How many hours to work on your startup

Working 5 days a week is a luxury now

Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and for many others like me.

I have been reading different articles on entrepreneurship, and there is a consensus that entrepreneurs work long hours. By the way this is one of the things that scared me to take this startup journey in the first place. I am the kind of person who does not believe in working long hours. While working in a job, I had found my optimal working hours — which is 30 hrs/week and 5 days/week. I live this famous quote “Work smart not hard”. But I was unsurprisingly awakened by a hard truth that your optimal working hours become suboptimal when you become the owner of a startup. This cutoff, that I used to do in my job, is not enough for my startup.

As an owner I can make my own schedule of when to start work and when to stop, at least till the time I do not have a paid customer. But it is now very clear to me that I do have to put in more hours. The earlier optimum hours formula that I developed in my job, is no longer working for me. Now I have started doing some work on Saturdays too. Though it is still a lighter workday compared to my weekdays. But eventually I will make my Saturday a full workday.

I started this new routine last Saturday and by the evening, my mind and body got so tired that I slept in early evening and woke up after 10 hours. Now I could relate to my ex-boss who mentioned that once, he slept for 18 hours continuously. He was also building his startup.

I think I get it now — Entrepreneurship is working long hours and sleeping long hours :-). But do not get me wrong here. The working long hours is six days a week and sleeping long hours is only once a week.

Another new discovery in this startup journey!

On this note, wishing everyone a great work week and a sound sleep after work.

Please, feel free to leave comments below for thoughts, suggestions, and even feedbacks.