It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

Nothing was better for customers. And, self-servingly, nothing was better for us, too. It meant less work, it meant shrinking the project, it meant shaving weeks off the deadline, and it meant shipping sooner. Nothing was better.

Sometimes you have to fight against the obvious. And sometimes you have to recognize that time in doesn’t equal benefits out. Doing nothing can be the hardest choice but the strongest, too.

Imagine that—feeling bad about getting back to a customer within three minutes! We had stumbled into an unrealistic goal of “we can never get back to people fast enough” and it was taking its toll. It was amazing that it could be done, but we had forgotten to ask whether it should be done.

Here’s what we do. 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.

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.

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!

What did we say? “We won’t accept checks anymore.” Yes, we decided to turn away revenue and customers who could only pay by check. But it wasn’t really a turn away, it was a trade away. We traded some revenue for some time.

What is it with three? Three is a wedge, and that’s why it works. Three has a sharp point. It’s an odd number, so there are no ties. It’s powerful enough to make a dent, but also weak enough to not break what isn’t broken. Big teams make things worse all the time by applying too much force to things that only need to be lightly finessed.

The problem with four is that you almost always need to add a fifth to manage. The problem with five is that it’s two too many. And six, seven, or eight on a team will inevitably make simple things more complicated than they need to be. 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.

What makes this pause possible is that our projects don’t go on forever. Six weeks max, and generally shorter. That means we have natural opportunities to consider new ideas every few weeks. We don’t have to cut something short to start something new. First we finish what we started, then we consider what we want to tackle next. When the urgency of now goes away, so does the anxiety.

Knowing what you’ll say no to is better than knowing what you’ll say yes to.

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.

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.

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.