I tried to work 100 hours per week
Do you need that for your startup to succeed?
At the beginning of 2015, I still didn’t have a profitable startup yet.
What could I do to make that happen?
Most leaders and entrepreneurs believe that to be successful, they have to work a lot. And by a lot, I mean 60 or 80 hours per week.
I believed that.
I remember like it was today when I saw a video from Elon Musk when he talked about the 100-hour workweek. He said that working that amount of hours could significantly increase the chances of your company be successful.
I watched this at the end of 2014. I have just moved from Brazil to Chile, where I lived for seven months by myself. I was going through the Startup Chile program, my first accelerator program I did because of my gaming startup. The Startup Chile is an initiative from the Chilean government. It helped companies with US$ 40,000, working spaces, and mentoring.
At that time, my startup wasn’t profitable yet. So I decided to start to work desperately 100 hours per week to make that happen.
I already was a workaholic before that, but I have never worked 100 hours a week. One hundred hours a week is a little bit more than 14 hours every day. From Monday to Monday. No stop. It’s much more than the usual 40-hour workweek or even 60 and 80 that we listened to more in the startup world.
While I was trying to working 100 hours per week, I wasn’t negating my sleep. I was sleeping 8 hours per day. I wish I could sleep less, but that is what my body needs. I already tried to sleep less to finish more work, but that isn’t nice. My body needs that time.
I also was working out six times per week (about 1 hour per day). So, besides sleep and working out, I was pretty much working. At least trying to. I had less than an hour to do any other activity (eat, shower, read, play, etc.).
To guarantee that I was working all of this time, I took notes on a spreadsheet when I was working. I must confess that just a few times I was able to work 100 hours a week. I felt exhausted many times, and I wasn’t able to get work done.
I spent much time looking at my monitor and doing nothing. My brain wasn’t working anymore.
The worst was that I was not happy with myself for not being able to work 100 hours a week. I was feeling guilty.
The time I lived in Chile was one of the most stressful moments of my life. My startup had a few months of life. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to make my startup profitable.
I moved to Chile in November 2014. At the end of that year, my girlfriend from that time and my mother came to visit to spend Christmas and New Year’s Day with me. However, I was so obsessed with working 100 hours per week and making my startup profitable that I didn’t give too much attention to them.
The idea behind the 100-hour workweek is that by working more, you get more done. But that is not true. The human body has a limit of productivity. Some researches show that we can be productive on average 50 hours per week. I was trying to work the double of that.
The weeks that I was able to work 100 hours didn’t mean that I was getting the double work done. As I was tired, I was doing a lot of stuff wrong and had to fix them the other day.
In the last month of the program, we weren’t a profitable company yet. We were going to run out of money, and the startup was going to end. We had some money left and decided to try a different strategy.
By that time, our focus was the Latin American market. We decided to pivot to the US. The money left we had was supposed to pay the next month’s salaries of my two employees at the time. We decided to risk that money investing in user acquisition for our games. That worked, and we finished the program being a profitable company.
I could have reached the goal of being a profitable company faster If I had worked smarter and not harder.
After the program, I never tried to work 100 hours per week again. I started trying to be more productive, not focusing on working longer hours. I was focusing on working smarter.
I had to learn to prioritize my work better to make that happened. I also had to learn to be calm when things were waiting for me to do, but I didn’t have the time at the moment. To learn how to deal with my own pressure of getting things done was the most challenging thing for me.
There were rare cases where my employees had to work more than 40 hours a week. That usually happened when we had a strict deadline, which occurred no more than once per quarter.
The fact that I tried to work 100 hours per week made me fight for smart work. I passed this on to my team. I started helping them to find ways to work better without extended hours. There were some cases where an employee said that he wanted to work more to finish all of his tasks. When that happened, I tried to make him see how he could work smarter and not harder.
We kept the company growing after I moved back to Brazil. Working smarter helped us achieve much more.
In 2017 we raised US$1 million, and even with that, we kept working 40 hours per week.
However, there are times that you will need to work more than 40 hours a week, but that shouldn’t be the rule, in my opinion.
Focus on learning how you work best in the day. I usually prefer doing more mechanical work in the morning and more thinking stuff in the afternoon. At night, I also do a quick review for the current day and a plan for the next one.
All of this helps me focus on doing work that generates more value for the company.
