It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

What’s our market share? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.

But there was a brief moment when we changed our mind. We pinned up a big round revenue target—one of those fat nine-digit numbers. “Why not?” we thought. “We can do it!” But after chasing that goal for a while, we thought again. And the answer to “Why not?” became a very clear “Because (1) it’s disingenuous for us to pretend we care about a number we just made up, and (2) because we aren’t willing to make the cultural compromises it’ll take to get there.”

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. 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.

Plus, there’s an even darker side to goal setting. Chasing goals often leads companies to compromise their morals, honesty, and integrity to reach those fake numbers. The best intentions slip when you’re behind. Need to improve margins by a few points? Let’s turn a blind eye to quality for a while. Need to find another $800,000 this quarter to hit that number? Let’s make it harder for customers to request refunds.

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.

The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation. It’s no longer about simply making a great product or providing a great service. No, now it’s all about how this BRAND-NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING. A thousand revolutions promised all at once. Come on.

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.

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.

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.

Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.

Most of the time, if you’re uncomfortable with something, it’s because it isn’t right. 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.

For example, we don’t have status meetings at Basecamp. We all know these meetings —one person talks for a bit and shares some plans, then the next person does the same thing. They’re a waste of time. Why? While it seems efficient to get everyone together at the same time, it isn’t. It’s costly, too. Eight people in a room for an hour doesn’t cost one hour, it costs eight hours.

It’s sad to think that some people crave a commute because it’s the only time during the day they have to themselves.

And between all those context switches and attempts at multitasking, you have to add buffer time. Time for your head to leave the last thing and get into the next thing. This is how you end up thinking “What did I actually do today?” when the clock turns to five and you supposedly spent eight hours at the office. You know you were there, but the hours had no weight, so they slipped away with nothing to show.

What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked. 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.

People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.

It’s wonderful when the right answer unlocks insight or progress. But it’s terrible when that one expert is fielding their fifth random question of the day and suddenly the day is done. The person with the question needed something and they got it. The person with the answer was doing something else and had to stop. That’s rarely a fair trade.

So take a step toward calm, and relieve people from needing to broadcast their whereabouts and status. Everyone’s status should be implicit: I’m trying to do my job, please respect my time and attention.

How fast you can reach someone has nothing to do with how quickly they need to get back to you. The content of the communication dictates that. Emergencies? Okay. You need me to resend that thing I sent you last week? That can wait. You need an answer to a question you can find yourself? That can wait. You need to know what time the client’s coming in three days from now? That can wait.

Because there’s absolutely no reason everyone needs to attempt to know everything that’s going on at our company. And especially not in real time! If it’s important, you’ll find out. And most of it isn’t. Most of the day-to-day work inside a company’s walls is mundane. And that’s a beautiful thing. It’s work, it’s not news. We must all stop treating every little fucking thing that happens at work like it’s on a breaking-news ticker.

Companies love to declare “We’re all family here.” No, you’re not. Neither are we at Basecamp. 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. Furthermore, Basecamp is not “our baby.” Basecamp is our product. We’ll make it great, but we won’t take a bullet for it. And neither would you for 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.

Besides, don’t you already have a family or group of friends who feel like blood? The modern company isn’t a street gang filled with orphans trying to make it in the tough, tough world. Trying to supplant the family you likely already have is just another way to attempt to put the needs of the company above the needs of your actual family. That’s a sick ploy.

It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what you do.

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

A low trust battery is at the core of many personal disputes at work. It powers stressful encounters and anxious moments. When the battery is drained, everything is wrong, everything is judged harshly. A 10 percent charge equals a 90 percent chance an interaction will go south. 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.

If the boss really wants to know what’s going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask! Not vague, self-congratulatory bullshit questions like “What can we do even better?” but the hard ones like “What’s something nobody dares to talk about?” or “Are you afraid of anything at work?” or “Is there anything you worked on recently that you wish you could do over?” Or even more specific ones like “What do you think we could have done differently to help Jane succeed?” or “What advice would you give before we start on the big website redesign project?”

So at Basecamp we try to get out and ask rather than just wait at the door. Not all the time, because you shouldn’t ask before you’re willing and able to act on the answer, but often enough to know most of what’s going on most of the time.

The idea that you’ll instantly move needles because you’ve never tried to move them until now is, well, delusional.

And sometimes it’s more subtle than that. Someone may be the right individual fit, but they may not fit the team. Whenever someone joins (or leaves) a team, the old team is gone. It’s a new team now. No matter the group, every personnel change changes the dynamics.

The quickest way to disappointment is to set unreasonable expectations.

Even if you had the most precious orchid planted in your garden, it would quickly die without the proper care. And if you do pay attention to having the best environment, you can grow your own beautiful orchids with patience. No need to steal them from your neighbor!

If you don’t clearly communicate to everyone else why someone was let go, the people who remain at the company will come up with their own story to explain it. Those stories will almost certainly be worse than the real reason.

Chat puts conversations on conveyor belts that are perpetually moving away from you. If you’re not at your station when the conversation rolls by, you’ll never get a chance to put in your two cents. This means that if you want to have your say, you need be paying attention all day (and often to multiple rooms/channels). You can decide not to follow along, but then you’re battling the fear of missing out. It’s a bad bargain either way.

Almost everything can and should wait until someone has had a chance to think it through and properly write it up.

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.

Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can’t work calmly. When you don’t trust the date, or when you think it’s impossible to do everything someone’s telling you to do within a specific period of time, or when someone keeps piling on more work without giving you more time, you work frantically and maniacally. Few things are as demoralizing as working on projects with no end in sight.

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.

A deadline with a flexible scope invites pushback, compromises, and tradeoffs—all ingredients in healthy, calm projects. It’s when you try to fix both scope and time that you have a recipe for dread, overwork, and exhaustion.

Here are some of the telltale signs that your deadline is really a dreadline: An unreasonably large amount of work that needs to be done in an unreasonably short amount of time. “This massive redesign and reorganization needs to happen in two weeks. Yeah, I know half the team is out on vacation next week, but that’s not my problem.” An unreasonable expectation of quality given the resources and time. “We can’t compromise on quality—every detail must be perfect by Friday. Whatever it takes.” An ever-expanding amount of work in the same time frame as originally promised. “The CEO just told me that we also need to launch this in Spanish and Italian, not just English.”

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

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.

Companies waste an enormous amount of time and energy trying to convince everyone to agree before moving forward on something. What they’ll often get is reluctant acceptance that masks secret resentment. Instead, 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.

What’s especially important in disagree-and-commit situations is that the final decision should be explained clearly to everyone involved. It’s not just decide and go, it’s decide, explain, and go.

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.

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. 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.

“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. Or trying to meet some fantastical financial “stretch goal” that nobody who actually has to do the stretching would think reasonable.

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!

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.

“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.