[nostrebored]

6 days / 16 hours or 7 days / 14 hours still leaves time for a normal sleep schedule.

Many of the people in our YC batch were doing this for the duration of the batch. My cofounder and I both have families and managed to make a similar schedule work (with more peaks and valleys).

The last few weeks have been a crunch where I’ve been getting a lot closer to a true 140ish. That is unsustainable and I’ve had to go into it knowing that the price is future productivity.

But as a student with no commitments, 100hrs a week feels like the norm in YC startups right now.

[himeexcelanta]

This is performance - the human brain doesn’t work like this.

[nostrebored]

I've frequently had points in my career where this is just life. It comes down to planning when you do which tasks. I'm absolutely not at peak decision making capacity, but sometimes you aren't making decisions, just executing on work that takes time.

[isaacremuant]

You may have a family but how much time are you spending with them.

You know yourself but I think it's extremely unhealthy advice to give to people and usually hides a lot of inefficiency and misused hours.

Constraints breed creativity and efficiency. Do more with less and all that.

Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

Again, what you're doing might work for you but I'm trying to offer a slightly more nuanced take than what I consider it to be the "constant crunch" mode.

Busy doesn't mean value.

[nostrebored]

> Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

My cofounder and I do this usually about twice a month where we sit down and purposefully think about this at a macro and micro level.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

It's real! My health is not being taken care of, but that is the "pick 3" axis that I'm compromising on in the short term.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

I think this is not the right way to think about it. People have different preferences. The difference between having 4m in the bank and 8m in the bank at the end of my career is very marginal to me. I would much rather put myself in the position to work towards a tail event.

[isaacremuant]

Meh. I just don't believe that it is not performative and about "the hour metric" when on second read, I read the phrase about the really unsustainable thint being when you reached the "140 hours". In the last few WEEKS, plural.

4 hours sleep. Every day. And working non stop.

You can pretend all you want but for all that is holy stop giving this bullshit snake oil advice.

You don't have a life and neglect your family. They better enjoy those extra millions and buy themselves a father and a husband.

[raw_anon_1111]

And somehow you seem to be defending it. Even though there is statistically a better return just working in a bank as a Java dev in a second tier city.

[nostrebored]

This is absolutely untrue. We pay ourselves and all of our employees competitive salaries.

[raw_anon_1111]

See you paying them at least $335K in cash seeing that an average enterprise dev can make $140K working 40 hours a week and you want them to work 2.4x as many hours?