. My point isn't that Elon Musk's life is a mess, my point is we don't know, so we shouldn't be using him as evidence of not needing to "balance" work life, unless we're ready to have an in-depth conversation about what most people consider (rightly or wrongly) to be off limits private matters.

hippo3311• 14 years ago

He was referenced, because of another article (see link in my post) on work-life balance.

mapgrep3• 14 years ago

You referenced and tried to refute the article, but how do you know Musk is happy? How do you know he has found his personal balance? From what little I know about his personal life -- and it may be unrepresentative, again -- you can argue his personal life is on the rocks. He might also be perfectly happy. But what's the evidence? I don't see any evidence his story supports you point at all.

keeptrying2• 14 years ago

Two divorces in 2.5 years. And since divorces arent "same day service" type things I'm pretty sure the dude is "unhappy" with his private life.

guylhem6• 14 years ago

Let the ones who never took a bad decision in an area they are not very familiar with (like personal life when you're all about work) cast him the first stones

benlower• 14 years ago

I find it odd that we call it "work-life" balance. So work comes first and life second? I've started calling it "life-work" balance. Not to imply that I work less but that things are well integrated and stuff that feels like work comes second :-)

drallison2• 14 years ago

How can I take this posting seriously with a significant grammar error in the title.

hippo3311• 14 years ago

In the same way you take Apple seriously for using the slogan "Think different." :)

drallison2• 14 years ago

I don't. But the error is significantly different. English is changing and adverbs are disappearing. "Your" and the contraction "You're" are significantly different grammatically but sound the same when pronounced.

saraid2164• 14 years ago

You have a punctuation error in your comment.

bstewartnyc• 14 years ago

# there is no 'balance', only this algorithm running my life while(True): task=getNextTask() if priority(task)>priority(current_task): backBurner.add(current_task) current_task=task startWorkOn(current_task) else: backBurner.add(task)

padobson• 14 years ago

I agree that we shouldn't be looking at it in terms of hours, but I don't know if it can be measured in terms of happiness (as the author seems to be indicating) either.

What are your goals? What is it going to take for you to achieve those goals? Will you be happy working towards those goals? Is the misery that you're going to have to endure to achieve those goals worth it? Can you sustain that level of misery and still accomplish your goals?

But, it could also mean that you’re just a lot dumber and less efficient than your peers who could do the same thing without pulling an all-nighter.

You may well be dumber than someone who doesn't need an all-nighter to do what you're doing, but you may want the prize you're working towards more than the person getting 8 hours of sleep - so go for it.

eli_gottlieb3• 14 years ago

I have a kind of rule that has seen me from one place to another: you can always do it without an all-nighter. It might not have the best software engineering properties, it might suddenly do something completely different from all the rest of the code and drag in half a dozen libraries, it might barely fit the API you're calling.... but there is always some cleverer way of doing it than just coding all through the day and night.

Of course, many jobs actually want brute-force code versus library-laden, clever hacks. This is why I struggled to become a researcher again.

kryptiskt• 14 years ago

There's no such thing as an optimal work-life balance, life is an infinite buffet and you can only nibble at a few dishes. No matter what you do, you're going to miss out on nearly everything.

Somewhat less pretentiously, I wonder about contrasting life and work, because it's not unusual to have a pretty active social life at work. The absence of any social stimulation there would at least make me unhappy.

Tichy• 14 years ago

I don't think you can even see what you are missing if you never go on vacation or try other things.

tsotha• 14 years ago

You can be happy doing what you're doing at the time, but that doesn't mean your life is in balance. It just means you're happy right now. Well, a heroin addict that shoots up is happy while he's high.

Think ahead a little.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Would it not be simpler to say 'some things you do adds energy to you' and 'some things you do drains energy from you' avoid deficit energy days if possible.

I can spend a couple of hours programming and be hugely energized by it, and I can spend a couple of hours watching TV and be drained by it. The reverse is also true.

Be aware of your energy flow and balance it.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

I like to work hard for a few years, then take a year off. I'm doing that right now. I find it a lot more effective than trying to jam too many different activities into an ordinary week.

ruswick• 14 years ago

I think that this framework isn't applicable to most because people who sincerely enjoy working are anomalous and in the minority. Even people who "love" their jobs do so not because the job is "lovable" in and of itself but because it is the lesser of all evils and affords them more freedom/time/benefits/money/other happiness-promoting factor, not because the actual labor is enjoyable in and of itself.

If most people were given a chance, they wouldn't elect to work. For most people, work is an obligation that they except reluctantly. Given this, "work-life balance" then becomes a unidirectional effort to drive down the amount of work and the number of hours down to zero, not to achieve any kind of real equilibrium.

Additionally, because hours worked is the most common and widely used method used to determine the amount of work one has done, any attempt to reduce that amount of work is most likely going to be done by reducing hours works. Hours are the quintessential "work measurement": if you want more "balance," you're going to try to work less hours.

I'm sorry, but most people don't like working, and they expend effort attempting to work less. Because of the widely accepted idea that hours worked equates to amount worked, the way that they do so is by trying to reduce their hours.

In the words of Micael Scott, "I would rather live jobless, on a beach somewhere, off the money from a large inheritance, than have to work in any one of these crapholes."

That's the mentality that most people have, and that's why they want to work fewer hours.

photorized• 14 years ago

My personal observation is that when I got married, I became more productive, more selective, and also more effective at solving things quickly. Something about valuing your time.

anthonyb• 14 years ago

"Let me dive into something concrete."

That's a seriously mixed metaphor...

aphidbyteinc• 14 years ago

Balance is very important for entrepreneurs. However, I do believe in going the extra mile to make your company succeed. Which means not partying on a weekend when you could be doing something for your business. Me personally, I party as a reward for my hard work.

Startup work-life balance

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