Startup Work-Life Balance

The biggest issue is that at a startup your whole brain is focused on what you're building. If your personal life gets involved, you'll want to make sure to make time to do other things. You don't actually want to talk about your startup all the time.If you work 12 hour days at a startup, you probably don't have time for much else at all.If you're a normal person who thinks that is unsustainable, you can find time for a normal life along with working on your company. That's the case whethe

I completely understand your struggle. I'm working on our startup with two other team members. We're all in our mid-twenty's, two of us married, one of us with a kid, working full-time (sometimes more-than-full-time jobs).We've been doing it for a year, and as much as we continue to push, we just don't seem to have time for anything. Our finances have taken a hit, our personal lives have taken a hit... sometimes it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel and sometimes it feels like w

I think there are 2 good reasons for a startup to take over your life:1. If your startup is succeeding wildly. If you were seeing amazing returns from your time(i.e. maybe you work 80 hours in a week but made $10,000 and growing or signed up 20,000 new users), it's hard to think about anything else. You realize that you have stumbled upon a rare opportunity and it's worth it to sacrifice other things for a short time.OR2. You don't know any better. The first time you do a startup it's

I have been involving in a startup since one year ago. Result: I broke one relationship, and missed another. When my mom came visiting me from another state I didn't have the time to bring her around, and not even the time to talk to her. When everyone is enjoying the weekends I have to lock myself in my room and code, code CODE. When everyone is enjoying TVs after coming back from work, I read emails, filter resumes and do other work related stuffs. I don't have personal life; all of my time i

Most people choose the wrong time periods for thinking about work/life balance. The usual discussion is about achieving a balance every day or every week. That just dilutes and compromises both your work and the remainder of your life. A startup is a chance to balance out your work and life over many decades. If you can work, say, five times as effectively as other people (which is hard), and if you can get paid for that, you have the possibility to compress your working life into 9 years instea

You may not realize this but you're asking a question a "true" startup entrepreneur doesn't think to ask.Or to put it another way, a passionate entrepreneur would ask the opposite question in some zen philosophy forum, "Must I spend time away from my startup so I appear to have a balanced life?"The true entrepreneurs are obsessed with their startup. They don't want to spend time shooting the breeze drinking beers with their bu

It gets complicated the more things you want to be involved in. If you have no girlfriend/wife, no responsibilities, don't care what your few friends think of you and have no ambitions to add value to the world (other than through your startup) you can go hard, day or night.For those of us who are married, have kids, do community work, go to Church (Sundays and weeknights) etc... we have a lot more to juggle and finding quality time is very difficult. You really need to put in at least 20 h

I'd like to buy enough downvotes to make this comment disappear forever.A startup is still a job, and a job is still only part of your life.There are jobs before and jobs after, but nobody lays on their deathbed wishing they would have spent _less_ time with their family.

I was co-founder of a (YC-backed) startup for 4 years until we were forced to close, so I don't know if you can define us as "successful".Anecdotally speaking, I started off working with no life. There is a lot to be said for time periods where you shut out all else and just focus on your business, in fact the YC programme gave good impetus to only "write code, speak to customers or exercise". However doing this for extended periods is a great way to burn out.Initi

That mostly depends on whether you still have a day job or not. When you do, doing a startup will eat all of your free time. You can only get so far with skipping sleep & overloading on stimulants before you will inevitably crash, so don't go that road.