Startup Hours (Part Three): What I’ve Learned

I am a pretty hardcore productivity enthusiast. I spend hours scouring Lifehacker and Product Hunt for the best email apps. I read books like “Smarter, Better, Faster” for inspiration. I enjoy using shortcuts and hacks. I drink Soylent so I don’t have to spend time finding, buying, or making lunch. I spend time thinking about the philosophical and practical differences between being productive vs. being active.
If you sleep for eight hours every night, every ten minutes that goes by is 1% of your waking day. I enjoy thinking about how to maximize each of those ten minute increments to the fullest.

My love of productivity bleeds into and blends my personal and professional lives. Recently, I’ve made an effort to experiment with quantifying my “startup hours” in an effort to measure work-life balance. The exercise has taught me invaluable lessons about how we structure, talk about, defend, and manage our time as leaders, startup workers, and individuals seeking a separation between our work and our personal lives.
Here’s what I uncovered:
Each day, I average 9 hours and 57 minutes in the office. I typically arrive around 10:24 a.m. and leave right around 8 p.m. My longest day in the office was April 10th, 2017 when my manager was in town: 13 hours, 34 minutes. My shortest day in the office was March 13th, 2017 — we closed the campus early because of an impending snowstorm: 6 hours.

In a typical month, I spend:
- 36 hours in regularly scheduled one-on-ones: these are with my manager and the eight team members who directly report to me. One hour per direct report initially seemed excessive, but I consider the hour with each team member to be precious; it’s our dedicated time to reflect on challenges, celebrate wins, and plan for the future. Given the number of direct reports I have, I’ve started to experiment with 30 minute one-on-ones every other week, prioritizing the teams and team members with whom I’ve spent the least time elsewhere. Since my one-on-ones are often scheduled back to back, I also try to end the meetings a few minutes before the hour to reflect and jot down a few notes for our next meeting as well as respond to a few Slacks and emails before I jump into my next engagement.
- 12 hours in regularly scheduled all-hands team meetings
- 28 hours on Slack
- 16 hours on Email
- 4 hours on Google Calendar: I spend about an hour per week organizing my schedule: putting agendas into invitations, allotting for travel time, and plotting out work time. I often have “maker” tasks on a manager’s schedule, and I require chunks of time to focus in order to get anything done. Spending a significant amount of time dedicated to simply organizing my schedule may seem ridiculous at the outset, but it allows me to block out my time so that precious work time doesn’t get booked over by additional invitations and ensures that I can actually Get Shit Done.
- 2 hours in Google Docs or Microsoft Word
- 2 hours in Keynote or Google Presentations
The reality of Inbox Zero:
Email is a wily beast and quite a time-suck. In May, I received 1,878 emails internally and 1,837 externally. On average, that’s about 123 emails per day.

My quickest response time is about 10 seconds, whereas on average, I reply to most emails about 9 hours after receiving them. This is largely because I tend to bucket my inbox management time to the beginning and end of each day. I monitor my inbox between meetings to ensure I don’t miss anything urgent, but anything that takes more than a few seconds to respond to has to wait until my dedicated inbox time.
The act of reading and responding to emails is easily conflated with productivity; the efforts can quickly slip into the category of simply being busy or reactive rather than effective.
I am a huge advocate of the “Inbox Zero” philosophy but it definitely takes up a considerable amount of time to read every email and respond to the ones that matter. The act of reading and responding to emails is easily conflated with productivity; the efforts can quickly slip into the categories of simply being busy or reactive rather than effective. I find that instead of aiming to get to inbox zero every day, I aim to do so two to three times per week.
Sleep is variable:

Ariana Huffington recommends you “sleep your way to the top” by getting a full night of rest every evening. She has spoken extensively about how sleep is a powerful key to success. As it relates to work-life balance, sleep is one of the “easiest” life metrics to quantify, and I think I’m doing decently. On average, I leave the office at 8:02 p.m. and fall asleep around 1 a.m., though that varies pretty wildly between midnight and 2 a.m. I typically wake up sometime between 8 a.m. and 8:45 a.m. on weekdays and sleep considerably longer on the weekends. On most days, I’m fairly well rested by averaging seven hours of sleep, enough to make Ms. Huffington proud.
Quantifying my own sleep made me more sensitive to hearing about how much others are sleeping. I was able to notice a loose correlation between the amount of sleep I had the night before and my mood, hunger, and productivity. When I receive less sleep, I’m more irritable, have a tendency to overeat, and am not nearly as productive. In the startup world, we tend to brag about how little sleep we get: for me, it’s a red flag. As a manager, a lack of sleep is a warning sign that an employee may not be prepared to do his/her best work. As a leader, a lack of sleep for myself is a warning sign that I may not be prepared to make sound decisions.
This isn’t even close to everything.

As I attempted to quantify my hours, I couldn’t help but think about all of the data slipping through the cracks. Those monthly 16 hours of email consist of both campus update emails that take 90+ minutes to write and quick GIF replies to celebrate wins. I practice difficult conversations in my head while I make coffee in the morning. I have Slack installed on my personal computer so that I can quickly respond to late-night messages, which isn’t tracked on RescueTime. I email my co-workers from my phone while commuting to and from work (e.g.: So sorry you’re not feeling well — go home!; Stuck in traffic — be there in ten!; Yikes — let’s circle up about this tomorrow AM!).
There’s no demonstrable line to separate my work and my personal life.
While the exercise in documenting how I spend my hours resulted in some helpful introspection, it also led me to conclude that I have no chance at actually quantifying my work-life balance. There’s no demonstrable line to separate my work and my personal life.
I’m beginning to believe that tracking and quantifying the work that we do by hours is largely an exercise in vanity metrics: somewhat reflective but highly variable on a regular basis and thus, a relatively imprecise picture of work-life balance and largely unhelpful. It’s almost impossible to quantify work-life balance when you have difficulty even defining the categories and articulating the boundaries that only questionably exist. This complexity has led me to reflect beyond my personal perspective and consider the consequences of our non-stop culture for my team and startups more broadly.
