?It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried
Juan Carlos Zambrano
Gerente de Finanzas @ Tecnofarma Bolivia | Coaching ontologico
First
It’s crazy at work
How often have you heard someone say “It’s crazy at work”? Maybe you’ve even said it yourself. For many, “It’s crazy at work” has become their normal. But why so crazy?
There are two primary reasons: (1) The workday is being sliced into tiny, fleeting work moments by an onslaught of physical and virtual distractions. And (2) an unhealthy obsession with growth at any cost sets towering, unrealistic expectations that stress people out.
What’s worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity
But the thing is, there’s not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there’s hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it. People are working more but getting less done. It doesn’t add up—until you account for the majority of time being wasted on things that don’t matter
Out of the 60, 70, or 80 hours a week many people are expected to pour into work, how many of those hours are really spent on the work itself? And how many are tossed away in meetings, lost to distraction, and withered away by inefficient business practices? The bulk of them. The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit
It’s time for companies to stop asking their employees to breathlessly chase ever-higher, ever-more-artificial targets set by ego. It’s time to give people the uninterrupted time that great work demands. It’s time to stop celebrating crazy at work
No growth-at-all-costs. No false busyness. No ego-driven goals. No keeping up with the Joneses Corporation. No hair on fire. And yet we’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business
The modern workplace is sick. Chaos should not be the natural state at work. Anxiety isn’t a prerequisite for progress. Sitting in meetings all day isn’t required for success. These are all perversions of work—side effects of broken models and follow-the-lemming-off-the-cliff worst practices. Step aside and let the suckers jump
Calm is protecting people’s time and attention.
Calm is about 40 hours of work a week.
Calm is reasonable expectations.
Calm is ample time off.
Calm is smaller.
Calm is a visible horizon.
Calm is meetings as a last resort.
Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second.
Calm is more independence, less interdependence.
Calm is sustainable practices for the long term
Calm is profitability.
A quick bit about us
We’re Jason and David. We’ve been running Basecamp together since 2003. Jason is CEO, David is CTO, and we’re the only two Cs at the company. Basecamp is both the name of our company and the name of our product.
The Basecamp product is a unique cloud-based application that helps companies organize all their projects and internal communications in one place. When everything’s in Basecamp, people know what they need to do, everyone knows where everything is, it’s easy to see where things stand, and nothing slips through the cracks.
Your company is a product
It begins with this idea: Your company is a product. Yes, the things you make are products (or services), but your company is the thing that makes those things. That’s why your company should be your best product
That, like product development, progress is achieved through iteration. If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company.
But when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use the company? Is it simple? Complex? Is it obvious how it works? What’s fast about it? What’s slow about it? Are there bugs? What’s broken that we can fix quickly and what’s going to take a long time?
A company is like software. It has to be usable, it has to be useful. And it probably also has bugs, places where the company crashes because of bad organizational design or cultural oversights
When you start to think about your company as a product, all sorts of new possibilities for improvement emerge. When you realize the way you work is malleable, you can start molding something new, something better.
Curb Your Ambition
Bury the hustle
Hustlemania has captured a monopoly on entrepreneurial inspiration. This endless stream of pump-me-up quotes about working yourself to the bone. It’s time to snap out of it
You aren’t more worthy in defeat or victory because you sacrificed everything. Because you kept pushing through the pain and exhaustion for a bigger carrot. The human experience is so much more than 24/7 hustle to the max
You rarely hear about people working three low-end jobs out of necessity wearing that grind with pride. It’s only the pretenders, those who aren’t exactly struggling for subsistence, who feel the need to brag about their immense sacrifice.
So 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
Happy pacifists
The business world is obsessed with fighting and winning and dominating and destroying. This ethos turns business leaders into tiny Napoleons. It’s not enough for them to merely put their dent in the universe
This language of war writes awful stories. When you think of yourself as a military commander who has to eliminate the enemy (your competition), it’s much easier to justify dirty tricks and anything-goes morals. And the bigger the battle, the dirtier it gets
Mark Twain nailed it: Comparison is the death of joy. We’re with Mark
We don’t compare. What others do has no bearing on what we’re able to do, what we want to do, or what we choose to do. There’s no chase at Basecamp, no rabbit to pursue. Just a deep satisfaction with doing our very best work as measured by our happiness and our customers’ purchases.
Our goal: 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
Are we interested in increasing profits? Yes. Revenues? Yes. Being more effective? Yes. Making our products easier, faster, and more useful? Yes. Making our customers and employees happier? Yes, absolutely. Do we love iterating and improving? Yup!
Do we want to make things better? All the time. But do we want to maximize better through constantly chasing goals? No thanks
Because 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
Why would you do that to yourself and your business? Doing great, creative work is hard enough. So is building a long-lasting sustainable business with happy employees
Ever try to cancel an account with your cell phone company? It’s not an inherently complicated act. But many phone companies make it so difficult to do because they have retention goals to hit. They want to make it hard for you to cancel so it’s easier for them to hit their numbers.
How about something really audacious: No targets, no goals? 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
Don’t change the world
Nothing encapsulates this like the infatuation with disruption. Everyone wants to be a disrupter these days. Break all the rules (and several laws). Upend every existing industry. But if you label your own work as disruption, it probably isn’t
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, even if you go home at a reasonable time
Make it up as you go
Short-term planning has gotten a bum rap, but we think it’s undeserved. 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.
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 and all the stress that comes with it. We simply believe that you’re better off steering the ship with a thousand little inputs as you go rather than a few grand sweeping movements made way ahead of time.
Comfy’s cool
The idea that you have to constantly push yourself out of your comfort zone is the kind of supposedly self-evident nonsense you’ll often find in corporate manifestos
Requiring discomfort—or pain—to make progress is faulty logic. NO PAIN, NO GAIN! looks good on a poster at the gym, but work and working out aren’t the same. And, frankly, you don’t need to hurt yourself to get healthier, either
Generally speaking, the notion of having to break out of something to reach the next level doesn’t jibe with us. Oftentimes 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.
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. We’ve been in that place many times over the years at Basecamp
Defend Your Time
8’s enough, 40’s plenty
Working 40 hours a week is plenty. Plenty of time to do great work, plenty of time to be competitive, plenty of time to get the important stuff done
Your time in the office feels shorter because it’s sliced up into a dozen smaller bits. Most people don’t actually have 8 hours a day to work, they have a couple of hours. The rest of the day is stolen from them by meetings, conference calls, and other distractions. So while you may be at the office for 8 hours, it feels more like just a few
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. Most of what we think we have to do, we don’t have to do at all. It’s a choice, and often it’s a poor one
Protectionism
Companies love to protect. They protect their brand with trademarks and lawsuits. They protect their data and trade secrets with rules, policies, and NDAs. They protect their money with budgets, CFOs, and investments. 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 of an hour
There are lots of ways to slice 60 minutes
1 × 60 = 60
2 × 30 = 60
4 × 15 = 60
25 + 10 + 5 + 15 + 5 = 60
A fractured hour isn’t really an hour—it’s a mess of minutes
Look at your hours. If they’re a bunch of fractions, who or what is doing the division? Are others distracting you or are you distracting yourself? What can you change? How many things are you working on in a given hour? One thing at a time doesn’t mean one thing, then another thing, then another thing in quick succession; it means one big thing for hours at a time or, better yet, a whole day
Effective > Productive
Everyone’s talking about hacking productivity these days. There’s an endless stream of methodologies and tools promising to make you more productive. But more productive at what? Productivity is for machines, not for people
When people focus on productivity, they end up focusing on being busy. Filling every moment with something to do. And there’s always more to do!
We believe in effectiveness. How little can we do? How much can we cut out? Instead of adding to-dos, we add to-don’ts.
The outwork myth
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. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with
Work doesn’t happen at work
Modern-day offices have become interruption factories. Merely walking in the door makes you a target for anyone else’s conversation, question, or irritation
The major distractions at work aren’t from the outside, they’re from the inside. The wandering manager constantly asking people how things are going, the meeting that accomplishes little but morphs into another meeting next week, the cramped quarters into which people are crammed like sardines, the ringing phones of the sales department, or the loud lunchroom down the hall from your desk. These are the toxic by-products of offices these days
Office hours
The problem comes when you make it too easy—and always acceptable—to pose any question as soon as it comes to mind. Most questions just aren’t that pressing, but the urge to ask the expert immediately is irresistible
So we borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours. For some that means an open afternoon every Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It’s up to each expert to decide their availability
But what if you have a question on Monday and someone’s office hours aren’t until Thursday? You wait, that’s what you do. You work on something else until Thursday, or you figure it out for yourself before Thursday. Just like you would if you had to wait to talk to your professor
Calendar Tetris
The shared work calendar is one of the most destructive inventions of modern times. So much orbits around it, so much hinges on it, and so much is wrong because of it.
When you optimize people’s calendars for effortless carving, you shouldn’t be surprised when people’s time is sliced up. Furthermore, if you make it easy for someone to invite five other people to a meeting—because software can find the open slot that works for everyone—then meetings with six people will proliferate.
Taking someone’s time should be a pain in the ass. Taking many people’s time should be so cumbersome that most people won’t even bother to try it unless it’s REALLY IMPORTANT! Meetings should be a last resort, especially big ones
When someone takes your time, it doesn’t cost them anything, but it costs you everything. You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it
The presence prison
But how do you know if someone’s working if you can’t see them? Same answer as this question: How do you know if someone’s working if you can see them? You don’t. The only way to know if work is getting done is by looking at the actual work. That’s the boss’s job. If they can’t do that job, they should find another one
Technology has made the problem worse, too. Now it’s not just the boss who wants to know where you are, it’s everyone else, too. With the proliferation of chat tools invading the workplace, more and more people are being asked to broadcast their real-time status all the time. They’re chained to the dot—green for available, red for away.
What if you need something from someone and you don’t know whether they’re available or not? Just ask them! If they respond, then you have what you needed
I’ll get back to you whenever
First someone emails you. Then if they don’t hear from you in a few minutes, they text you. No answer? Next they call you. Then they ask someone else where you are. And that someone else goes through the same steps to get your attention. All of a sudden you’re pulled away from what you’re working on. And why? Is it a crisis? Okay, fine then! They’re excused. But if it’s not—and it almost never is—then there’s no excuse
The expectation of an immediate response is the ember that ignites so many fires at work.
FOMO? JOMO!
FOMO. The fear of missing out. It’s the affliction that drives obsessive checking of Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Instagram stories, WhatsApp groups, and news apps. It’s not uncommon for people to pick up their phones dozens of times a day when some push notification makes it buzz, because WHAT IF IT WAS SOMETHING SUPER IMPORTANT! (It just about never is.)
People should be missing out! Most people should miss out on most things most of the time. That’s what we try to encourage JOMO! The joy of missing out
Feed Your Culture
We’re not family
Companies love to declare We’re all family here. No, you’re not We’re coworkers. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about one another. That doesn’t mean we won’t go out of our way for one another. We do care and we do help. But a family we are not. And neither is your business
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.
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.
They’ll do as you do
If your manager’s manager is setting a bad example, that impression rolls down the hierarchy and gathers momentum like a snowball.
Take those trite stories about the CEO who only sleeps four hours each night, is the first in the parking lot, has three meetings before breakfast, and turns out the light after midnight. What a hero! Truly someone who lives and breathes the company before themselves!
No, not a hero. If the only way you can inspire the troops is by a regimen of exhaustion, it’s time to look for some deeper substance
If you, as the boss, want employees to take vacations, you have to take a vacation. If you want them to stay home when they’re sick, you can’t come into the office sniffling. If you don’t want them to feel guilty for taking their kids to Legoland on the weekend, post some pictures of yourself there with yours.
The trust battery
Tobias Lütke, CEO at Shopify, coined the term. Here’s how he explained it in a New York Times interview: Another concept we talk a lot about is something called a ‘trust battery.’ It’s charged at 50 percent when people are first hired. And then every time you work with someone at the company, the trust battery between the two of you is either charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise.
The reality is that the trust battery is a summary of all interactions to date. If you want to recharge the battery, you have to do different things in the future. Only new actions and new attitudes count.
Don’t be the last to know
If the boss really wants to know what’s going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask!
Posing real, pointed questions is the only way to convey that it’s safe to provide real answers
The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you’ll know what it’s really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance
The owner’s word weighs a ton
There’s no such thing as a casual suggestion when it comes from the owner of the business. When the person who signs the paychecks mentions this or that, this or that invariably becomes a top priority
Evading responsibility with a But it’s just a suggestion isn’t going to calm the waters. Only knowing the weight of the owner’s word will
The problem, as we’ve learned over time, 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
Declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you’re setting out to do.
Don’t cheat sleep
Sleep is for the weak! Real A players only need four to five hours! Great accomplishments require great sacrifice! Bull. Shit. The people who brag about trading sleep for endless slogs and midnight marathons are usually the ones who can’t point to actual accomplishments. Telling tales of endless slogs is a diversionary tactic. It’s pathetic.
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
Out of whack
At most companies, work-life balance is a sham. Not because there shouldn’t be a balance, but because work always seems to end up putting its fat finger on the scale. Life just lifts. That’s not balance
Balance is give and take. The typical corporate give-and-take is that life gives and work takes. If it’s easier for work to claim a Sunday than for life to borrow a Thursday, there ain’t no balance
With seven days in a week, and work already owning the majority of your waking hours for at least five of them, life already starts at a disadvantage. And that’s okay—something has to pay for living. But that five is already plenty. It’s pretty basic. If you work Monday to Friday, weekends should be off-limits for work
Hire the work, not the résumé
Few things in business are as stressful as realizing you hired the wrong person
While it’s impossible to hire perfectly, you can certainly increase your odds if you reconsider your approach toward evaluating candidates
We look for candidates who are interesting and different from the people we already have
Résumés may list the work they’ve done, but we all know that they are exaggerated and often bullshit. Beyond that—even if their résumé is perfectly accurate—a list of work is not the work itself. Don’t just take their word for it. Take their work for it.
Yes, maybe you were a designer on the?nike.com?redesign, but what part of it did you do?
For example, when we’re choosing a new designer, we hire each of the finalists for a week, pay them $1,500 for that time, and ask them to do a sample project for us. Then we have something to evaluate that’s current, real, and completely theirs.
The idea here is that by focusing on the person and their work, we can avoid hiring an imaginary person. It’s really easy to fall for someone’s carefully crafted story. Great pedigree, great school, impressive list of previous employment
When you force yourself to focus on just the person and their work, not their glorified past, you also end up giving more people a chance
Nobody hits the ground running
“We just want someone who can hit the ground running is the common refrain for companies seeking senior-level job candidates. There’s a natural assumption that someone who was already, say, a lead programmer or designer in their previous job will be able to step right into that role anywhere and be effective immediately. That just isn’t so. Organizations differ widely. The skills and experience needed to get traction in one place are often totally different somewhere else
All these dangers are multiplied when you have senior people who switch from a role at a big company to a little company or vice versa
Ignore the talent war
Talent isn’t worth fighting over. It’s not a fixed, scarce resource that either you have or you don’t. It rarely even transplants all that well. Someone who’s a superstar at one company often turns out to be completely ineffectual at another. Don’t go to war over talent
We’ve found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who’s already at their peak. We hired many of our best people not because of who they were but because of who they could become
It takes patience to grow and nurture your own talent
Don’t negotiate salaries
To be paid fairly at most companies, it’s not enough to just be really good at your job. You also have to be an ace negotiator. Most people aren’t, so they end up getting shortchanged—sometimes making less money than more junior peers who were recently hired
We no longer negotiate salaries or raises at Basecamp. Everyone in the same role at the same level is paid the same. Equal work, equal pay.
Once every year we review market rates and issue raises automatically. Our target is to pay everyone at the company at the top 10 percent of the market regardless of their role. So whether you work in customer support or ops or programming or design, you’ll be paid in the top 10 percent for that position
If someone is below that target, they get a raise large enough to match the target. If someone is already above the target, they stay where they are. (We’re not going to cut the pay for existing employees if the market dips for their role.) If someone is promoted, they get a raise to match the market rate for the new level.
We get the market rates through a variety of salary survey companies
We don’t pay traditional bonuses at Basecamp, either, so our salaries are benchmarked against other companies’ salaries plus bonus packages
So here’s what we do instead: We’ve vowed to distribute 5 percent of the proceeds to all current employees if we ever sell the company
We’ve also recently put a new profit growth-sharing scheme in place. If total profits grow year over year, we’ll distribute 25 percent of that growth to employees in that year
No compensation system is perfect, but at least under this model, nobody is forced to hop jobs just to get a raise that matches their market value
Hiring and training people is not only expensive, but draining. All that energy could go into making better products with people you’ve kept happy for the long term by being fair and transparent about salary and benefits
领英推荐
Benefits who?
Have you heard about those companies whose benefits include game-console rooms, cereal snack bars, top-chef lunches and dinners, nap rooms, laundry service, and free beer on Fridays? It seems so generous, but there’s also a catch: You can’t leave the office
Consider the free dinner for employees who stay late. How is staying late a benefit? Or those free lunches that often just end up cutting into break time and keeping workers on campus versus down the street. Talk about putting the there’s no free lunch in free lunch.
At Basecamp, we’re having none of that. Not just because we don’t require anyone to physically come to our office to work, but because we don’t offer gotcha benefits. There’s no mission to maximize the hours we make employees stay at the office. We aren’t looking to get the most out of everyone, we’re only looking for what’s reasonable. That requires balance
Here’s a list of relevant outside the office benefits we offer all employees, regardless of position, regardless of salary:
Not a single benefit aimed at trapping people at the office
Library rules
Whoever managed to rebrand the typical open-plan office—with all its noise, lack of privacy, and resulting interruptions—as something hip and modern deserves a damn medal from the Committee of Irritating Distractions. Such offices are great at one thing: packing in as many people as possible at the expense of the individual.
Open-plan offices suck at providing an environment for calm, creative work done by professionals who need peace, quiet, privacy, and space to think and do their best
In spaces like that, distractions spread like viruses. Before you know it, everyone’s infected
Rather than thinking of it as an office, we think of it as a library. In fact, we call our guiding principle: Library Rules.
No fakecations
When someone takes a vacation at Basecamp, it should feel like they don’t work here anymore. We encourage them to go completely dark: Log out of Basecamp on their computer, delete the Basecamp app from their phone, and don’t check in. Go away for real. Be gone. Off our grid
But the reality is that most companies don’t actually offer their employees any real vacation time. All they offer is a fakecation where employees can still be reeled into conference calls, asked to hop on a quick call about something, or expected to be available whenever a question comes up
Calm goodbyes
While the act of letting someone go is unpleasant for all involved
At many companies, when someone’s let go, all you get are vague euphemisms. Hey, what happened to Bob? Oh, Bob? We don’t talk about Bob anymore. It was simply time for him to move on. Fuck that
A dismissal opens a vacuum, and unless you fill that vacuum with facts, it’ll quickly fill with rumors, conjecture, anxiety, and fear. If you want to avoid that, you simply have to be honest and clear with everyone about what just happened
The person who’s leaving then gets to see all the responses to this announcement from everyone else in the company before the day is up
Dissect Your Process
The wrong time for real-time
Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It’s completely exhausting
However, chat is not all bad if you use it sparingly. Chat is great for hashing stuff out quickly when speed truly is important
When it comes to chat, we have two primary rules of thumb: Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time and If it’s important, slow down.”
Important topics need time, traction, and separation from the rest of the chatter. If something is being discussed in a chat room and it’s clearly too important to process one line at a time, we ask people to write it up instead. This goes together with the rule If everyone needs to see it, don’t chat about it. Give the discussion a dedicated, permanent home that won’t scroll away in five minutes
Dreadlines
Most deadlines aren’t so much deadlines as dreadlines. Unrealistic dates mired by ever-expanding project requirements. More work piles on but the timeline remains the same. That’s not work, that’s hell
Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can’t work calmly
Our deadlines remain fixed and fair. They are fundamental to our process—and making progress. If it’s due on November 20, then it’s due on November 20. The date won’t move up and the date won’t move back
What’s variable is the scope of the problem—the work itself. But only on the downside. You can’t fix a deadline and then add more work to it. That’s not fair. Our projects can only get smaller over time, not larger. As we progress, we separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves and toss out the nonessentials
And who makes the decision about what stays and what goes in a fixed period of time? The team that’s working on it. Not the CEO, not the CTO. The team that’s doing the work has control over the work. They wield the scope hammer, as we call it. They can crush the big must-haves into smaller pieces and then judge each piece individually and objectively. Then they can sort, sift, and decide what’s worth keeping and what can wait
Here are some of the telltale signs that your deadline is really a dreadline
Don’t be a knee-jerk
At most companies, people put together a deck, reserve a conference room, and call a meeting to pitch a new idea. If they’re lucky, no one interrupts them while they’re presenting. (But usually someone jumps in and derails the presentation after two minutes.) When it’s over, people react. This is precisely the problem
The person making the pitch has presumably put a lot of time, thought, and energy into gathering their thoughts and presenting them clearly to an audience. But the rest of the people in the room are asked to react. Not absorb, not think it over, not consider—just react. Knee-jerk it. That’s no way to treat fragile new ideas
At Basecamp we flip the script. When we present work, it’s almost always written up first. A complete idea in the form of a carefully composed multipage document. Illustrated, whenever possible. And then it’s posted to Basecamp, which lets everyone involved know there’s a complete idea waiting to be considered. Considered!
We don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback
Watch out for 12-day weeks
Way back when, we used to release new software on Fridays all the time. That often meant working Saturdays and Sundays to fix an urgent problem with the new stuff, wrecking the weekend for whoever did the release. It was stupid yet predictable, because we kept setting deadlines at the end of a week. But Friday is the worst day to release anything. First off, you probably rushed to finish. So work done on Fridays tends to be a bit sloppy
Second, Mondays don’t come after Fridays. Saturdays and Sundays come after Fridays. So if something goes wrong, you’re working the weekend
The new normal
Normal comes on quick. First it starts as an outlier. Some behavior you don’t love, but tolerate. Then someone else follows suit, but either you miss it or you let it slide. Then people pile on—repeating what they’ve seen because no one stepped in to course correct. Then it’s too late. It’s become the culture. The new normal
This happens in organizations all the time. A single snarky remark can cascade into a storm of collective snark in the same way that a single spark can ignite a forest fire. And, implicitly, when you let it happen, it becomes okay. Behavior unchecked becomes behavior sanctioned
Bad habits beat good intentions
Micromanagers tend to stay micromanagers. Workaholics tend to stay workaholics. Hustlers tend to stay hustlers
What we do repeatedly hardens into habits. The longer you carry on, the tougher it is to change. All your best intentions about doing the right thing later are no match for the power of habits
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.
Later is where excuses live
Independencies
Few question the assumption that a company should always strive to move in sync. Team A providing Team B with exactly what they need exactly when they need it. All lined up, beautifully choreographed. But such a ballet of interdependence is a performance we’d rather skip
We want our teams to be able to glide by one another independently rather than get tripped up in lockstep. Things should fit together rather than stick together
If you’re building airplanes or working an assembly line, fine. That’s probably required. But most companies these days aren’t, yet they still work as if they are.
Throwing away a bunch of work, simply because of the way you worked on it, is a morale gut punch. But that’s what happens when your work is filled with dependencies
Today we ship things when they’re ready rather than when they’re coordinated. If it’s ready for the web, ship it! iOS will catch up when they’re ready. Or if iOS is first, Android will get there when they’re ready
Commitment, not consensus
The gold standard for legal deliberations is a unanimous verdict by a jury of peers. When the stakes of justice are at their highest, consensus is the only thing that’ll do. Anything less and it’s a do-over.
That’s a wonderful ideal for a criminal court, but it’s a terrible practice to mimic in business. If you only have to make a single decision, and it might literally be life or death, then that’s a burden worth bearing. But in business, you may have to make multiple major decisions monthly. If every one of them has to be made by consensus, you’re in for an endless grind with significant collateral damage. The cost of consensus is simply too much to pay over and over again.
So what to do instead? It’s not like good decisions just spring into the mind of a single individual. They’re always going to be the product of consultation, evidence, arguments, and debate. But the only sustainable method in business is to have them made by individuals
Someone in charge has to make the final call, even if others would prefer a different decision. Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment
Compromise on quality
We compromise on quality all the time at Basecamp. We launch features that aren’t good enough for everyone (but will be Just Fine for plenty of people). We duct-tape bugs when they’re not bad enough to warrant a true root-cause fix. We publish essays on our blog that may have a grammatical error or two
You just can’t bring your A game to every situation. Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be
We’re not suggesting you put shit work out there. You need to be able to be proud of it, even if it’s only okay. But attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy
Narrow as you go
It’s almost impossible to work on something and not be tempted to chase all the exciting new what-if and we-could-also ideas that come up
After the initial dust settles, the work required to finish a project should be dwindling over time, not expanding. The deadline should be comfortably approaching, not scarily arriving. Remember: Deadlines, not dreadlines
When we spend six weeks on something, the first week or two is for clarifying unknowns and validating assumptions. This is the time when the concept needs to hit reality and either bounce if it’s sound or shatter if it’s not
That’s why we quickly begin prototyping as soon as we can in those first two weeks. We’re often looking at something real within a day or two. Nothing tells the truth like actually experiencing the idea in real life. That’s the first time we know if what we had in our heads is actually going to work or not. But after that—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!
Why not nothing?
Doing nothing isn’t an option. Oh, yes, it is. And it’s often the best one. Nothing should always be on the table
Change makes things worse all the time. It’s easier to fuck up something that’s working well than it is to genuinely improve it. But we commonly delude ourselves into thinking that more time, more investment, more attention is always going to win
Sometimes you have to fight against the obvious. And sometimes you have to recognize that time in doesn’t equal benefits out. Doing nothing can be the hardest choice but the strongest, too
It’s enough
Calm requires getting comfortable with enough
While there’s no hard-line definition of when’s enough or what’s enough in every situation, one thing’s for sure: If it’s never enough, then it’ll always be crazy at work
Worst practices
Every mature industry is drowning in best practices. There are best practices about how to price a product, conduct employee reviews, do content marketing, design a website, or make an app scalable to millions of users. There’s no end to advice claiming to be the best
There are many reasons to be skeptical of best practices, but one of the most common is when you see someone deriving them purely from outside observations about how another company does it: Top 10 best practices for how Apple develops products. Has that person worked on a product development team at Apple? No. They’re simply coming to their own conclusions based on their own assumptions about how they think things work. Unless you’ve actually done the work, you’re in no position to encode it as a best practice
Furthermore, many best practices are purely folklore. No one knows where they came from, why they started, and why they continue to be followed. But because of that powerful label—best practice—people often forget to even question them
Whatever it doesn’t take
Whatever it takes! It feels good, doesn’t it? It’s hard to find three words loaded with more inspiration, aspiration, and ambition than whatever it takes! It’s the rallying cry for captains of industry and war generals alike. Who wouldn’t want to be such a hero and a leader? But you’re not actually capturing a hill on the beach of Normandy, are you? You’re probably just trying to meet some arbitrary deadline set by those who don’t actually have to do the work.
Whatever it takes is an iceberg. Steer clear lest it literally sink your ship. Just ask Edward Smith, the captain of the Titanic, who gave orders to do whatever it took to get to New York faster than expected to break a record. You probably know how that turned out
Reasonable expectations are out the window with whatever it takes. So you know you’re going to grossly underestimate the difficulty and complexity required to make it happen
Have less to do
Time-management hacks, life hacks, sleep hacks, work hacks. These all reflect an obsession with trying to squeeze more time out of the day, but rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn’t the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem. The only way to get more done is to have less to do
Saying no is the only way to claw back time. Don’t shuffle 12 things so that you can do them in a different order, don’t set timers to move on from this or that. Eliminate 7 of the 12 things, and you’ll have time left for the 5. It’s not time management, it’s obligation elimination. Everything else is snake oil
Management scholar Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago when he said There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Bam!
Three’s company
Nearly all product work at Basecamp is done by teams of three people. It’s our magic number. A team of three is usually composed of two programmers and one designer. And if it’s not three, it’s one or two rather than four or five. We don’t throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three. We rarely have meetings at Basecamp, but when we do, you’ll hardly ever find more than three people around a table. Same with conference calls or video chats. Any conversation with more than three people is typically a conversation with too many people
What if there are five departments involved in a project or a decision? There aren’t. We don’t work on projects like that—intentionally
Stick with it
If the boss is constantly pulling people off one project to chase another, nobody’s going to get anything done. Pull-offs can happen for a number of reasons, but the most common one is that someone senior has a new idea that Just Can’t Wait
These half-baked, right-in-the-middle-of-something-else new ideas lead to half-finished, abandoned projects that litter the landscape and zap morale
That’s why rather than jumping on every new idea right away, we make every idea wait a while. Generally a few weeks, at least. That’s just enough time either to forget about it completely or to realize you can’t stop thinking about it
What makes this pause possible is that our projects don’t go on forever. Six weeks max, and generally shorter
Know no
No is easier to do, yes is easier to say. No is no to one thing. Yes is no to a thousand things. No is a precision instrument, a surgeon’s scalpel, a laser beam focused on one point. Yes is a blunt object, a club, a fisherman’s net that catches everything indiscriminately. No is specific. Yes is general.
When you say no to one thing, it’s a choice that breeds choices. Tomorrow you can be as open to new opportunities as you were today. When you say yes to one thing, you’ve spent that choice. The door is shut on a whole host of alternative possibilities and tomorrow is that much more limited.
Mind Your Business
Risk without putting yourself at risk
A lot of entrepreneurs are addicted to risk. The bigger the better. Chasing the thrill, the adrenaline, and the glory that comes from hanging in the balance between winning everything or losing it all. Not us. We don’t need to shoot up on risk to get excited about work. We’ll take a risk, but we won’t put the company at risk.
Season’s greetings
Change is often seen as stressful, but the polar opposite, monotony, can be even worse. You can only work exactly the same way, at the same pace, doing the same work for so long before monotony bites.
When you’re growing up, life is seasonal. Even if you live in a place where the weather doesn’t change, there’s a change in rhythm to the year. There’s school, there’s summer. Different things happen at different times
We celebrate the summer months (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) by cutting out a workday every week
We also celebrate the seasons outside of work at Basecamp by covering the cost of a weekly community-supported agriculture share for each employee. Fresh, local, seasonal fruits and veggies in people’s homes
Calm’s in the black
From the very first month we started the business back in 1999, we were profitable. We’ve remained profitable every year since then. We’ve certainly had our share of good fortune and luck, but we’ve also intentionally never gotten ahead of ourselves. We’ve always kept our costs in check and never made a move that would push us back from black to red. Why? Because crazy’s in the red. Calm’s in the black
Priced to lose
The worst customer is the one you can’t afford to lose. The big whale that can crush your spirit and fray your nerves with just a hint of their dissatisfaction. These are the customers who keep you up at night. Yet most business-software companies, like ours, are irresistibly drawn to the siren song of huge accounts. That’s because most business software is sold by the seat
We’ve rejected the per-seat business model from day one. It’s not because we don’t like money, but because we like our freedom more
So we take the opposite approach. Buy Basecamp today and it’s just $99/month, flat and fixed. It doesn’t matter if you have 5 employees, 50, 500, or 5,000—it’s still just $99/month total. You can’t pay us more than that.
Thanks but no thanks. Here are a couple of reasons why: First, since no one customer can pay us an outsized amount, no one customer’s demands for features or fixes or exceptions will automatically rise to the top
Second, we wanted to build Basecamp for small businesses like ourselves: members of the Fortune 5,000,000. And not just build software for them, but really help them
Launch and learn
If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it. You can test, you can brainstorm, you can argue, you can survey, but only shipping will tell you whether you’re going to sink or swim. Is this thing any good? Does it solve a real problem? Should we have made it better? Are we making what customers want? Is anybody going to buy this? Did we price it right? All good questions! But you can debate this internally forever
But so what? Those are simulated answers, they aren’t real. Real answers are only uncovered when someone’s motivated enough to buy your product and use it in their own natural environment—and of their own volition. Anything else is a simulation, and simulated situations give you simulated answers. Shipping real products gives you real answers
At Basecamp we live this philosophy to the extreme. We don’t show any customers anything until every customer can see it. We don’t beta-test with customers. We don’t ask people what they’d pay for something. We don’t ask anyone what they think of something. We do the best job we know how to do and then we launch it into the market. The market will tell us the truth.
Promise not to promise
Since the beginning of Basecamp, we’ve been loath to make promises about future product improvements. We’ve always wanted customers to judge the product they could buy and use today, not some imaginary version that might exist in the future
Promises pile up like debt, and they accrue interest, too. The longer you wait to fulfill them, the more they cost to pay off and the worse the regret. When it’s time to do the work, you realize just how expensive that yes really was
Copycats
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?
Do you think your customers are going to care? They just want a good product at a great price. Few will have the time or empathy for a sob story about what the competition did or didn’t do
That’s life! If you want to be calm, you have to move on.
But, really, unless you’ve patented it, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Besides, copying does more harm to the copier than to the copied
So, really, chill out. Accept the mild frustration for a moment and then let it go
Change control
You’ll often hear that people don’t like change, but that’s not quite right. People have no problem with change they asked for. What people don’t like is forced change—change they didn’t request on a timeline they didn’t choose. Your new and improved can easily become their what the fuck? when it is dumped on them as a surprise.
We’ve learned that lesson over and over again making Basecamp. We’d come up with a new design that moved the stuff around a bit too much to make room for something better, and all we’d hear is WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY APP! I LIKED IT JUST HOW IT WAS! CHANGE IT BACK!
This doesn’t mean your new work sucks, just that people are usually in the middle of something that’s more important to them than a change to your product. They’re already invested in what they have to do and they’re already familiar with how they’re going to do it. And then you toss a change at them that immediately makes their life a little more complicated. Now they have a new thing to learn right in the middle of having an old thing to do.
It also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invite your customers to check out your latest offering. But it should be an invitation, not a demand. Once you start pushing too hard, some will rightfully resist and then suddenly you’re in a skirmish. There’s nothing calm about that
Startups are easy, stayups are hard
Many entrepreneurs put everything they have into starting their business. Long nights, loads of focus, and lots of love. And then they launch, utterly exhausted by the sprint. Now it’s finally done, they think. If only!
Getting things off the ground is so hard that it’s natural to expect it’ll just get easier from here. Except it doesn’t. Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That’s the dirty little secret of business. As you grow, you hire people. With people come personalities. With personalities come office politics and a hundred other challenges of human nature
Ultimately, startups are easy, stayups are hard
No big deal or the end of the world?
Here’s something that should be obvious: People don’t like to have their grievances downplayed or dismissed. When that happens, even the smallest irritation can turn into an obsessive crusade.
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
Keep that in mind the next time you take a token. Which one are you leaving for the customer?
The good old days
Just a few years ago we made a number of different products. Today we make just one: Basecamp. We gave up everything else—and the potential of millions more in revenue—so we could focus in rather than pan wide
Companies typically downsize their offerings when they’re not doing well. We did the opposite. We cut back in the best of times. At the moment we scaled back, business had never been better. You don’t hear about that a lot in business. Turning down growth, turning down revenue. Companies are culturally and structurally encouraged to get bigger and bigger
So we’ve decided to stay as small as we can for as long as we can
Last
Choose calm
A business is a collection of choices. Every day is a new chance to make a new choice, a different choice. Are you going to continue to let people chip away at other people’s time? Or are you going to choose to protect people’s time and attention? Are you going to keep trying to squeeze 10-hour days or 60-plus hours a week out of people? Or are you going to choose to make a reasonable number of hours count for more?
Are you going to continue to force people to pay attention to a dozen real-time conversations all day long? Or are you going to choose to relieve people from the conveyor belts of information and give them the focus that their best work requires? Are you going to continue to expect people to respond immediately to everything? Or are you going to choose contemplation and consideration prior to communication? Are you going to continue to burn more money than you earn, hoping that one day profit will finally materialize? Or are you going to choose to give endless growth a rest until the numbers work?
Are you going to continue to pile on more work and repeatedly miss deadlines? Or are you going to choose to give teams control over what can be reasonably accomplished given the time? Are you going to keep pulling people off one incomplete thing to jump onto another incomplete thing? Or are you going to choose to finish what you started before moving on to the next? Are you going to continue to say That would never work in our business? Are you going to continue to say If the client calls at 11 p.m., I have to answer the phone? Are you going to continue to say It’s okay to ask someone to work while they’re on their vacation? Or are you going to finally choose to make a change?
You have a choice. And 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. Change the way you interact with people. Change the way you communicate. Start protecting your own time. No matter where you live in an organization, you can start making better choices. Choices that chip away at crazy and get closer to calm
A calm company is a choice. Make it yours.
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