Work doesn't necessarily need to be stressful. If you're doing the right stuff, it's fun enough that you want to keep at it and you're productive in different ways throughout the day.

It's rare when I feel like I'm "working all [my] waking hours" because when I feel mentally drained on the boring things, I find some of the fun things in our backlog and toy with those-- e.g. designing a prototype for our next site, doing some graphic design (which I find fun but I'm not so good at), trying a new technology/tool that might help us out, etc.

I enjoy hacking very much. Startup founders often get caught up working on all sorts of unfun business things during their core hours so designing/coding then becomes your relaxation time.

The biggest problem is that exercise stuff-- I'm going to go work on that right now.

See my other post on this question.. it's possible to last quite a while.

But yeah, at that rate, burnout is inevitable. However, with some animalistic (see http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html ) determination and focus, and the right support network (friends, family, partner), it's possible to last quite a while, even though bits and pieces of your life are falling apart along the way.

I should add to the post I made (but can't anymore now) that after I launched that first startup, I went pretty much into super-low productivity mode for about 2 months, which was absolutely necessary to recover from over 8 months of working two and a half intellectually demanding jobs!

DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, recently talked about getting more sleep. Too much emphasis, he said, is put on the superman mystique of the coder who codes 12 hours/day. We should stop bragging about how little sleep we get and instead wake up rested and productive.

"projects are not dependent on what happens in one day"

As a personal note, from experiencing this many times... once you get sick (which can be accelerated by lack of sleep + diet + stress), the wheels fall off everything (startup/coding? try getting out of bed)

In the 12 years that I've largely wasted as a professional software engineer, what I've noticed is that the best developers never work a lot of overtime for extended periods of time. Sure, it happens that they end up staying late to get something done now and then, but it's very rare.

The bad ones make up for taking the "shut up and code" methodology and spending hours and hours trying to get their pointlessly complicated solutions to work, rather than trying to do it right in the first place. The results, assuming they work, are almost invariably a morass of undocumented spaghetti code. It makes you wonder; what were they doing with all that time? If they weren't documenting their code, then the options are: a) they were faking it b) hunting for code that solves their problem on the internet to hide the fact that they couldn't write it themselvse c) wasting time debugging their own mess because they couldn't remember what the code they wrote last night at 11pm was supposed to do, but they were too tired and rushed to bother with little things like documentation

The let's work a 12+ hour day approach isn't how you get the job done, it's how you achieve job security when you work for a big company.

Yea, in the big companies, you would not believe how often I have seen someone 'recognised' and given great praise for being in the office real late pulling a release out of the fire - almost everytime it was that very person that put it into the fire to begin with - The ones that just got the thing to work and went home didn't even feature on the radar!

Sometimes I think the way to progress in a big company is to make a hash of things and then stay late fixing them - that doesn't compute with me though - they are bound to get found out at some point, right?

Sort of. Those are the ones that tend to get promoted to management roles and proceed to use the same reward system for the people who come after them.

In the end, you end up with a culture of long work hours because "that's how it's done" rather than for any rational reason.

I completely agree, I'm only really productive for 4-5hr during the day (this is when I come up with my best ideas, work or solutions) the rest of the day is spent doing general admin stuff. If you push yourself too hard you are likely just to burn yourself out. Working too long and hard is generally counter productive (at least thats how I feel)

Depends on if you really enjoy what you are doing and find it stimulating enough. Being able to take a power nap at times also helps.

I used to work 12-14hrs/day and be highly productive (80/20 rule) as once tasks got boring or my mind started to wonder I would nap for half hour before doing a completly different task e..g. from coding to creating designs in photoshop, which was different enough to use different parts of my mind and thought processes. A change is as good as a holiday.

Most projects were completed as quickly as I could do and because they did not drag-on and because I was able to make lots of headway (reward in itself) I could sustain this for several weeks at a time.

Afterwards I would always take a some time off though :)

Yea if you are interested enough in what you are doing, or its your own startup things are a little different - even interesting work tires you out eventually though.

I need at least 1 day a week off all the same - I think that is important. Work real hard Monday - Friday and then party at the weekend :)

I can manage that schedule for a few months, but after that I need to shutdown for a week or I start to go crazy.