"Is 60 hours of work per week enough? 80? 100? Do I just work ALL of them?"

In startup culture, we've developed a pretty broken mantra that "more hours equals more growth". We believe we can kill ourselves to success, and if we're being fair, there's a bit of that requirement in building something from nothing, but the real question is — how many hours should we devote to our startup per week?

Before we get into the number of hours we work, let's first focus on the quality of hours we work.

Remember the 40-hour baseline was established at the turn of the 19th century, popularized by the Ford Motor Company in an era where the number of hours that were worked directly drove the growth of the company.

Nowadays, the correlations are rarely t...