The Boss of You

morn­ing snug­gles (photo by emira)

I’ve been catch­ing up on an inter­est­ing dia­logue tak­ing place in the geek-business blog world. It started with a post about how to save money run­ning a startup, wherein its author, Jason Cala­ca­nis, posited one money-saving tip that raised a few hackles.

“Fire peo­ple who are not worka­holics,” he wrote. “Go work at the post office or Stabucks [sic] if you want bal­ance in your life.”

(By the way, the rest of his list is actu­ally chock-full of great tips, so don’t dis­miss it out of hand; I encour­age you to read it and glean some hard-earned wis­dom about how to cut spend­ing with­out los­ing productivity.)

Sig­nal vs. Noise, the blog of 37signals (cre­ators of online apps like Base­camp, High­rise, Back­pack and Camp­fire), volleyed with a response titled “Fire the worka­holics,” list­ing five rea­sons worka­holics are not an entrepreneur’s best friend. The post (with which I mostly agree, though I’ve cer­tainly been guilty of worka­holic ten­den­cies myself) concludes:

If your start-up can only suc­ceed by being a sweat­shop, your idea is sim­ply not good enough. Go back to the draw­ing board and come up with some­thing bet­ter that can be imple­mented by whole peo­ple, not cogs.

Hear, hear! Now, that said, I don’t think Cala­ca­nis was propos­ing that he wanted over­worked and under­paid work­ers so much as that he was look­ing for devo­tion and enthu­si­asm — and that per­spec­tive is reaf­firmed in his follow-up post, “Can you have a life and work at a startup com­pany?” (The answer: Yes, he thinks so. (Maybe.))

Any­way, to some extent this is just another round in the same debate that’s been going on in the IT indus­try for decades. We saw it when we started our IT careers in the mid-nineties, and the name of the game was long hours and gru­elling dead­lines in exchange for com­pany perks like foos­ball tables and free vending-machine sugar infu­sions. In our minds it was a trend that couldn’t last, because we thought at the time those perks could only keep the atten­tion of child­less males under the age of thirty — but it turns out we were wrong, and the over­work cul­ture in IT con­tin­ues apace (along with every­where else, from what we’ve seen).

We fight hard with our inter­nal worka­holic demons to keep some sem­blance of bal­ance in our work lives. We’re not always good about it, but it’s one of our core val­ues and we do our damnedest to leave the office at a rea­son­able hour and cre­ate a work life that sup­ports life out­side of work. We’ve always believed it would pay off in the form of more cre­ative energy (essen­tial to our work, but really a must for any entre­pre­neur), clearer think­ing, and hap­pier, more enthu­si­as­tic staff.

Well, we have one more arrow in our quiver, because 60 Min­utes has reported on a series of stud­ies that show that sleep depri­va­tion (which invari­ably accom­pa­nies over­long work hours) has griev­ous effects on our health — it’s a risk fac­tor for Type 2 dia­betes, for exam­ple — but on our abil­ity to think clearly, retain infor­ma­tion, and make good deci­sions. Read this arti­cle and you’ll be newly inspired to carve out the down­time you need (I repeat, need), and make sure that you and your team mem­bers are get­ting enough rest.