Thursday, March 21, 2013

End of 15 hour work day

I spend about 13 hours a day working.  It is not something that my boss demanded of me.  I just put in as much as I can to solve things that are coming my way, and when I count all the hours that I spend on average, it comes out to be about 13 hours a day.  That does not include chores like washing up, eating and commuting.  It's 13 hours in front of my laptop doing one thing or another.  That means I work about 15 hours each day, Monday thru Friday.

When I put in 15 hours day in and day out, I started to notice that I lose my daily rhythm.  Each day bleeds into another.  Back-to-back 5 hour sleep cycle starts to wear on me as mid week rolls in, and by Friday I become a walking zombie kept awake by the power of black Peet's coffee of the day.  There is no unplugging, hence there is no transition.

I am finally acknowledging that it may be causing more harm than doing good.  Being always on is not the answer to increase the productivity.  I have to take a longer term perspective, and pace myself.  The race won't be determined by who gets to cram in more working hours a week.  Instead it will be about how fast I can evolve the product, and whether I will keep going when product-market fit starts to find its sweet spot.  As they say, it's a marathon, not a 100m dash. 

Simply allocating more time to get more done cannot be the sustainable strategy.  I first have to specify the beginning and end of each day, then put the rest of things within the available time.

It's going to be difficult to do because I'm used to adding more time to get things done.  But it's something that I am willing to try.

Let me see how successful I can be.

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