It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

There are two primary reasons: (1) The workday is being sliced into tiny, fleeting work moments by an onslaught of physical and virtual distractions. And (2) an unhealthy obsession with growth at any cost sets towering, unrealistic expectations that stress people out. It’s no wonder people are working longer, earlier, later, on weekends, and whenever they have a spare moment. People can’t get work done at work anymore. That turns life into work’s leftovers.

Calm is protecting people’s time and attention. Calm is about 40 hours of work a week. Calm is reasonable expectations. Calm is ample time off. Calm is smaller. Calm is a visible horizon. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second. Calm is more independence, less interdependence. Calm is sustainable practices for the long term. Calm is profitability.

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.

We work on projects for six weeks at a time, then we take two weeks off from scheduled work to roam and decompress. We didn’t simply theorize that would be the best way to work. We started by working on things for as long as they took. Then we saw how projects never seemed to end. So we started time-boxing at three months. We found that was still too long. So we tried even shorter times. And we ended up here, in six-week cycles. We iterated our way to what works for us.

Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be this epic tale of cutthroat survival. Most of the time it’s way more boring than that. Less jumping over exploding cars and wild chase scenes, more laying of bricks and applying another layer of paint.

Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.”

Every six weeks or so, we decide what we’ll be working on next. And that’s the only plan we have. Anything further out is considered a “maybe, we’ll see.”

When you stick with planning for the short term, you get to change your mind often. And that’s a huge relief! This eliminates the pressure for perfect planning and all the stress that comes with it. We simply believe that you’re better off steering the ship with a thousand little inputs as you go rather than a few grand sweeping movements made way ahead of time.

Every day your workday is like flying from Chicago to London. But why does the flight feel longer than your time in the office? It’s because the flight is uninterrupted, continuous time. It feels long because it is long!

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. Most of what we think we have to do, we don’t have to do at all. It’s a choice, and often it’s a poor one.

Time and attention are best spent in large bills, if you will, not spare coins and small change. Enough to buy those big chunks of time to do that wonderful, thorough job you’re expected to do. When you don’t get that, you have to scrounge for focused time, forced to squeeze project work in between all the other nonessential, yet mandated, things you’re expected to do every day.

So we borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours. For some that means an open afternoon every Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It’s up to each expert to decide their availability.

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

Beyond that—even if their résumé is perfectly accurate—a list of work is not the work itself. Don’t just take their word for it. Take their work for it.

When you force yourself to focus on just the person and their work, not their glorified past, you also end up giving more people a chance. There’s no GPA filter to cut out someone who didn’t care for certain parts of their schooling. There’s no pedigree screen to prevent the self-taught from getting hired. There’s no arbitrary “years of experience” cut to prevent a fast learner from applying to a senior position.

The quickest way to disappointment is to set unreasonable expectations.

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.

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.

There’s a fountain of happiness and productivity in working with a stable crew. It’s absolutely key to how we’re able to do so much with so few at Basecamp. We’re baffled that such a competitive advantage isn’t more diligently sought.

If we tell a team that they have six weeks to build a great calendar feature in Basecamp, they’re much more likely to produce lovely work than if we ask them how long it’ll take to build this specific calendar feature, and then break their weekends and backs to make it so.

But they require you to embrace budgets and shun estimates. Great work will fill the time allotted if you allow it to.

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.

When we pitch this way, we’re effectively “forcing the floor.” No one can interrupt the presenter because there’s no one there to interrupt. The idea is shared whole—there’s no room to stop someone, no opportunity to break someone’s flow. They have the floor and it can’t be taken away. And then when you’re ready to present your feedback, the floor is yours.

Give it a try sometime. Don’t meet, write. Don’t react, consider.

When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit. But if you start crazy, it’ll define you. You have to keep asking yourself if the way you’re working today is the way you’d want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not “later.”

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.

Rather than put endless effort into every detail, we put lots of effort into separating what really matters from what sort of matters from what doesn’t matter at all. The act of separation should be your highest-quality endeavor. It’s easy to say “Everything has to be great,” but anyone can do that. The chall...

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.

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.” Bam!

Nearly all product work at Basecamp is done by teams of three people. It’s our magic number. A team of three is usually composed of two programmers and one designer. And if it’s not three, it’s one or two rather than four or five. We don’t throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three.

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.

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.

You can do big things with small teams, but it’s a whole hell of a lot harder to do small things with big teams. And small things are often all that’s necessary. The occasional big thing is great, but most improvements come as small incremental steps. Big teams can step right over those small moves.

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.

Happiness is shipping: finishing good work, sending it off, and then moving on to the next idea.

When you say no to one thing, it’s a choice that breeds choices. Tomorrow you can be as open to new opportunities as you were today. When you say yes to one thing, you’ve spent that choice. The door is shut on a whole host of alternative possibilities and tomorrow is that much more limited.

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.

We don’t show any customers anything until every customer can see it. We don’t beta-test with customers. We don’t ask people what they’d pay for something. We don’t ask anyone what they think of something. We do the best job we know how to do and then we launch it into the market. The market will tell us the truth.

Promises pile up like debt, and they accrue interest, too. The longer you wait to fulfill them, the more they cost to pay off and the worse the regret. When it’s time to do the work, you realize just how expensive that yes really was.

But, really, unless you’ve patented it, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Besides, copying does more harm to the copier than to the copied. When someone copies you, they are copying a moment in time. They don’t know the thinking that went into getting you to that moment in time, and they won’t know the thinking that’ll help you have a million more moments in time. They’re stuck with what you left behind.