Work-life balance

Guess it's a common story, but I learned the hard way.

I got so excited in the beginning so I was working 7 days a week until I burnt out badly.
I took a month off and since then worked 5 days a week, while one day is devoted to self-learning and discovery of new technologies/ideas.

My work is done now much smarter, I can actually see that I need fewer irritations for things I've been writing. More important - I'm way more relaxed and happy :).

Before... I used to do different things different time. As long I break from a task, I can do other tasks without being tired. But that's just me and that's when I was younger and without family

I think it really depends on the phase of the product development
Currently I'm working on Nolly.io everyday since I started

Burnout is a real issue I agree but it's not about work/life I'd argue. It's about how much stress you're exposed to and how much time you take to unwind from it. When there's too much stressful stuff piling up, pushing through is usually what finally burns you out.

I used to work 7 days before I quit building and focused on my personal life. My decision was less about burnout from working and more about getting crushed by other players. I believe I shared that story before.

Anyways, I wasn't spending long hours on my project but in the end, it was the stress of not being able to keep up with copycats with vastly more resources than me that did me in. If you can manage the stress in your life you'll have a lot more longevity. It's not about the quantity of "me-hours" you have, it's the quality in my opinion. Hope this helps :)

This will seem provocative but I actually don't believe in work-life balance, and I work every day.

I've got an article in the works about this, but I think "work vs. life" is the wrong abstraction.

"Work" belongs wherever you have problems, and you of course have just as many problems in your non-employment context as you do in your employment context. Relationships take work. Civic responsibilities take work. Home improvement takes work. Traveling takes work. Staying healthy takes work. Managing your finances takes work. Practicing your hobbies takes work. And so on.

So why do we use the work-life dichotomy then? I think the answer lies in autonomy. At home before and after their 9-to-5s, most people feel they have autonomy to "choose their own adventures" — i.e. focus on work or focus on "play" — but at the office itself, they no longer feel they have this autonomy. Which makes sense, I suppose. But this paradigm works a lot less effectively for remote workers and entrepreneurs running their own businesses.

Yet I acknowledge — how could I not? — that there's clearly such a thing as burnout. And overwork. And so there's something at the bottom of these conditions that we have to address in the way that we work. My point is simply that this "something at the bottom" isn't captured very well by separating "work" from "life."

A better abstraction, in my opinion, is this: "stress-rest balance." Because the actual mechanism that leads to burnout is chronic stress.

A routine which captures this improved paradigm might well involve daily work, but that work will come in cycles that line up with our underlying biology — throughout the day, we'll have several engaged periods of "dopaminergic" activity followed by relaxed periods of "serotonergic" recovery.

Anyway. I'll write more about this soon.

I try to keep a sane work/life balance because I understand that in the end, I'll regret spending too much time on work and not on my family. Well, of course, I try to use services like commercial cleaning singapore to reduce the time I spend on chores and work instead, but in my free time, I'm with my family.