It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

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?

This is just... yes

We work on projects for six weeks at a time, then we take two weeks off from scheduled work to roam and decompress. We didn’t simply theorize that would be the best way to work. We started by working on things for as long as they took. Then we saw how projects never seemed to end. So we started time-boxing at three months. We found that was still too long. So we tried even shorter times. And we ended up here, in six-week cycles.

Running a calm company is, unfortunately, not the default way to run a company these days. You have to work against your instincts for a while. You have to put toxic industry norms aside. You have to recognize that “It’s crazy at work” isn’t right. Calm is a destination and we’ll share with you how we got there and stay there.

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.

But 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.

Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.” We’re with Mark.

Discomfort is the human response to a questionable or bad situation, whether that’s working long hours with no end in sight, exaggerating your business numbers to impress investors, or selling intimate user data to advertisers. If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you’re going to lose yourself, your manners, and your morals.

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.

Instead, we ask people to write updates daily or weekly on Basecamp for others to read when they have a free moment. This saves dozens of hours a week and affords people larger blocks of uninterrupted time. Meetings tend to break time into “before” and “after.” Get rid of those meetings and people suddenly have a good stretch of time to immerse themselves in their work.

It’s no wonder people are coming up short and are working longer hours, late nights, and weekends to make it up. Where else can they find the uninterrupted time? It’s sad to think that some people crave a commute because it’s the only time during the day they have to themselves.

This is where I was at!

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!

Yupp

Yes, it’s perfectly okay to have nothing to do. Or, better yet, nothing worth doing. 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. Not doing something that isn’t worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.

Make it stick in my brain

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.

This!!!

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.

If you don’t own the vast majority of your own time, it’s impossible to be calm. You’ll always be stressed out, feeling robbed of the ability to actually do your job.

Yes yes yes... so much so I can cry

Are there exceptions? Of course. It might be good to know who’s around in a true emergency, but 1 percent occasions like that shouldn’t drive policy 99 percent of the time.

The expectation of an immediate response is the ember that ignites so many fires at work.

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

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.

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.

Having good relationships at work takes, err, work. The kind that can only begin once you’re honest about where you’re starting from. The worst thing you can do is pretend that interpersonal feelings don’t matter. That work should “just be about work.” That’s just ignorant. Humans are humans whether they’re at work or at home.

The worst is when you load up these expectations on new hires and assume they’ll meet them all quickly. You’re basically setting them up to fail.

Sleep is for the weak! Real A players only need four to five hours! Great accomplishments require great sacrifice! Bull. Shit.

I am personally attacked

It’s not worth trading sleep for a few extra hours at the office. Not only will it make you exhausted, it’ll literally make you stupid. The science is clear on this: Continued sleep deprivation batters your IQ and saps your creativity. You may be too tired to notice, but the people you work with will.

Yet somehow it’s still frequently seen as heroic to sacrifice yourself, your health, and even your ability to do your job just to prove your loyalty to THE MISSION. Fuck the mission. 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.

I'm just sitting here and pondering why have I been so dirty and taught such toxic behaviors, and to take pride of all of them!

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.

If it’s easier for work to claim a Sunday than for life to borrow a Thursday, there ain’t no balance.

When companies act like they own all of their employees’ time, they breed a culture of neurotic exhaustion. Everyone needs a chance to truly get away and reboot. If they’re denied that, especially during sanctioned vacation time, they’re going to return tired and resentful.

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

Unwinding the new normal requires far more effort than preventing that new normal from being set in the first place. If you don’t want gnarly roots in your culture, you have to mind the seeds.

Yet 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.

Week four of a six-week project should be about finishing things up and ramping things down, not coming up with big new ideas. It’s not that new approaches or ideas are bad, but their timing may well be. Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing. Confidently close that door. Accept that better ideas aren’t necessarily better if they arrive after the train has left the station. If they’re so good, they can catch the next one. That’s really the answer to new ideas that arrive too late: You’ll just have to wait!

Besides, 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.

Besides, the next morning (or week) has a way of telling the truth. It’s good to sleep on something. You might well wake up the next day to see what was the world’s best idea yesterday doesn’t seem quite as important now. Taking a breather gives you perspective.

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.

So it makes sense to mentally prepare for what comes after launch. If you think it’s all sunshine and roses ahead, you’re going to be caught off guard. If you understand what the future might look like, you can visualize it and be ready when the rain doesn’t let up. It’s all about setting expectations.

Keeping the show running for the long term is a lot harder than walking onstage for the first time. On day one, every startup in the world is in business. On day one thousand, only a fraction remain standing. That’s reality. So pace yourself. Don’t burn out early thinking the hard part is behind you.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says “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.