Dustin Moskovitz, Asana's co-founder, argues that nonstop work is a myth. He points to his early Facebook days living on soda and energy drinks as unsustainable, and says founders and engineers who burn out often quit entirely. Real productivity means pacing yourself like a marathon: taking breaks, unplugging at night, using weekends and vacations.
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"Work Hard, Live well" (on Medium).
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That was not really the case at Facebook, though, early on. Right. I mean, I don't know if you guys have read this great blog post that Dustin wrote about a year and a half ago now where he talked about the work life balance or lack thereof that you had in early days of Facebook. I think you wrote that you were subsisting on soda and energy drinks for a while, which I'm sure people in this room can understand. That happens. But you said that it didn't make you a more productive person to be kind of grinding that hard or stressing that much. So could you talk a little bit about when you realized that and sort of what you would have maybe done differently today?
Sure. You know, a lot of it, I think, was just how I was kind of pushing myself and, you know, some bad habits that I formed early on. But a lot of it also, I think is just the culture of the tech industry and especially Silicon Valley where, you know, it's kind of romanticized to like, just be working 24 7. You'll hear people say they were up two nights in a row, you know, finishing this project, things like that. And it's easy to sort of get this idea that that's the optimal way to work, that's the way to get the most done. But when you talk to people that are further in their career or if you look at any of the research that's been done about this, you get the exact opposite conclusion where you really have to treat it much more like a marathon and really pace yourself and work in a sustainable way. So, you know, I started Facebook when I was 19, so you can do that for a couple years, especially when you're young, but eventually you're going to burn out, eventually you're going to slow down. And so a few years in, I was sort of, you know, starting to feel that, and it was starting to cost me. So the blog post I wrote is Work Hard, Live well. It's on medium. And I just talk about, you know, better patterns for how to build, you know, sustainable habits. And it's at every scale of abstraction. Right. You have to take breaks during the day, you have to go home and rest at night and sort of unplug. You have to use your weekends, you have to take vacations. And after a few years, ideally you can take some time off between jobs or take a sabbatical. That's really the way to keep going. And a lot of the people that I've seen in startups or coming from Facebook, they didn't learn these lessons and they burnt out. And frankly, some of them stopped. Stopped working for years at a time or just retired early. And so you really have to be intentional to avoid that outcome.
