It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.

The bulk of them. The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.

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?

So you hereby have our permission to bury the hustle. To put in a good day’s work, day after day, but nothing more. You can play with your kids and still be a successful entrepreneur. You can have a hobby. You can take care of yourself physically. You can read a book. You can watch a silly movie with your partner. You can take the time to cook a proper meal. You can go for a long walk. You can dare to be completely ordinary every now and then.

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.

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

felt working for other people at companies that

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.

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.

Now, if the sole reason they work there is to answer questions and be available for everyone else all day long, well, then, okay, sounds good. But our experts have their own work to do, too. You can’t have both.

But what if you have a question on Monday and someone’s office hours aren’t until Thursday? You wait, that’s what you do. You work on something else until Thursday, or you figure it out for yourself before Thursday. Just like you would if you had to wait to talk to your professor.

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.

Workaholism is a contagious disease. You can’t stop the spread if you’re the one bringing it into the office. Disseminate some calm instead.

“We’ve never done any social media outreach, so imagine how much new traffic” —low-hanging fruit —“we’ll get if we just start tweeting stuff out.”

We’re definitely guilty of having thought about things in these terms. By definition, pursuing low-hanging fruit should be a no-brainer for any business. An easy opportunity simply waiting to be seized. Little sweat, all reward! The problem, as we’ve learned over time, is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks. Once you get up close, you see it’s quite a bit higher than you thought. We assume that picking it will be easy only because we’ve never tried to do it before.

The idea that you’ll instantly move needles because you’ve never tried to move them until now is, well, delusional. Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that’s rarely the case. Most conversion work, most business-development work, most sales work is a grind —a lot of effort for a little movement. You pile those little movements into a big one eventually, but that fruit is way up at the top of the tree.

but never forget that not having done something before doesn’t make it easy. It usually makes it hard.

In the long run, work is not more important than sleep.

Great people who are eager to do great work come from the most unlikely places and look nothing like what you might imagine. Focusing just on the person and their work is the only way to spot them.

In fact, junk the whole metaphor of talent wars altogether. 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.

Open-plan offices suck at providing an environment for calm, creative work done by professionals who need peace, quiet, privacy, and space to think and do their best.

But the reality is that most companies don’t actually offer their employees any real vacation time. All they offer is a “fakecation” where employees can still be reeled into conference calls, asked to “hop on a quick call about something,” or expected to be available whenever a question comes up.

Important topics need time, traction, and separation from the rest of the chatter. If something is being discussed in a chat room and it’s clearly too important to process one line at a time, we ask people to “write it up” instead. 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.

When we present work, it’s almost always written up first. A complete idea in the form of a carefully composed multipage document. Illustrated, whenever possible. And then it’s posted to Basecamp, which lets everyone involved know there’s a complete idea waiting to be considered.

We don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Sleep on it. Take your time to gather and present your thoughts—just like the person who pitched the original idea took their time to gather and present theirs.

First it starts as an outlier. Some behavior you don’t love, but tolerate. Then someone else follows suit, but either you miss it or you let it slide. Then people pile on—repeating what they’ve seen because no one stepped in to course correct. Then it’s too late. It’s become the culture. The new normal.

We kinda knew it wasn’t right, but we didn’t stop it. Which just made it that much harder when we finally decided enough was enough.

Later is where excuses live. Later is where good intentions go to die. Later is a broken back and a bent spirit. Later says “all-nighters are temporary until we’ve got this figured out.” Unlikely. Make the change now.

When you get a bunch of people in a room under the assumption that consensus is the only way out again, you’re in for a war of attrition. Whoever can keep arguing the longest stands the best chance of winning. That’s just silly.

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.

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.

Being clear about what demands excellence and what’s perfectly okay just being adequate is a great way to bring a sense of calm into your work. You’ll worry less, you’ll accept more. “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.

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.

The only way to get more done is to have less to do.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

At Basecamp we’ve become ruthless about eliminating either work that doesn’t need to be done or work we don’t want to do.

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.

That’s why rather than jumping on every new idea right away, we make every idea wait a while. Generally a few weeks, at least. That’s just enough time either to forget about it completely or to realize you can’t stop thinking about it.

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.

Without profit, something is always on fire. When companies talk about burn rates, two things are burning: money and people. One you’re burning up, one you’re burning out.

But why worry? Do your best, believe in the work you’ve done, and ship it. Then you’ll find out for sure. Maybe it’ll be spot-on. Maybe it’ll suck. Maybe it’ll be somewhere in between. But if you want to know, you have to put it on the market. The real market. It’s the only place you’ll find the truth.

It’s why we’ve never committed to a product road map. It’s not because we have a secret one in the back of some smoky room we don’t want to share, but because one doesn’t actually exist. We honestly don’t know what we’ll be working on in a year, so why act like we do?

Getting angry only hurts you. It zaps energy you could have spent doing better work still. It blurs your focus on what’s next, keeping you locked in on the past. And again, for what?

Getting things off the ground is so hard that it’s natural to expect it’ll just get easier from here. Except it doesn’t. Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That’s the dirty little secret of business.

Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.

A business is a collection of choices. Every day is a new chance to make a new choice, a different choice.

Are you going to continue to say “That would never work in our business”? Are you going to continue to say “If the client calls at 11 p.m., I have to answer the phone”? Are you going to continue to say “It’s okay to ask someone to work while they’re on their vacation”? Or are you going to finally choose to make a change?