I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.
4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..
Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good:
8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review
12-1 - Software Requisition Review
1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting
2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI
3-4 - Meeting with an LP
4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin
5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures
7 - Dinner
8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb
Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software.
That's how you get to these hours.
I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."
My career - I think - is heading in the same direction (though still early) and I have a severe problem internalizing every little thing and its relative yield to the business. Thankfully I only manage 3 people at a small company, but training alone has been my biggest regret because I know there is so much potential in the team that has been untapped because we haven't invested enough into training (mostly due to my ability to generate and executing training resources and exercises).
What you’re doing is valuable and useful work, but it is a lot easier to do. Much less mentally demanding.
I think that is how you get to 60 hours, I don't think that is how you get to 80 hours like I said.
As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!
1. Hours worked & productivity are interrelated variables but they do not equal each other. So you have to explore the other variables involved in your productivity equation if you want to control effects on productivity.
2. The brain works on solving big problems even when you’re not actively focused on it. Anyone who experiences the effect of coming back to a problem they were beating their heads on for a while and quickly figured out a path forward has experienced this first hand.
3. If you’ve bought into this, then also consider that your output is solved problems. That’s what other people will see about your work. If the outcome is that you stayed at the office for 12 hours solving a problem, versus at work for 6 hours, said f this, went home, came back the next morning and worked the problem out in an hour, then what was the difference?
You kinda keyed in that a lot of work is not creative, so I think that kinda fits into this framework too. I find that doing rote work is a nice warm up or wind down block of time. So having scheduling awareness can help boost your productivity. But yeah for all of that, I’ve never been able to buy into the idea that 60/80 hour work weeks are at all a necessary idea, or a very proper one either. And this is how I’ve tried to make myself feel better that I could never personally do that kind of time, lol.
Most of your work is being present, either in meetings or work functions. These will include breakfast lunch and dinner, and something all three on the same day.
Your main focus is communication. This work extends to working within your own departments, the company, the rest of senior management, government, share holders, banks etc.
Most of your hours are not effective. You write them off. It’s understanding that you only have 10 hours a week of effective hours out of 80 hours and making sure those hours are actually effective.Effective time will be 5 minutes in an hour most likely.
That said some people are really good at juggling all of this bs, and some people are really terrible.
We can talk about different approaches and what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that the 80 to 100 hour work week is real for a lot of people in that position.
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685
I'm also open to the possibility that might be a very small percentage of people who could do it and that I might just not be one of them.
I'm also open to the possibility that I've been conditioned to expect 40 hour work weeks and that's why I may not be able to do much more. Apparently it's common for students in China to attend school for 12 hours a day. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a similar environment it would be easier to focus for longer?
And you're right, that those hours are not all 'at the desk working', but they are still most definitely working hours when you're waiting for a page, an email, or a piece of data that require immediate response at 3am.
That kind of work can be deeply rewarding (in retrospect), but is very clearly damaging if it persists for too long.
We're talking full up tactical exercises in the military, and a couple of critical repair scenarios here and there since.
A couple of days of near total downtime is a minimum to reset from that kind of effort, and 'normal' work for at least a week or two if possible.
A higher dose does not increase that time, at least for me. I'm curious how those without add/adhd are affected.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say my personal lifestyle and habits (eating healthy, maintaining daily exercise, blah blah) are massive contributors to my having sustained this consistent output since 2012.
Edit: no drug use
Human beings are only capable of sustained attention for limited periods of time, plus they have biological needs and must navigate a physical world.
Now, if you're just talking about time on the clock, then sure- 168 hours is the limit per week. But we're talking about people doing productive, mentally demanding work. 80 hours might not be possible.
Obviously unsustainable, but easily one of the most enjoyable periods of my work life. Everybody was helping doing everybody else’s job. It was really fun.
That's a weird thing to believe. I saw it all the time when I worked in finance (but I was capped at 60 hrs, which I did routinely), and it seems pretty par-for-the-course for my friends who are doctors and lawyers.
I don't think it's healthy, but it's certainly done.
To your first statement, it is possible and very common in law and investment banking, so it’s easy to dispel that misconception for you. I worked in investment banking for years and there were dozens of people on my floor which was one of dozens of floors pulling 70-90 hour weeks routinely. There is some % of an 80 hour week lost in transition (sitting at a desk waiting for feedback on a book that needs to go to printing by 4am for the 8am meeting) but you have no choice but to be there and at any moment you have to be prepared to act on whatever next step is required.
To your second point: was this work deeply creative or meaningful? To me it was. Perhaps less creative than technical. As for meaning, that depends. We would routinely work on projects that had 9-figure dollar impact on companies with tens of thousands of employees. Our numbers determined the fates of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands in their supply chains. Today I manage over 50 people, while I have a more direct human impact now than I did then, my impact today is a fraction of what it was when our teams changed the course of companies from a little Excel spreadsheet.
I did a 7 month stretch where I was working from home, on my own schedule, doing what I loved, and was doing 15-18 hour days 6 days a week (~90-100/week), while still managing to have/cook dinner and a bit of downtime with my now-wife each day, plus a full day off. It was fantastic.
Once the product was live the work shifted just so slightly from pure create/build to maintenance/improvements, going into the office a couple of days a week, and suddenly even 60 hours felt like a lot, and eventually it was just a job and I was doing 40-45.
I think it's more a matter of finding the right thing and schedule for you rather than imposing some kind of convention onto it.
As an EMT some of our crew worked 1 48hr shift and then later in the week 1 24hr shift. They got paid so little ($9.25 an hour back then!) that was the only way to survive in the Bay Area was to stack your shifts and then hit time and a half after 40hrs and double time for the last 20 hrs.
I had a preceptor who worked those shifts and I had to work her schedule while she was evaluating me. It was horrific. The 48s were brutal and I was wrecked later in the week when it came time to do the 24. Those months went by in a blur and it was basically hell to get through it.
When I advanced and got to set my own schedule I just worked 1 24hr and 1 12hr and life was great. Got to do chores and errands and long hiking trips on my days off, had enough time to travel and enjoy my hobbies.
Left EMS to more of an office job because I needed to make more $$, but I miss the patients, the camaraderie, and being out in the field.
Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours.
The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.
While we're valuing diversity, let's consider diversity of circumstance as well as attitudes. Working 80 hours a week is not the same for someone who's single and healthy vs. someone who is themselves disabled or who has family members who require significant care. Assuming or implying that it's only about values is exactly what makes this discussion so contentious. Many people have the "right" values but their work role or their non-work situation is not as conducive to long hours. Or maybe they've just read the actual research instead of relying on anecdata - especially cherry-picked (or outright fabricated) stories from CEOs and VCs who benefit more from others' overwork than those people do themselves. For most people, 80 hours per week is just not healthy or sustainable.
1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.
2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.
3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.
I loved what Tobi said in this tweet: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297
"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."
5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.
For these your ROI per hour goes down, but your total ROI still goes up even after 5 or even 8 hours. Maybe not for everyone everyday, but for some people some days for sure.
I feel like the hardest skill in jobs like programming, design (or any creative jobs, to be fair) is managing your cognitive resources, understanding when to approach problems requiring particular modes of thinking and when to stop, work on something else, or learn to do nothing.
In my mid 20s I did my share of reckless 80-100h weeks—ending up with depression and health issues that took years to recover. Some days are still challenging. And, I’m just 31.
40 hours (9-6) is rough enough!
Re: Thiel, wasn't the point of that power law section meant to say that each founder should focus on what gives them leverage? I don't recall correctly.
"The Search" is the discovery of those things outside of your normal circles of concern, which makes it doubly-difficult to find _on purpose_. Felix Dennis describes the process more akin to an aware predator waiting for something to enter its kill-zone.
See? Working long hours sometimes is not a burden, but a choice, a choice that one makes to master what they love, and to make sure they won't regret wasting their life when looking back years later. And sometimes working long hours, as long as it's voluntary, is the only way to succeed.
Some of the proponents of long term overwork argue that it is a requirement for big successes in entrepreneurship or that people must be willing to burn themselves out to 'change the world' or other such nonsense.
Working long hours on a short term basis is not evil, but there are quite a few organizations exploiting their employees in a chase for big exits that those employees will never benefit from.
If the latter, I guarantee you will have just as much regret looking back years later. The 'voluntary' part is the gray area that most seem to talk around.
So he didn't. What about his employees?
Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic. Some bosses do get away with working shorter hours while they flog their employees to work like crazy. On the other hand, workaholism at many companies tends to gets worse and worse as you gain responsibility, and some of the most insane hours are worked by those near the top.
That's definitely true of the Bay Area, but Shopify is an Ottawa, Canada company. Having gone to college there, I don't get the feeling that Tobi is doing anything out of the ordinary for an Ottawa company. That may not be the case in Kitchener/Waterloo or Vancouver -- and it's definitely not true of the Bay Area -- but it's much less endemic out there.
It's at once nice to see but also frustrating because I feel like Ottawa tends to lack that drive, motivation and commitment broadly speaking to develop more Shopify-type companies. There's IBM, Mitel, Adobe, Blackberry, Corel and a bunch of companies selling into government out there from a tech perspective. But hey, hopefully Shopify leads the way here and we see more of them.
Shopify is something of a point of pride for Ottawa and I do wish them all the best!
What does it mean to "work hard" at a white collar job when you don't work long hours?
Honestly curious.
> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
Obviously Shopify has thousands of employees now, there's very real chance that Tobi's perception does not match the reality of the employees.
I started incorporating this thinking into my own work schedule, and I believe it to be true. I certainly found that I grew incredibly quickly in my abilities when I started working more (as long as I was applying the hours intelligently, which is admittedly its own trick)
I think the argument can be made for doing a bit extra regularly to improve and grow. But that's not what is happening in this ridiculous hustle culture where people are burning 60-80+ hours week all year round in an effort to win the rat race by running people into the ground.
If startup founders want to work extra - let them. But when they create a culture where they expect everyone to give the same extreme amount of sacrifice and work while they stand to gain only a fraction of what those who own the capital or have power in running the companies will gain - that is something that should be fought against as vigorously as possible on every level of society - culture, law etc.
So I applaud this "virtue signaling" and call it common sense.
Years later, when you're already comfortable, have a rich network of experts and trusted past associates, have easy access to capital, have decades of experience of building businesses, and a deep understanding of an industry of two? Yeah, you don't need the long hours, you're fine.
What does the s=20 do?
Seems to be tacked on by Twitter to track the source of shares. Pretty sure the number changes by device.
If you're fortunate enough to hit product market fit without too much struggle ... and then can scale it as a regular company - good on you.
But I suggest in the early years, it's really not like that for most founders as they pivot and strife.
In the scale years, I suggest it probably could be more like that for most company employees and leadership. And FYI I think most companies are like this i.e. more or less 9-to-5, even very well known corps.
I also think this might have very much to do with the nature of the technology and the inherent competitiveness/barriers in the category: in companies wherein there's a significant number of talented individuals needed to focus - crunching happens.
For example: Pixar films. Apparently people work pretty long and hard to make production work. It involves a lot of specific talent, working together with ambiguous timelines and schedules, last minute creative changes.
Spotify seems to be the kind of company perhaps wherein the work can be spread out fairly efficiently thereby enabling not only 9-5 hours, but perhaps more importantly: no need for A+ Valley Top Talent. I know Ottawa very well and there isn't remotely enough raw, high end A+ talent and specialisation of skills to make something like the iPhone.
Spotify can be built with a large number of 'smart people' (which Ottawa has aplenty), but I'm doubtful there will ever be an iPhone or 'Toy Story' come out of Ottawa either (though I would desperately like to be wrong).
The one distinction I find important is between working long hours because of the nature of your situation v/s working long hours because your manager/company is exploiting you. Determining if that's the case or not is up to the worker.
But weirdly enough - the same might be said of Spotify.
In the sense that Stocholm is not the Valley and doesn't have A+ stars in many tech categories. But - because Sweden has a historical special relationship with the music industry, and Spotify requires 'smart people and a few geniuses but not tons of specialised geniuses' - Stockholm might make a better choice than the Valley.
One thing about Sweden though - they hit way above their weight in other, more classical industries. They're a small country that makes massive international brands, car companies - for gosh sakes they make the most complicated product category: Jet fighters. Mind you, not all of it, especially the engines, but making a 'Jet Figther' requires A+ players across a broad set of industrial categories, including a diplomatic corps that's deeply and efficiently embedded with industry, as many European countries have. Canada does not have this at all, and is probably last place in the OECD for this kind of economic cooperation.
If you're salaried, and you're working extra hours regularly, all you're doing is reducing your effective hourly rate.
That said, a great work-life balance is great to strive for, just that depending on what your company does, it may or may not happen soon enough.
There’s always going to be significant differences in the business dynamics and the public pressure on Tesla and their crew was insane. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill sometimes and it’s hard to control.
Shopify also never faced the massive and constant vitriol and naysayers from day one. It was a massive play out of the gate, not a hockey stick growth but a massive capital investment covering multiple very difficult verticles all at once from design to operations to production and managing a very expensive and risky customer lifespan and regulatory risk for every car sold. Not to downplay how hard it is to do what Shopify accomplished, which was significant and very admirable. But ultimately it’s comparing apples to oranges at a high level like that.
But I get burnt out fast when on a schedule like that, and knew I'd have some downtime with holidays and need to fill up on work to pay bills in January. Definitely couldn't sustain hours like that unless I was CEO and it was my baby then I'd be more apt to just keep going because it's a passion project.
It has spread to take over twitter and spawned articles and CEOs of large companies weighing in, and now on hacker news. Fascinating to watch where our news starts from and how it spreads
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1209115637148274690
I wholeheartedly agree as well. The key to working less, while being successful is to focus on what will give you the best rate of return and not doing the things that are not useful. That is really hard to figure out initially though. But I think it gets easier as you get more experienced, as your personal value system gets better tweaked to match reality.
This applies to the company as well like Jason Fried said. The company should have clear values that are attuned to market value and it should be professionally run.
Whilst more hours certainly doesn't mean more productivity, the idea of nurturing intrinsic motivation is often omitted in discussions about working late and it's more an implicit by-product of a good working environment.
My big metric for success is currently how many hours I can spend on my bike a week while still feeding myself and providing for loved ones responsibly.
Even then, there are only going to be but so many companies that get to the kind of scale of Shopify and that was true 15 years ago, and it's true today. But there is plenty of room for new small and medium sized companies to make millions of dollars. Success doesn't always have to be at the 3 comma level.
Success is never defined
If you want to know why he selected the features for the Cybertruck, go back 1 year when he asked the desired features on Twitter. It's crazy how many of those small looking features (like a bed for normal sized / tall people, lighting in the back) were included in all models.
>How much do you sleep per night, on average?
>ElonMuskOfficial: I actually measured this with my phone! Almost exactly 6 hours on average.
The 4 hour thing seems kind of made up by journalists for clickbait as far as I can tell from a brief google. Though he was up last night working on Starship stuff that seems quite cool https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1210649166407438336
This is not healthy or impressive, and it may be the first sign of dementia for many people.
Even if we assume the first statement is true, which is a big if, it still doesn't necessarily support the idea that working long hours is good. After all, you can't tell whether he was successful because of, or despite the long hours.
How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind when even in the tech vertical he has some serious competition (are we forgetting about Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.), let alone actual historical figures like Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc.
But when you're at the front lines, striving to create something new, you'll be competing against very motivated entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will often have more resources than you, and zero aversion to working weekends. In those circumstances, Tobi's lifestyle probably isn't going to cut it. When an entrepreneur is working to create that spark, it pays to be completely obsessed, sometimes for years.
Thankfully, very few of us are on the front lines struggling to launch something momentous. Tobi once was, but he was smart and surrounded by great people, and now he's in scaling mode, which seems like a much different beast. I'm grateful that he and other successful tech leaders don't force their teams to work as hard as they needed to in the early days.
Surely it works the other way as well -- for all the stories of people who worked all night to achieve success, there are others about people who either did so and didn't win, or worse yet burnt themselves out or hurt their lives in other ways.
Everyone thinks their experience reflects an universal truth.
That's the one big error, in my opinion.
What I learned in my life is, find your individual way. Don't play other peoples games, play your own game.
Pick what you need from the system and throw the rest away.
I'm bad at standing up before 12 and even worse at working 40h a week.
I'm don't like doing the same stuff for years.
I'm bad at networking for work, most people I meet there are just boring or upsetting to me.
All these things set me up for failure, still I'm doing better than most of my friends who are better at these things by a mile.
Most entrepreneurs are just chasing money like a Leprechaun. Wherever it goes, you follow. Run, turn, grind, pivot.
Shopify has always been really focused. Moves slower than the competition in many ways. They’ve been at it for 15 years. Mostly behind the scenes, not the sexiest stuff.
When you have a simple business you don’t have to grind weekends to try and convince someone to give you more money. The business is self sustaining and profitable.
...never...
I've also been pleasantly surprised about the unlimited vacation. I started late in the year, and the company isn't really busy near Christmas. But I've already taken a decent amount of vacation.
He's practically asking to put company success before personal growth. That's incredibly selfish if you ask me.
Some others, with job titles similar to him, speak of "giving 110%" and how their employees are so dedicated to the company, they gladly take on overtime and crunch and whatnot. This seems refreshingly honest to me in comparison.
Using his math, there's 35 creative hours per person per week; assuming a 5-day work week, he's _paying_ for 20 of those and leaving 15 for personal growth. Sure, some might prefer a different ratio, but at least he's acknowledging that there needs to be a balance.
You have to remember most of the people who work there can work almost anywhere. They have specifically chosen to dedicate 80% of their creative energy at Shopify.
It's an inconvenient truth, but you're not going to be able to reach the John Carmacks of the world if you're working 40 and they're working 60: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1210593150303031296
Anyone who thinks he would've achieved the same with far fewer hours are just kidding themselves and pulling crabs down into the bucket. Also implicit in that is Carmack being a fool for working 60, when he would've been as or more(!) effective with less? Nonsense.
Different people have different styles that work for them. Some people love to work 60+ hours and are productive doing it, others get more and better work done when they limit themselves to 40 and take time off. What works for you/Tobi/John doesn't universally work for others.
