📆 Do founders get weekends, or is that a myth?
by•
We always think we'll take Saturday off...
Then we remember:
• users don't stop using the product
• ideas don't stop coming
• launches don't wait
• neither do bugs
Curious how everyone else handles it.
Do you protect your weekends, or have you accepted that working on weekends are just part of being a maker?
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Replies
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
I still see the founders who at least once a day have a look at working Slack. :D
RunEvr
@busmark_w_nika True)) Seems like all makers share the same zodiac sign =D
We just can’t go a whole day without at least a tiny interaction with the product.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@adana Just for fun :D What is your zodiac sign? :D
RunEvr
@busmark_w_nika Taurus ))
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@adana Earth signs are harder workers. :)
Quash
Saturday is just code named "Workday with 80% fewer Slack pings."
As a founding engineer, my and company's weekend policy is simple: Saturday belongs to building, and Sunday belongs to making sure I didn't break production on Saturday. We don't protect weekends; we protect uptime!
RunEvr
@yash_tiwary Code name =D
Sounds like a true founder schedule ! But are all team members on board with it, or do they still fight for their weekends? 🙃
Quash
@adana Haha, definitely no rigid office grind! The secret is just changing the scenery. Hitting up a cozy cafe, grabbing good coffee, and setting up shop there takes all the pressure off.
RunEvr
@yash_tiwary Coffee is the universal solution for makers ))
New place + good coffee = instant productivity boost !
For me weekend are usually for the fun parts of building not the urgent ones. That makes them feel less like work. Curious do you ever block out a full weekend or has that become unrealistic now?
RunEvr
@kathe__jordan I think we all naturally move the “softer” and more enjoyable parts of building into weekends, as long as there is nothing urgent waiting.
And sometimes we do give a full weekend, because building is not only about working harder.
It’s also about taking care of the energy behind it: good sleep, good food, hydration, and recovery.
Mine got quieter without getting freer, and the reason is worth naming.
I have things that run on a schedule at the weekend now, so a fair bit of the work happens without me. What I did not expect is that automating it gave me back very little. It changed the shape of the interruption rather than removing it. I do not get pulled in because there is work waiting. I get pulled in because something might have stopped, and I am the only person who would notice.
That is the worse version, because it never resolves. Actual work finishes. Checking that nothing has quietly failed does not, so you end up glancing at a dashboard on a Sunday evening at something that is almost certainly fine.
So the fix is not discipline. It is making the system capable of telling me it stopped. As long as quiet and broken look the same from the outside, you will keep checking, and no amount of protecting the weekend survives that.
RunEvr
@dalemooney This is a really interesting point. Sometimes automation doesn’t remove responsibility, it just changes it from doing the work to monitoring the work.
Maybe the real freedom comes when you can trust the system enough to stop watching it..
Weekend for me is whichever day I'm not fighting with landing page copy. Doing eng, product and growth alone means the miss finds you regardless of what day it is, so the split stopped mattering months ago.
RunEvr
@irahimiam Love the vice versa mindset - making every day feel like a weekend instead of turning every weekend into a workday =)
I protect my weekends by working through them so nothing bad can happen to them ;)
RunEvr
@etiennegarcia HaHa =D
Perfect approach !
Dale said the useful half already. Quieter without getting freer. A weekend does not get ruined by working. It gets ruined by being the single point of failure. You can work all Saturday and feel completely fine if nothing breaks while you are not looking. You can work zero hours and feel wrecked, because you are the only person who can answer the one question that came in at 11am. So the number worth tracking is not hours. It is how many things currently cannot move without me. Hours are not fixable and that one is. Founder as runtime is the actual problem here. Weekends are just where you notice it.
RunEvr
@adana Honestly, no. Telling myself it will be fine has never once worked, because some of the time it genuinely would not have been, and I knew that while I was saying it. What works is the other order. Make it actually true, and the permission turns up on its own. I never have to talk myself into calm about the things that have a second owner. There is no tension there to manage in the first place. Which is why I think the tension is information rather than a flaw. It points straight at the one thing nobody else can pick up. Reading it as anxiety to be soothed skips the message it is carrying. The uncomfortable version, and I am saying it to myself as much as anyone: if I need to give myself permission, that is usually a sign I have not built the thing that would make permission unnecessary.
RunEvr
@adana That second sentence is the whole thing. Relaxing is a downstream symptom, not a skill you can practise directly. The test I trust is boring: pick a Saturday, tell nobody you are unreachable, and see what breaks. Whatever breaks is the dependency, and it is never the thing you assumed. Usually it is not the work at all, it is that a decision nobody else is allowed to make was sitting in the queue. Then you fix that one, and the weekend arrives on its own as a side effect. What broke the last time you tried to actually be off?
RunEvr
@rabnoor_s That's a great way to test it. I think for many founders, the hardest dependency isn't even a process - it's the founders themselves.
The last time we were off, nothing really broke. But a few things had to wait because they needed a decision from founders.
As a founder, the reality is just a myth —especially in the early stages.
Many founders actually balance a full-time job elsewhere while building their business. Since you aren't getting paid while assembling the pieces and getting off the ground, having another source of income is usually essential just to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
While taking on debt to launch a startup is a risky path—and one many of us avoid—it means the trade-off comes down to time. Depending on the stage of your business, evenings and weekends are your dedicated build time. That has certainly been my experience.
RunEvr
@richatsealedvault The most expensive currency nowadays is time, that's true..
The challenge is making sure that this investment of time eventually creates more freedom, not just a never-ending cycle of being busy.
What is your product, and does it have any connection with your full-time job? If it grew from a problem you experienced there or if it’s something completely separate.
Haha, I don’t even take nights off. But I only have myself to blame. I just don’t know how to stop. It’s in my blood.
RunEvr
@martin_herran It's the thrill! Founders should have that drive. Don't blame yourself =)
What are you building?
@adana Haha, exactly. I’m actually launching two products this week: modelARch, which generates full-stack applications from structured business models, and Handraise, a local control room for planning work and coordinating coding agents like Claude Code and Codex. So that probably explains the lack of nights off 😄
RunEvr
@martin_herran Oh, I see ))
Are these your first product launches, or have you launched others before?
@adana First time :) What about you? Has launching RunEvr changed your routine already?
Weekends are the best days for founders, IMO.
No major noise from team mates and customers, easy to work on upcoming quotes, project planning and sure ACCOUNTING!
RunEvr
@bhargav5394 I agree !
Do you usually work from home or from the office?
Working from home on weekends often means the house is full of family =D
@adana both actually! When I need hyperfocus, have to lock in in the office cabin, no music, just work.
Yes, family and home may reduce the efficiency + focus.
RunEvr
@bhargav5394 Totally agree about the music. When I need real focus, it actually distracts me instead of helping.