I did some math today that genuinely surprised me.
For about three and a half months, I was working my regular 10–6 job, and then spending roughly 7 PM to 3 AM working on Datespots.City. Weekends weren’t really weekends either, since I was putting in close to full days on Saturday and Sunday. I knew I was working a lot at the time, but I had never actually bothered to calculate how much.
My regular job comes out to 40 hours a week. Datespots was another 40 hours between Monday and Friday, plus roughly 14–16 hours over the weekend. So I was working somewhere around 94–96 hours every week.
I was also still training about 5.5–7 hours a week. I couldn’t run because of a knee injury, so most of that time went into weights and swimming. Add that to the work and I was spending roughly 100–103 hours a week working or training.
There are only 168 hours in a week. I was sleeping anywhere from 3–5 hours a night at the time, or about 21–35 hours a week. Depending on the week, that means work, training and sleep were taking up roughly 121–138 of the available 168 hours.
The rest was pretty mundane. I commuted to the office three days a week, ate, showered, did laundry, bought groceries and took care of whatever else needed to be done. I wasn’t cooking all the time and there wasn’t really any downtime. For the most part, that was my life for those three and a half months.
What surprised me more was the total. Three and a half months is a little over 15 weeks, which means I spent roughly 1,430–1,460 hours working during that period. Once I include training, it’s somewhere around 1,500–1,560 hours.
For comparison, 1,500 hours at a normal 40-hour workweek is 37.5 weeks, or about eight and a half months of full-time work. Obviously training isn’t work, so it’s not a perfect comparison, but it still puts into perspective just how much of those three and a half months was accounted for.
I don’t really know what the lesson is supposed to be here. I’m proud of what I managed to build during that time, and I don’t regret doing it. I was obsessed with Datespots and there was always something else I wanted to finish, fix or improve. When you’re in that routine, you don’t really stop at the end of the week and count how many hours you worked. You just wake up and continue where you left off.
It was only after doing the math today that I realized how ridiculous those three and a half months actually were. I’m glad I was capable of doing it, but I also don’t think 100-hour weeks and 3–5 hours of sleep are something I have any interest in turning into a lifestyle.