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- I’m somehow or other working or thinking about work or available to work 24/7. At night, on the weekend, on vacation.
- I work long hours, I work in the morning before I go to work, I work at night after I get home.
- I pride myself on working a lot and being dedicated and being obsessed. I fetishize and idealize this level of obsession because that’s how you get good and grow. That’s what the movies and X posts have told me.
- To some extent, it is true. I am learning and growing and progressing faster than I would with normal “work hours” and total isolation outside of those hours.
- But, I have used my 24/7 availability and my tolerance for dedicating all hours of my life to work to cover for the lack of reliability and automatization of systems I’ve built.
- e.g. I don’t verify all the potential use cases and test something I’m building because if it breaks I will be immediately available and will fix it fast. or I’ve tolerated a messy architecture for a project that requires a lot of manual step-by-step setup instead of simplifying and automating it because I don’t care how long it takes me or whether it takes hours away from my weekend, I’ll just do it.
- At the the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and be proud of working hard and long hours and being obsessed and dedicated to a degree no one else is.
- But that’s just laziness and sloppy work.
- If you were to work under the constraint that you were working only 9-5 and wouldn’t even open your laptop outside of those hours and had to not get fired, you would produce better work. Systems that are simpler to operate, need less manual work, are completely automated.
- More importantly, it would be sustainable. I can’t work 24/7 forever. And, when I stop, systems I have built are going to break and I have to fix them when I would rather not be fixing them.
- It’s always hard to balance things like this at a fast-pace startup that is growing crazy. At some point it’s inevitable to leave improvements in the backlog because you have to move fast to the next thing that has a tight deadline, and fast iteration through errors is largely good.
- But, at some point long hours and hard work become a blanket to hide real fundamental problems.
- There’s a difference between something working and your work on it being done. It’s tempting to move on when it’s working, but then you have this problem of it haunting you till the end of days.
- As a professional who cares about your work, you have to go from working to done. Meaning, you are not a dependency for it working any more. You can forget about it and it will just work.