It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

Your Company Is a Product

* Think of your company as a product. * Continuously improve it. * Make it easy to use. * Make it simple.

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?

Bury the Hustle

* You don't need to work all the time * You can live like a normal person * Entrepreneur != Maniac Hard-Worker

Creativity, progress, and impact do not yield to brute force.

Happy Pacifists

* Are you profitable? If yes. Then be happy. * Don't try to make 10x 20x 30x. * Your market share doesn't matter as long as you're profitable. * Don't compare your business to other competing businesses. * Don't try to conquer the market — Be a participator — Be a part of it. * There's plenty for everyone. * Comparison brings unhappiness.

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.

Doubling, tripling, quadrupling our market share doesn’t matter.

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.

The opposite of conquering the world isn’t failure, it’s participation.

Our Goal: No Goals

* BE PROFITABLE. * This is the only goal you need. * Other goals are not necessary. * Growth-rate, headcount, sales, revenue, retention, profitability goals. * Don't mind leaving money on the table. * You can improve all these but don't make it a goal. * Do the best work every day. * You don't need goals for that.

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.

You can absolutely run a great business without a single goal.

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.

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.

If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you’re going to lose yourself, your manners, and your morals. 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.

If you’ve only got three hours of work to do on a given day, then stop.

It’s in these moments—the moments far away from work, way outside the office—when it is the easiest to get work done. Interruption-free zones.

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.

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.

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.

At Basecamp, we don’t dread the deadline, we embrace it. 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.

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.”

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.

Rather than put endless effort into every detail, we put lots of effort into separating what really matters from what sort of matters from what doesn’t matter at all. The act of se...

“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.

The deadline should be comfortably approaching, not scarily arriving. Remember: Deadlines, not dreadlines.

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.

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.

Calm requires getting comfortable with enough.

They’re like training wheels. When you don’t know how to keep your balance or how fast to pedal, they can be helpful to get you going. But every best practice should come with a reminder to reconsider.

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

Rather than demand whatever it takes, 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, decrees burn them.

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.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.

Taking a risk doesn’t have to be reckless. You’re not any bolder or braver because you put yourself or the business at needless risk. The smart bet is one where you get to play again if it doesn’t come up your way.

May through September we work 4-day, 32-hour weeks. The idea isn’t to cram more stuff into fewer hours, so we adapt our ambition, too. Winter is when we buckle down and take on larger, more challenging projects. Summer, with its shorter 4-day weeks, is when we tackle simpler, lighter projects.

We’ve always kept our costs in check and never made a move that would push us back from black to red.

Until you’re running a profitable business, you’re always almost out of business.

Profit means time to think, space to explore. It means being in control of your own destiny and schedule.

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.

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! The problem with per-seat pricing is that it makes your biggest customers your best customers. 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.

To be honest, we don’t really give a shit about the Fortune 500. The corporate behemoths are much more likely to be set in stone, unable to change. With the Fortune 5,000,000 we have a real shot at making a real impact. That’s more satisfying work.

Third, we didn’t want to get sucked into the mechanics that chasing big contracts inevitably leads to. Key account managers. Sales meetings. Schmoozing. The enterprise sales playbook is well established and repulsive to us. But it’s also unavoidable once you open the door to the big bucks from the big shots. Again, no thank you.

Becoming a calm company is all about making decisions about who you are, who you want to serve, and who you want to say no to. It’s about knowing what to optimize for. It’s not that any particular choice is the right one, but not making one or dithering is definitely the wrong one.

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.

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.

So 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’ve never committed to a product road map.

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