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I hate to break it to you, but the people who are working as tech workers and CEO’s for 50-60 hour work weeks are probably not the ones with pregnant daughters and delinquent sons. Your arguments ring hollow because the author of this article is a CEO; he really has no employer, and he chooses the work schedule he has. Just because your priorities are different from someone who is more successful than you doesn’t mean that you should look down on him. Despite all your warnings regarding stress, from the looks of your writing style you are the one who is stressed out all the time.

I invite responses. Feel free.

My day:
* I set a minimum of 10 @ the desk and I like to break it up during the day if I can
* typically I can run to 14 hours without any effort at all, ala lose myself in a task
* I sleep 5-6 hours a day (don’t need more as I don’t drink and I am not an anxious fellow otherwise, so not to much stress to recover from). This notably extends my day quite a bit as I now have 18-19 hours a day to work with balancing fun and work.
* 5-9 hours of not at the desk
* generally when I’m not at my desk and there is no other pressing personal issue on my mind I’d say that I spend at least 1/2 my mental energy on work (so make it 3 hours a day)
* I generally work 5 days a week minimum and almost always find something fun on Saturdays for 6 hours. I do try to take Sunday off from the desk bit of the job.

Breakdown:
* Desk 10-14 (call it average 12)
* Mental time 3 hours
Add that up:
Weekdays 5 @ 14 (aver 12 @ desk and 2 hours other mental)
Saturday 1 @ 6
Sunday mental energy only so to be conservative we won’t count
Total: 76

Important other calculation: Fun time!
Weekdays 5 @ 6
Saturday 1 @ 12
Sunday 1 @ 18
Total: 60

That’s a pretty dam good life if you ask me, 60 hours of fun a week!

I find that most people have very poorly organised personal lives which makes 40 hours at work seem like a huge impact into their ‘Life’, additionally I find that a lot of people sleep huge amounts of time, watch TV more then they think and spend hours a day commuting. I think if most people audited their time resource they’d discover that it is not their Job that is robbing them of valuable time but many other insidious elements of their lives and if these items were brought into alignment with their personal goals and values that they in fact could devout more time to their career without negative impacts on the rest of their lives.

The usual. I have this regular job where I spent 45hrs weekly within my own desk

How does it break down between desk work and thinking work, weekday work and weekend work?

I assume that even if I’m at my desk I have to be thinking at least 50% of the time. So I can say I spend 22hrs weekly to enrich my acknowledge.

Have you found a balance that keeps you passionate and productive?

This one is a hard one to answer. Keep us passionate at work includes how much fun you’re having with the time that lefts for ourselves. I think this “fun time” creates this balance between personal stuff and professional since we’re know how and when to split both.

On top of that, in my 14 years at startups my experience is that 75% of the time in the office is spent bs’ing and surfing the net. I’m not just referring to Sales and Marketing either but also to engineering, ops, finance, etc. As an example take into account digg.com. Their userbase is pretty engineering centric based on their said demographics. All day long those users are digging stories and chatting on the msg boards. Surely this all can’t be directly related to their respective jobs which is just one example of how some people might consider being at work the same thing as working.

Trying to tally how many hours someone works a guess at best because there is no real and universal definition of what work actually means. I can get the things I need to be done to be succesful as defined by my set objectives and goals in 30mins to an hour on most days. That 30-60mins is spread over the course of the entire day so I may only work, as I define to be doing the things I need to do to accomplish my objectives, 4 mins here 20mins there, 10 mins here and 12 mins there over the course of the day. I know I’m not alone because I see the same thing happening all over the valley in my own company and the ones i work with. unless it is actual physical labor, how can you measure work? if you’re in sales and you make 200% of your quota in the first month of the year do you still need to go to the office everyday? Technically you may but the reality is you don’t, at least in my experience. If you are an engineer and you write a script that takes 90% of your coding and automates it, do you still have to be at work for 100% of the day or does being there for 10% suffice? Not that being there means you’re working but you get the point.

IMHO, people shouldn’t be judged on how much they work but on how less they work relative to their achievments. The fact of the matter is that as an employer you should want to hire and keep the most efficient employees you have because they are the people that, due to some innate characteristic can be relied upon to, when given a task, finish it sooner than you thought for cheaper than you budgeted and perhaps even run more efficiently than originally planned.

My point is that we shouldn’t confuse productivity with work because they are apples and oranges.

Then anywhere from 1-5 hours many evenings on a freelance project, 4-10 more on the weekends…

That’s potentially 60 hours a week, and can be more. Plus 1.5 hours each day commuting that’s not on the clock. If I get to go Web Worker, as I hope to in 07, working freelance, I’d like to stick to 4 10-hour days honestly. Though it’ll more likely be 40-50 hours dispersed throughout the 7-day week, with more flexibility to break for personal/family life throughout those days.