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.

One page in and I love this book already.

The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit.

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

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.

This has always stuck me as a tad bit unrealistic.

Set out to do good work. Set out to be fair in your dealings with customers, employees, and reality. Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.

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.

It’s sad to think that some people crave a commute because it’s the only time during the day they have to themselves.

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.

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.

The modern company isn’t a street gang filled with orphans trying to make it in the tough, tough world.

If the only way you can inspire the troops is by a regimen of exhaustion, it’s time to look for some deeper substance. Because what trickles down is less likely to be admiration but dread and fear instead. A leader who sets an example of self-sacrifice can’t help but ask self-sacrifice of others.

If you, as the boss, want employees to take vacations, you have to take a vacation. If you want them to stay home when they’re sick, you can’t come into the office sniffling. If you don’t want them to feel guilty for taking their kids to Legoland on the weekend, post some pictures of yourself there with yours.

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. The only time such an empty gesture serves any purpose is after the shit has already hit the fan. Then it can be dragged out of the drawer with “Why didn’t you just come and tell me?” and “I told you if you ever had an issue with anything that you should come talk to me.” *eyeroll* What the boss most needs to hear is where they and the organization are falling short. But who knows how a superior is going to take such pointed feedback? It’s a minefield, and every employee knows someone who’s been blown up for raising the wrong issue at the wrong time to the wrong boss. Why on earth would they risk their career on an empty promise of an open door?

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. Declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you’re setting out to do. And any estimate of how much work it’ll take to do something you’ve never tried before is likely to be off by degrees of magnitude. The worst is when you load up these expectations on new hires and assume they’ll meet them all quickly. You’re basically setting them up to fail.

The idea that you’ll instantly move needles because you’ve never tried to move them until now is, well, delusional.

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.

Because what happens over and over again is that people who start on long hours simply stay on long hours. We’re all creatures of habit. Breaking the cycle once it’s been internalized might well require a full bout of rehab, if not an outright intervention. Be careful taking that first hit!

At most companies, work-life balance is a sham. Not because there shouldn’t be a balance, but because work always seems to end up putting its fat finger on the scale. Life just lifts. That’s not balance.

Hiring and training people is not only expensive, but draining. All that energy could go into making better products with people you’ve kept happy for the long term by being fair and transparent about salary and benefits. Churning through people because you’re trying to suppress the wages of those who stay just seems like poor business.

Have you heard about those companies whose benefits include game-console rooms, cereal snack bars, top-chef lunches and dinners, nap rooms, laundry service, and free beer on Fridays? It seems so generous, but there’s also a catch: You can’t leave the office.

It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that specific designs encourage specific behaviors. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.

Friday is the worst day to release anything. First off, you probably rushed to finish. So work done on Fridays tends to be a bit sloppy. Second, Mondays don’t come after Fridays. Saturdays and Sundays come after Fridays. So if something goes wrong, you’re working the weekend. Third, if you work the weekends, you don’t get a chance to recharge. Basically, when you’ve worked all week and you’re forced to work the weekend, the following Monday is the eighth day of the last week, not the first day of next week. This means that if you keep working through that following week, you’re working 12-day weeks. That’s no good.

If you don’t want gnarly roots in your culture, you have to mind the seeds. You don’t have to let something slide for long before it becomes the new normal. Culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do. So do better.

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.”

“I disagree, but let’s commit”

The five magic words!

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.

This resonates. It is exhausting trying to make everything perfect, and energizing to hit perfection when it matters.