Sustain a High Output Over the Long Term

You have 168 hours per week, ~112 awake. Substitute capital for time, technology for both. Avoid travel. Cancel meetings. Focus on doing.

You can work sustainable seventy-hour weeks if you work when you want, sleep when you want, wake up when you want, work out when you want, and never travel.

I want to maximize the total number of hours I can work, including weekdays and weekends. I might want to work for sixteen hours one day, then rest the next day. I do meetings only one day a week. The rest of the week, I am totally free to work spontaneously. That’s my single biggest productivity hack: stack all meetings on (for example) Monday and Thursday. Then you are always no more than three days from a meeting, yet you get five focus days per week.

Losing sleep for a night isn’t the end of the world. Losing sleep for a year will affect your long-term health. Even from a pure dollars-and-cents perspective, losing too much sleep is going to affect your wealth-generating capacity and your capacity to provide value for your employees and your shareholders. Even if sacrificing sleep seems like the selfless thing to do on a daily basis, on a long-term basis, you want to take care of your health for the health of those around you.

Before I started my first company, I was about as jacked as it’s possible to be with my South Asian physiology. I lifted, ran, and worked out all the time. Doing that while operating a startup was difficult because there was always the temptation to make that short-term sacrifice, to stay up late or skip the workout to take a sales call.

I would tell myself I have a responsibility to my employees, and I believed my small health goals or hour of sleep wasn’t as important as the team’s outcome. I had a fiduciary responsibility to them. After all, I had them quit their jobs and move across the country. I didn’t want to say, “Oh, we didn’t get that deal because I went on a run.”

It took me a while to realize this was actually a false dichotomy. Sacrificing your physical fitness or health will also impoverish your team in the medium run. You can tap into that short-term health sacrifice for only so long. In the same way that a short-term optimization in engineering means taking on technical debt, you are taking on physical debt if you are not working out and eating right each day.

I want to put that in the top of my consciousness for my next project. I actually think daily fitness and eating properly is on a straight line to transhumanism and reversing aging. Whether we'll be successful in that, I don't know. But I want to be moving in that direction.

Don't just focus on economics alone, because you can overoptimize and distort financial metrics at the expense of health.

What you choose to load into your brain first thing in the morning is the most precious, precious space. Perhaps your first few hours should be offline with pen and paper, writing things out. Some offline time is good, so you don't just immediately jack into the internet.

I write a lot of stuff longhand because it forces focus. There are zero interruptions. Later in the day, I take those pieces of paper, a draft of a book chapter or something, and type it in a digital file.

When you get up, set aside some focus time. Now you have at least a few hours each day where you're moving the ball forward in your own self-determined direction. Say you get up at seven or eight, work out until nine, and stay offline until 1:00 p.m. You've done deep work for four hours straight. No one in the world can bother you, no one can get in touch with you, no one can tweet at you. You are offline to the entire world. That's good because you are able to push forward on your priorities. Then you connect and synchronize. You push all your updates. Now you're on the attack.

Drive your work forward before the rest of the world rushes in. You know it's going to rush in, but you want to hold it back and drive your focus forward as much as you can, and then let the water of the day rush in.

Taking some time off Twitter can be helpful, which I do every once in a while. I took almost four months off Twitter to complete all the final details in my book and get it shipped. Win off Twitter to win on Twitter. Pretty much anything you want, you cannot actually win on Twitter itself. You have to win off Twitter and announce on Twitter.

Hard work is a competitive advantage.

Even the belief that hard work is a competitive advantage is itself now a competitive advantage.