It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

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.

The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit. Less waste, not more production.

Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.

If it’s constantly crazy at work, we have two words for you: Fuck that.

We put in about 40 hours a week most of the year and just 32 in the summer. We send people on month-long sabbaticals every three years. We not only pay for people’s vacation time, we pay for the actual vacation, too.

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.

things. That’s why your company should be your best product.

If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company.

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.

We work on projects for six weeks at a time, then we take two weeks off from scheduled work to roam and decompress.

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 sh...

We didn’t just assume asynchronous communication is better than real-time communication most of the time. We figured it out after overusing chat tools for years.

And for everyone in that tiny minority that somehow finds what they’re looking for in the grind, there are so many more who end up broken, wasted, and burned out with nothing to show for it. And for what?

The human experience is so much more than 24/7 hustle to the max.

You’re not very likely to find that key insight or breakthrough idea north of the 14th hour in the day. Creativity, progress, and impact do not yield to brute force.

The business world is obsessed with fighting and winning and dominating and destroying. This ethos turns business leaders into tiny Napoleons.

We come in peace. We don’t have imperial ambitions. We aren’t trying to dominate an industry or a market. We wish everyone well. To get ours, we don’t need to take theirs.

We’re serving our customers well, and they’re serving us well. That’s what matters.

Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.”

Our Goal: No Goals

So imagine the response when we tell people that we don’t do goals.

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.

We simply do the best work we can on a daily basis.

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.

Chasing goals often leads companies to compromise their morals, honesty, and integrity to reach those fake numbers.

The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation.

No, now it’s all about how this BRAND-NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING.

If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself

So it becomes much harder to justify those 9 p.m. meetings or weekend sprints.

For nearly 20 years, we’ve been figuring it out as we go, a few weeks at a time.

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.

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.

Much corporate anxiety comes from the realization that the company has been doing the wrong thing, but it’s too late to change direction because of the “Plan.”

Requiring discomfort—or pain—to make progress is faulty logic.

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.

Working 40 hours a week is plenty.

No more. Less is often fine, too.

During the summer, we even take Fridays off and still get plenty of good stuff done in just 32 hours.

Because we don’t cram. We don’t rush. We don’t stuff. We work at a relaxed, sustainable pace. And what doesn’t get done in 40 hours by Friday at 5 picks up again Monday morning at 9.

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.

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.

At Basecamp, we see it as our top responsibility to protect our employees’ time and attention.

we don’t have status meetings at Basecamp.