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Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.” We’re with Mark.
People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.
An owner unknowingly scattering people’s attention is a common cause of the question “Why’s everyone working so much but nothing’s getting done?”
If you don’t clearly communicate to everyone else why someone was let go, the people who remain at the company will come up with their own story to explain it. Those stories will almost certainly be worse than the real reason.
This happens in organizations all the time. A single snarky remark can cascade into a storm of collective snark in the same way that a single spark can ignite a forest fire. And, implicitly, when you let it happen, it becomes okay. Behavior unchecked becomes behavior sanctioned.
Instead, we hire when it hurts. Slowly, and only after we clearly need someone. Not in anticipation of possibly maybe.
“I disagree, but let’s commit” is something you’ll hear at Basecamp after heated debates about specific products or strategy decisions.
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.
While there’s no hard-line definition of when’s enough or what’s enough in every situation, one thing’s for sure: If it’s never enough, then it’ll always be crazy at work.
Every mature industry is drowning in best practices. There are best practices about how to price a product, conduct employee reviews, do content marketing, design a website, or make an app scalable to millions of users. There’s no end to advice claiming to be the best.
Unless you’ve actually done the work, you’re in no position to encode it as a best practice.
It’s not time management, it’s obligation elimination. Everything else is snake oil.
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.
Be it in hours, degrees of difficulty, or even specific benefits that emphasize seasonality, find ways to melt the monotony of work. People grow dull and stiff if they stay in the same swing for too long.
