?? It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - book summary ??

Hi everyone, recently I’ve read?this book . It’s written by creators of?Re:work?book ( Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson ) and it changed my perspective on work. I used to be a person that is stressing out and working a lot overtime. This book helped me calm down and focus on the right things.??I thought I will share the main points with you.??

The main message of the whole book is that peaceful workplace is an effect of choice.??People don’t have to stress out and burn out to deliver results. And healthy people mean healthy company. Main points I found there:

1.??? You don’t have to work 24/7 to see results

You don’t have to change the world. Doing your job well everyday is sufficient to keep your results great. Don’t hesitate to take vacations and during your vacations - disappear from your company. Log off, don’t peak. The world will not collapse during your absence. Your brain needs rest to recover, to connect dots and to bring you new ideas.

2. Protect your time

8h is enough and 40h is a lot to do what you need to do. Don’t work at nights, don’t do 70-h long working weeks. If you can’t do your work in 8h a day, it means that you have too many responsibilities or something needs re-organising. 8h is a lot if you don’t have distractions. Try to eliminate as many distractions as you can. Do protect your time and the time of your colleagues.

3. Don’t be the prisoner of meetings?& Slack

If you resign from unnecessary meetings, you’ll find yourself having longer blocks of time that let you do more. Don’t worry to decline some meetings if you’re able to solve something with a short message. If you find yourself answering people’s questions all day, maybe agree on the duty hours when you’ll answer questions and the rest can be dedicated to work? You don’t have to replay to Slack messages right away.

4. Replace FOMO with JOMO

FOMO (fear of missing out) it making you check Slack or your phone all the time. Now - how many times when you checked the message, it required your attention urgently?? Almost never. Learn JOMO (joy of missing out) - gaining more time from not reading things that are probably not that important. Focus on the things you have to do. And if something is really important - it will find you anyway.

5. Don’t pretend that you need less sleep

Sacrificing sleep to spend more time at work is never a good idea. Sleeping less your brain is less efficient, less happy and open-minded, you become impatient and rude to the people around so this behaviour is not heroic but stupid. It might be just once but be careful - if somebody starts doing it, soon it might become a new habit.

6. Keep a balance

If your work wants to take Friday evening, let your life take Wednesday afternoon sometime. Keep the balance. Don’t let your work take your time easier than your life. Work on the weekend should be forbidden if you work from Monday to Friday.

7. Have realistic expectations about yourself and your colleagues

Exactly that. ;) Don’t expect from yourself more than a human-being can do.

8. Don’t increase the scope without moving the deadline

If you work with unreal deadlines and growing mount of work for hard deadline, it’s obvious it won’t be delivered and the people will be stressed and exhausted. We can follow the deadline but only if we keep or decrease the scope but never increase it. If you come up with new great ideas in the middle of the project, they might disrupt current work and make you get further from the end instead of closer.

9. 80% perfection

Are you aiming for 100 of perfection everywhere? Good but you’re probably spending a lot of time on it. Maybe there are things that can be done to 80% of perfection? Finding those areas will save you a lot of time. Learn the word “good enough”. You don’t always have to improve things if nobody will see the difference or if nobody expects this.

10. The power of saying NO

Learn to say “no”. No is more difficult to say than yes, but yes might mean NO for many other things. Choose carefully.

11. The less you promise - the better

It’a easy to make a promise - much harder to keep it. Trying to keep promises brings time pressure and stress. Next time you want to promise something ask yourself - can I not promise? What will happen if I say no or solve this differently than just giving a date and a promise? Nobody knows what unexpected things come our way, how much other work we will have so why to promise?

And remember - peaceful company is an effect of choice.?

What I also liked a lot about the book that it's quite short and written in a super simple way - straight to the point!

Let me know your point of view - do you agree with those points? Do you think it’s realistic to implement them?

P.S. Credits to Paula Julve for recommending me the book. You recognised so well what I needed to learn in that exact moment!