For those who are moonlighting, how do you avoid burnout?
Don't stop to think "omg I am working so hard".
... and get enough sleep.
Concentrate on small, achievable tasks. Do them regularly.
If it isn't worth $100 an hour it should be automated, outsourced, or eliminated. (You can move that number up as your time becomes worth more. I've always considered it a solid baseline.)
You can combine the techniques. I used to spend an incredible amount of time on content creation for my website. Conception, writing, HTMLification, etc would take me literally hours per page. I decided to eliminate (my involvement) by outsourcing the conception/writing and automating the heck out of the workflow.
This entailed moving my site from static HTML with a lot of handwritten content into a Rails-based pseudo-CMS with a lot of handwritten but machine-polished content. Downside: it is a lot more cookie cutter than it used to be. Upside: 2~4 hours of my time per unit of goodness is now 10 minutes of my time plus $100 per 30 units of goodness.
How do I avoid burning out, then? Many breaks of a medium duration (2 - 5 hours every few days, generally, with much shorter breaks in the interim) -- go out with friends, go to dinner, see a movie, nearly anything will do. If I'm feeling particularly unmotivated or tired one day, I'll reduce my to-do list for the day and shift the extra stuff to the next day or two.
Even if you think you can just keep going and going without any sort of side effects, you're fooling yourself. Everyone needs breaks, otherwise, at some point, you lose either your determination, will, or sanity.
Developing projects that can get you up and working for yourself, rather than those that take inordinate amounts of time/money and that are less likely to see the light of day.
I'd also like to work (d) on my project ideas, but there isn't enough time left after (a)-(c).
At face value, that's great advice. But I don't think it is that black and white for everyone. I don't know if DHH or Garyvee have kids, but for many people, if you really do need to support a family, then working 9am-3am every day is a pretty bad way to do it. Yeah, you might come out the other end running a business you love that's making you rich, but you'll probably be divorced and have kids that resent you. Or be sick and run down from all that lack of sleep.
If you have diapers to buy, ramen profitability might take longer to achieve. Or might not be an option at all. If you have personal relationships you value, working 18 hours per day might not be the best idea (if you can avoid it).
It really depends on your priorities. If supporting your family and spending time with them is important to you, then yeah, lack of time might really be a problem on the road to starting up. DHH is right that complaining about it isn't productive, but he comes across sounding arrogant when he writes it off as a non-issue.
Also, if I worked 12-15hr days every day, even doing something I love, I'd quickly grow to hate it. Not only would I resent the startup, but I'd likely be looking for an entire career change after a while.
There's no "shame" in not starting a business, not majoring in a certain subject, etc, except what society tries to tell us and society is trying to tell us that 100 different things are important. It's up to us to find what our destination is and head there, in spite of what other people say.
Do you think I could fit all that and still get straight As and have lots of time left over for playing World of Warcraft? No.
spoke to me. I gave up World of Warcraft to start my business. The business pays rather substantially better and takes up much less time.
I sometimes wish I had enough graphical talent to bling out my UI with incremental visual rewards ("purple pixels") for various accomplishments, as a means of self-motivation. Charts help, but if it were charts and little icons of e.g. "2k visitors in a day, have a new blue Boots of Modest Traffic!", well, you'd probably have to bring a crowbar to get me away from the business.
On second thought... no trophies.
I thought I was doing it wrong but now I see that I'm not the only one who sacrifices school to do something that they like.
