Full-time indie hackers, how many hours do you work per week?
I was wondering how many hours people here are working per week on their startup/business? I've burned myself a couple of times in the past by working too many hours and trying to never procrastinate. I take it a bit easier now and on some days, I just work for a few hours and then relax for the rest of the day. The great thing about this approach is that I'm usually excited to work again on the next day.
How do you approach this?
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Currently, I have a full-time job which can be anywhere between 8 - 12 hours a day. Then I try to work at least 4 hours on my startup. However, this is usually in the evening after I put the kids to bed and so I'm up until 2 am usually. It's been something that I've really been thinking about recently as my dad passed a few weeks ago. It's a massive sacrifice and I'm reconsidering whether it's actually the way to go about things.
@Firebeard Thats what I did for few years before jumping in full time. Sorry to hear about your dad. It must be hard. I would suggest to go easy on your self for few weeks.
Sorry about your dad :/ .Sounds stressful working over time, are there segments in your work you can hire someone else to do it instead? Like hire a freelancer? I outsource once I realise it’s getting too much and I am close to burnout . All the best.
Yeah, I have a team working on stuff, but just trying to bootstrap as my as we can. Man I'm surprised how king everyone is here lol!
How many hours of sleep do you get? Are you worried about your health?
Yeah, no matter the success you want to achieve, your health matters most.
Health is one point, yes, but you also don't perform well mentally on too little sleep.
Typically between 3 - 5 hours a day, so not great!
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Do you mean full focus or just messing around? As a developer I can say that If you are working 8 hours a day, your focus time will be around maximum 4-5 hours. So if we count full dedication development hours as a working section. So, I'm working 24-30 hours in week. You might use the time tracker and fix yourself for some time like 3-4 hours a day and I think its much more efficent according to the messing around with 8-10 hours.
As an indie hacker you're not just coding, right?
It's nocoding. But yeah even nocode contains design data & flow in one-piece. There is lots of things to do in projects, like social media, marketing, SEO etc. But my answer is still it's impossible to work > 5 hours (full focus) if you work 8-10 hours in a day. End of the day we're all human :)
My hours fluctuate a lot, since I have phases when I work fully full-time (60+ hours if needed) and then again I have phases with a lot of downtime, e.g. when I am on vacation, or visiting family, or busy with other stuff (then it's usually around 20 hours per week).
My current average (for the last month or so) is 50 hours per week in front of the computer (doing "stuff", coding, etc.) and at least 10-20 hours additional thinking and research (mostly on my mobile, e.g. when travelling).
I can also confirm what others posted: it does not matter that much how much you work, but how productive you are. I sometimes have super productive 4-5 hour days, on which I get more done than on 12 hour days.
What's really important is realizing that working yourself into the ground is not working, not worth it, and definitely not something to be proud of or aspire to.
Get enough sleep, eat healthy, have some other stuff to do (sports, family, life), take regular breaks and then "work" will just sort itself out.
Indiehacking is a marathon, not a sprint.
It totally depends on how I feel but usually my hours are in between 50-60hours / week. Although I was kind of feeling burn out in June and in response I dropped my hours in July (took some days off as well) and August and now I am ready to roll with a bang.
This is 100% my experience as well.
50-60 is solid! I'm more somewhere around 40-50.
40-50 hours are solid as well. I apologize but honestly, this is not a number game. In my opinion, it does not matter how many hours you put it in. The only thing that matter is how much you are productive during those hours (end results).
Between I only put 31 (productive) hours this week.
Yea I make sure that the time I put in are quality hours!
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I'm in a privileged position where I've had previous success in my career, and more specifically an IPO at a tech company that treated me very well from a financial perspective.
I consult part time, and the rest of my time I spend on my projects.
All told I probably work 60 hours a week on the IH stuff, and 20 hours a week on the consulting.
I work a lot. But I enjoy it, and I can't imagine life being any other way.
That said, it's pretty much 24/7. You really gotta enjoy the grind and you have to make sure your family is on board.
Whenever I'm feeling a bit burned out I take 2 weeks off and focus on something completely different. Resetting is important
I work about 5 hours per day, and alternate between Bear Blog and JustSketchMe.
Talk about differentiation! How are your products doing?
They're both doing great thank you! I've added Botsy as well. Collectively the 3 projects are making about $25k MRR :)
I used to try to get a commit going everyday but slowly as I have built more infrastructure and I get to start managing with more users. I think I hope my project becomes just self-sufficient and I can watch it grow.
I do think naturally if I am bored I will be doing something so who knows sometimes on the hours but way less now than I used to before.
I've been working for myself for eight years now. I used to be a major workaholic, but I've tried scaling back in recent years. I essentially work a 9-5 now.
However, I almost always have a new side project I'm excited about, which can easily become another 1-3 hours in the evening. I think I'm stuck like this 😅
Well, it doesn't sound like a bad thing if you enjoy it. The opposite (not being motivated to try out new stuff) is probably a worse problem to have.
i work more than 4 hours on my project for https://sngplbill.pk/
I also have a full-time job and between that and staying active/healthy... I try to dedicate some after-dinner hours to indiehacking! so I think maybe 7-10 hours a week max
I've tried out multiple things in the past working solo. I used to think about hours a lot but I realized that wasn't moving things forward as I liked. So instead I am using tasks/goals to organize my day.
I use time to timebox things or to set time I want to spend something on before moving to the next thing.
Because of this somedays I might work for 2 hours, other days 4 or 8 (rarely). my aim is to work as less as possible.
IMO, what matters most is the consistent work instead of hours of work.
I actually dedicate most of my time to my startup, mostly in the morning and evening. I have a separate time slot for exercising (which I try never to miss), reading, learning new things, and hanging out.
sometimes i work all day and night, sometimes i take a rest all day
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That's a nice lifestyle
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For me too, that's why I usually do social media marketing stuff at noon😁
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That's great 👍🏻