The other key of course is that companies that feel that they need to measure how subordinates spend their time is starting from the perspective that their employees are children who can’t be trusted as opposed to adults who are naturally inclined to do the right thing. This too is another post I think.

Thanks to everyone for the comments.

In any system, say for example, one that produces good software, there are bound to be bottlenecks at any specific point in time. For example, you would be bottlenecked on a few engineers, or on product management etc. At such points, it is far better for the non-bottlenecked people to take it easy, go learn a few skills (to alleviate the bottleneck), etc. than to work hard and overload the system.

This understanding, is in essence, an approach that measures results and throughput rather than number of hours spent working.
Which is not something many organizations are comfortable with, since they dont have those measurements in place, and so have to rely on, IMHO, the completely ad-hoc measure of watching how subordinates spend their time..

I don’t think of self-funded startups as bootstraps per se. Though I’ll confess that most bootstraps probably have some degree of self-funding even if it’s only subsidizing the venture by taking less salary (which we are certainly doing).

Maybe this is just semantics.

BTW… i’ll definitely check out rescuetime.com. It looks great.

Unless you are a services/hybrid business like Jackson Fish (you guys do consulting/project work for MS, don’t you?), you chance of getting a healthy salary early on is slim.

While you can adjust your spending to increase your runway– bootstrapping is essentially being your own VC. You are investing savings and/or opportunity cost in your idea/business.

This is true for ANY product business and is even more poignant for strict consumer plays (that don’t have a paid offering). It’s a long road with a painful cliff at the end unless you can manage to sprout wings before you get there.

All that being said, I think you are right on a lot of fronts. By virtue of the business I’ve created, I have very very good data to support that working 10 days straight kills productivity. Someday I’ll aggregate and publish some data to prove it.

Great/interesting post– thanks!

Take it in another direction: when people got a job and worked for a benevolent (ha!) company for long stretches, perhaps their entire working lives, there was a set of rules that was really easy to interpret: you showed up when expected and did was was asked if you desired to keep your “place”. We live in a different world, now:

Many experts in this field will tell you that there’s no such thing as a job anymore; even those of us “lucky” enough to be on someone’s payroll are really just self-employed people, albeit with a regular check. Well, if that’s true (and I posit that it is), then we all (and I’m an emploYER, thank you) need to accept the reality that high-handed statements like Jason’s have no place in the equation.

Most important: we all NEED downtime. Pick a study, any study; they all say the same thing. ANd be honest; did you even need a study to tell you that?

Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
PC VIP Inc.
Virtual VIP

Building products was my passion, I just needed to start actually doing it and really diving into the work to fully realize it.

With bootstrapping, I think the biggest advantage upfront is control. A lot of things will change and having a dynamic team that can shift, re-focus, and deliver productively and with real passion is important.