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Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
The Basecamp product is a unique cloud-based application that helps companies organize all their projects and internal communications in one place.
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.
“Comparison is the death of joy.”
The opposite of conquering the world isn’t failure, it’s participation. Being one of many options in a market is a virtue that allows customers to have a real choice.
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.
Not doing something that isn’t worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.
Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.
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.
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.
As a general rule, nobody at Basecamp really knows where anyone else is at any given moment. Are they working? Dunno. Are they taking a break? Dunno. Are they at lunch? Dunno. Are they picking up their kid from school? Dunno. Don’t care.
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.
The expectation of an immediate response is the ember that ignites so many fires at work.
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.
Don’t you have some other work to do while you wait? Waiting it out is just fine. The sky won’t fall, the company won’t fold. It’ll just be a calmer, cooler, more comfortable place to work. For everyone.
Waiting it out is just fine. The sky won’t fall, the company won’t fold. It’ll just be a calmer, cooler, more comfortable place to work. For everyone.
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 at Basecamp. JOMO! The joy of missing out.
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.
We’re people who work together to make a product. And we’re proud of it. That’s enough.
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.
You can’t credibly promote the virtues of reasonable hours, plentiful rest, and a healthy lifestyle to employees if you’re doing the opposite as the boss. When the top dog puts in mad hours, the rest of the pack is bound to follow along. 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.
Workaholism is a contagious disease. You can’t stop the spread if you’re the one bringing it into the office.
Having good relationships at work takes, err, work.
When the boss says “My door is always open,” it’s a cop-out, not an invitation. One that puts the onus of speaking up entirely on the employees.
If the boss really wants to know what’s going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask!
With great power comes great ignorance.
Stop thinking of talent as something to be plundered and start thinking of it as something to be grown and nurtured, the seeds for which are readily available all over the globe for companies willing to do the work.
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.
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.
Our target is to pay everyone at the company at the top 10 percent of the market regardless of their role.
Our market rates are based on San Francisco numbers despite the fact that we don’t have a single employee there. San Francisco is simply the highest-paying city in the world for our industry. So no matter where you choose to live, we pay the same top-market salaries. After all, where you live has nothing to do with the quality of your work, and it’s the quality of your work that we’re paying you for. What difference does it make that your bed is in Boston, Barcelona, or Bangladesh?
The important part isn’t really whether you can afford to pay salaries based on the top city in your industry or at the top 10 percent of the market, but that you keep salaries equal for equal work and seniority.
under this model, nobody is forced to hop jobs just to get a raise that matches their market value.
Some amount of turnover is a good thing, but salary shouldn’t be the main driver for most people.
There’s a fountain of happiness and productivity in working with a stable crew.
Dinners, lunches, game rooms, late nights—these mainly exist at companies that work 60-plus hours a week, not 40.
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.
specific designs encourage specific behaviors. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.
almost everything that can take six months can also be done in some other form in six weeks.
Don’t meet, write. Don’t react, consider.
Friday is the worst day to release anything.
Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment.
“I disagree, but let’s commit”
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.
Whatever it takes means sloppy work in the service of just delivering something. Whatever it takes means if you won’t do it, your boss will find someone else who will (endure the abuse).
