IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY AT WORK

by Jason Fried

• Below you can find some my highlights (not a summary)
• Skim… then slow down on the paragraphs that catch your interest. Reflection requires pause.

Creativity, progress, and impact do not yield to brute force. You’re not very likely to find that key insight or breakthrough idea north of the 14th hour in the day.

You hereby have our permission to bury the hustle. To put in a good day’s work, day after day, but nothing more. You can play with your kids and still be a successful entrepreneur. You can have a hobby. You can take care of yourself physically. You can read a book. You can watch a silly movie with your partner. You can take the time to cook a proper meal. You can go for a long walk. You can dare to be completely ordinary every now and then.

We’re serving our customers well, and they’re serving us well. That’s what matters. Doubling, tripling, quadrupling our market share doesn’t matter.

Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.”

On having no goals: The wisdom of setting business goals—always striving for bigger and better—is so established that it seems like the only thing left to debate is whether the goals are ambitious enough. So imagine the response when we tell people that we don’t do goals. At all.

We didn’t when we started, and now, nearly 20 years later, we still don’t. We simply do the best work we can on a daily basis.

let’s face it: Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned. And when that happens, you’re supposed to pick new ones and start stressing again. Nothing ever stops at the quarterly win. There are four quarters to a year. Forty to a decade. Every one of them has to produce, exceed, and beat EXPECTATIONS. Why would you do that to yourself and your business?

You can absolutely run a great business without a single goal. You don’t need something fake to do something real. And if you must have a goal, how about just staying in business? Or serving your customers well? Or being a delightful place to work? Just because these goals are harder to quantify does not make them any less important.

If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you. There’s no longer this convenient excuse for why it has to be all work all the time. The opportunity to do another good day’s work will come again tomorrow,

Set out to do good work. Set out to be fair in your dealings with customers, employees, and reality. Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.

Every six weeks or so, we decide what we’ll be working on next. And that’s the only plan we have. Anything further out is considered a “maybe, we’ll see.”

On perfect planning. When you stick with planning for the short term, you get to change your mind often. And that’s a huge relief! This eliminates the pressure for perfect planning

Seeing a bad idea through just because at one point it sounded like a good idea is a tragic waste of energy and talent.

The future is a major abstraction, riddled with a million vibrating variables you can’t control. The best information you’ll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution.

On mastery: …it’s not breaking out, but diving in, digging deeper, staying in your rabbit hole that brings the biggest gains. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.

Discomfort is the human response to a questionable or bad situation,

On the contrary, if you listen to your discomfort and back off from what’s causing it, you’re more likely to find the right path.

It was how uncomfortable it felt working for other people at companies that had taken large amounts of venture capital that kept us on the path of profitable independence at Basecamp.

On long work hours: what doesn’t get done in 40 hours by Friday at 5 picks up again Monday morning at 9. If you can’t fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours.

When you cut out what’s unnecessary, you’re left with what you need. And all you need is 8 hours a day for about 5 days a week.

On time and attention. They guard so many things, but all too often they fail to protect what’s both most vulnerable and most precious: their employees’ time and attention. Companies spend their employees’ time and attention as if there were an infinite supply of both. As if they cost nothing. Yet employees’ time and attention are among the scarcest resources we have.

The quality hour we’re after is 1 × 60.

A quality day is at least 4 × 60,

When was the last time you had three or even four completely uninterrupted hours to yourself and your work?

Productivity is for machines, not for people. There’s nothing meaningful about packing some number of work units into some amount of time or squeezing more into less.

How little can we do? … We don’t believe in busyness at Basecamp. We believe in effectiveness. How much can we cut out? Instead of adding to-dos, we add to-don’ts.

Productive VS effective: Being productive is about occupying your time—filling your schedule to the brim and getting as much done as you can. Being effective is about finding more of your time unoccupied and open for other things besides work. Time for leisure, time for family and friends. Or time for doing absolutely nothing.

If you’ve only got three hours of work to do on a given day, then stop. Don’t fill your day with five more just to stay busy or feel productive.

A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck.

we not only accept but strongly encourage people not to check email, or chat, or instant message for long stretches of uninterrupted time.

we want people to feel the oblivious joy of focus rather than the frantic, manic fear of missing something that didn’t matter anyway.

Whenever executives talk about how their company is really like a big ol’ family, beware. They’re usually not referring to how the company is going to protect you no matter what or love you unconditionally. You know, like healthy families would. Their motive is rather more likely to be a unidirectional form of sacrifice: yours.

We don’t need to bullshit ourselves or anyone else. We’re people who work together to make a product. And we’re proud of it. That’s enough.

The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families. Allies of families. They’re there to provide healthy, fulfilling work environments so that when workers shut their laptops at a reasonable hour, they’re the best husbands, wives, parents, siblings, and children they can be.

A leader who sets an example of self-sacrifice can’t help but ask self-sacrifice of others.

Workaholism is a contagious disease. You can’t stop the spread if you’re the one bringing it into the office. Disseminate some calm instead.

removed the natural instinct to evaluate whether someone is “right” about their feelings about another person (which is a nonsense concept to begin with). By measuring the charge on the trust battery, we have context to frame the conflict.

The work of recharging relationships is mostly one to one. That’s why two people who get along often can’t understand how someone else could have a problem with their good friend. … it’s personal. Alice’s trust battery with Bob is different from Carol’s trust battery with Bob. Bob may be at 85 percent with Alice but only 10 percent with Carol. Bob isn’t going to recharge his battery with Carol just by acting differently with Alice. 

Posing real, pointed questions is the only way to convey that it’s safe to provide real answers. And even then it’s going to take a while. Maybe you get 20 percent of the story the first time you ask, then 50 percent after a while, and if you’ve really nailed it as a trustworthy boss, you may get to 80 percent. Forget about ever getting the whole story.

The problem … is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks. Once you get up close, you see it’s quite a bit higher than you thought. We assume that picking it will be easy only because we’ve never tried to do it before.

any estimate of how much work it’ll take to do something you’ve never tried before is likely to be off by degrees of magnitude.

No mission (in business, anyway) is worthy of such dire personal straits.

Sleep-deprived people aren’t just short on brains or creativity, they’re short on patience. Short on understanding. Short on tolerance. The smallest things become the biggest dramas. That hurts colleagues at work as much as it does the family at home. Being short on sleep turns the astute into assholes.

A great night’s sleep enhances every waking hour. Isn’t that what you’re looking for anyway?

Fakecations put employees on a leash—liable to be yanked back and pulled into work at any moment. Time off isn’t much of a benefit if it can be taken right back. That’s more like a shitty loan with terrible terms. Plus interest. And worries.

Chat is great as a small slice but not the whole pie of communication.

Don’t meet, write. Don’t react, consider.

When there’s more at stake, you tend to measure twice, cut once.

There will always be some butterflies in the stomach—even a professional musician or public speaker gets nervous when they go onstage in front of a huge crowd. But stressed out we are not. And if we’re feeling frenzied for any reason, we delay the release until we’ve calmed down.

implicitly, when you let it happen, it becomes okay. Behavior unchecked becomes behavior sanctioned.

You don’t have to let something slide for long before it becomes the new normal. Culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do. So do better.

people deceive themselves all the time. They think they can put in long hours for years “so I won’t have to do it later.” You may not have to do it, but you probably will do it. Because it’s a habit.

Right from the beginning of Basecamp, we insisted on a reasonable workweek. We didn’t pull all-nighters to make impossible deadlines. We scoped the work to fit a good day’s work and then enjoyed a calm evening off. Not by magic, not by luck, but by choice.

we hire when it hurts. Slowly, and only after we clearly need someone.

When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit. But if you start crazy, it’ll define you. You have to keep asking yourself if the way you’re working today is the way you’d want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not “later.”

“I disagree, but let’s commit” is something you’ll hear at Basecamp after heated debates about specific products or strategy decisions.

they should allow everyone to be heard and then turn the decision over to one person to make the final call. It’s their job to listen, consider, contemplate, and decide.

It’s not just decide and go, it’s decide, explain, and go.

put lots of effort into separating what really matters from what sort of matters from what doesn’t matter at all.

The act of separation should be your highest-quality endeavor. It’s easy to say “Everything has to be great,”

Being clear about what demands excellence and what’s perfectly okay just being adequate is a great way to bring a sense of calm into your work.

“That’s fine” is such a wonderfully relaxing way to work most of the time. Save the occasional scrutiny for the differentiating details that truly matter.

We’re often looking at something real within a day or two. Nothing tells the truth like actually experiencing the idea in real life.

after that brief period of exploration at the beginning of a project—it’s time to focus in and get narrow. It’s time for tunnel vision!

Once the initial exploration is over, every week should lead us closer to being done, not further from it. Commit to an idea. See it through. Make it happen. You can always go back later, but only if you actually finish.

the answer to new ideas that arrive too late: You’ll just have to wait!

one thing’s for sure: If it’s never enough, then it’ll always be crazy at work.

It was amazing that it could be done, but we had forgotten to ask whether it should be done.

because of that powerful label—best practice—people often forget to even question them.

Find what works for you and do that. Create your practices and your patterns. Who cares if they’re the best for anyone else.

we ask, What will it take? That’s an invitation to a conversation. One where we can discuss strategy, make tradeoffs, make cuts, come up with a simpler approach all together, or even decide it’s not worth it after all. Questions bring options,

It’s not time management, it’s obligation elimination. Everything else is snake oil.

time isn’t something that can be managed. Time is time—it rolls along at the same pace regardless of how you try to wrestle with it. What you choose to spend it on is the only thing you have control over.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker

we’ve become ruthless about eliminating either work that doesn’t need to be done or work we don’t want to do.

it wasn’t really a turn away, it was a trade away. We traded some revenue for some time.

No is easier to do, yes is easier to say. No is no to one thing. Yes is no to a thousand things.

When you say yes to one thing, you’ve spent that choice. The door is shut on a whole host of alternative possibilities

When you say no now, you can come back and say yes later. If you say yes now, it’s harder to say no later. No is calm but hard. Yes is easy but a flurry.

Knowing what you’ll say no to is better than knowing what you’ll say yes to.

The smart bet is one where you get to play again if it doesn’t come up your way.

You can only work exactly the same way, at the same pace, doing the same work for so long before monotony bites.

People grow dull and stiff if they stay in the same swing for too long.

Without profit, something is always on fire. When companies talk about burn rates, two things are burning: money and people. One you’re burning up, one you’re burning out.

On getting funding: With money comes influence, if not outright power. And from that flows decisions about what and who to spend time on. There’s no way to be immune from such pressure once the money is flowing. The only fix is to cap the spigot.

Because we don’t want to be a two-headed company with two cultures. Selling to small businesses and selling to enterprises take two very different approaches with two very different kinds of people.

do your best and put it out there. You can iterate from there on real insights and real answers from real customers who really do need your product. Launch and learn.

We honestly don’t know what we’ll be working on in a year, so why act like we do?

That’s what promises lead to—rushing, dropping, scrambling, and a tinge of regret at the earlier promise that was a bit too easy to make.

Promises pile up like debt, and they accrue interest, too.

When it’s time to do the work, you realize just how expensive that yes really was.

You can get red-faced and furious that a competitor copied your product, stole your design, and reapportioned your ideas. But what good does it do? Getting angry only hurts you. It zaps energy you could have spent doing better work still. It blurs your focus on what’s next, keeping you locked in on the past. And again, for what?

That’s life! If you want to be calm, you have to move on.

unless you’ve patented it, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

When someone copies you, they are copying a moment in time.

Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That’s the dirty little secret of business.

“It’s no big deal” or the token that says “It’s the end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.

Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.

“Why didn’t they just grow slower and stay closer to the size they enjoyed the most?”

We’d stay in the good days—no need to call them old anymore.

we continually aim to pare down and lighten the load—even when times are great.

Cutting back when times are great is the luxury of a calm, profitable, and independent company.

are you going to choose contemplation and consideration prior to communication?

if you don’t have the power to make things change at the company level, find your local level. You always have the choice to change yourself and your expectations.