Why I Never Work Weekends
On living a balanced start-up life
It’s Saturday and I just signed-off an email to a customer by adding, “Now I’m going to write an article about how I never work on weekends.” I guess it’s more true to say that I hardly ever work on weekends.
After graduating from college in 1995, when I started working for ST Microelectronics in Bristol in the UK, some days I would work on weekdays until seven, eight, or even nine at night. That was after starting at eight or nine in the morning. So some days I was at work for up to twelve hours. Pretty much everyone else went home at five; I was the only one there, in the near darkness; the room in which six of us usually sat was lit only by my desk lamp. I was working late partly because I was scared, scared that I would not achieve my goals and scared that something terrible might happen, a reflection of the random abuse that I received in my childhood. But I was also curious and passionate about what I was working on.
Throughout my life, the amount of hours I have worked has been correlated with the passion I have felt for what I was working on. It’s hard to stay focused, to not get distracted, and to pour everything into a project unless there is some sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This is expressed extremely well in the book by Daniel Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth…
