It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

The doggie bag.

Wtf?

Stress is passed from organization to employee, from employee to employee, and then from employee to customer. Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.

Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second.

When you start to think about your company as a product, all sorts of new possibilities for improvement emerge. When you realize the way you work is malleable, you can start molding something new, something better.

You aren’t more worthy in defeat or victory because you sacrificed everything.

Because you kept pushing through the pain and exhaustion for a bigger carrot. The human experience is so much more than 24/7 hustle to the max.

To get ours, we don’t need to take theirs.

Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.” We’re with Mark.

The opposite of conquering the world isn’t failure, it’s participation. Being one of many options in a market is a virtue that allows customers to have a real choice. If you can embrace that, then the war metaphors of business can more easily be buried, as they should be.

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.

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.

Seeing a bad idea through just because at one point it sounded like a good idea is a tragic waste of energy and talent.

Nice example of when agile development should help eliminate shitty hipothesys and move smth meaningful.

The future is a major abstraction, riddled with a million vibrating variables you can’t control. The best information you’ll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution. We wait for those moments to make a call.

Make decision when you are in the moment

During the summer, we even take Fridays off and still get plenty of good stuff done in just 32 hours.

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.

It’s no wonder people are coming up short and are working longer hours, late nights, and weekends to make it up. Where else can they find the uninterrupted time? It’s sad to think that some people crave a commute because it’s the only time during the day they have to themselves.

When people spent most of their time on meetings, it's subsequently brings to overtimes to make smtb done wit personal concentration

Being effective is about finding more of your time unoccupied and open for other things besides work. Time for leisure, time for family and friends. Or time for doing absolutely nothing.

great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

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.

Mightbe an example of talents for good perso n (where to grow)

Way too many people simply can’t get work done at work anymore.

People aren’t working longer and later because there’s more work to do all of a sudden. People are working longer and later because they can’t get work done at work anymore!

Exactly about me while was in Wrike

Meetings should be a last resort, especially big ones.

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.

“But how do you know if someone’s working if you can’t see them?” Same answer as this question: “How do you know if someone’s working if you can see them?” You don’t. The only way to know if work is getting done is by looking at the actual work. That’s the boss’s job. If they can’t do that job, they should find another one.

Fuck that. People should be missing out! Most people should miss out on most things most of the time. That’s what we try to encourage at Basecamp. JOMO! The joy of missing out.

One way we push back against this at Basecamp is by writing monthly “Heartbeats.” Summaries of the work and progress that’s been done and had by a team, written by the team lead, to the entire company.

Nice idea for companies 1000+ Cool to make it in the Meduza vecherka format

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.

Tobias Lütke, CEO at Shopify, coined the term. Here’s how he explained it in a New York Times interview: “Another concept we talk a lot about is something called a ‘trust battery.’ It’s charged at 50 percent when people are first hired. And then every time you work with someone at the company, the trust battery between the two of you is either charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise.”

cop-out,

Nice informal word

If the boss really wants to know what’s going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask! Not vague, self-congratulatory bullshit questions like “What can we do even better?” but the hard ones like “What’s something nobody dares to talk about?” or “Are you afraid of anything at work?” or “Is there anything you worked on recently that you wish you could do over?” Or even more specific ones like “What do you think we could have done differently to help Jane succeed?” or “What advice would you give before we start on the big website redesign project?”

The problem, as we’ve learned over time, is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks.

such dire personal straits.

Wtf

Very few problems need to be solved at the twelfth or fifteenth hour of a workday. All-nighters are red flags, not green lights. If people are pulling them, pull back. Nearly everything can wait until morning.

Now you’ll either have to let them go (stressful for you and them) or tolerate the bad fit (stressful for you, them, and everyone else on the team). One stress breeds another stress.

It's bettsr to get clear with arguments and conclude with one wherewould be less cons. Decision would be tough, but in the end the continuity would be much problematic.

Whenever someone joins (or leaves) a team, the old team is gone. It’s a new team now.

riddles

Головоломка?

It takes patience to grow and nurture your own talent. But the work it takes—tending to the calm-culture soil—is the same work that improves the company for everyone. Get to it.

(We used to do bonuses many years ago, but we found that they were quickly treated as expected salary, anyway. So if they ever dipped, people felt like they got a demotion.)

At the time of publication of this book, a notch over 50 percent of our employees have been here for five years or more. That’s rarefied air in an industry where the average tenure at the top tech companies is less than two years.

the wages

The whole purpose of a vacation is to get away. To not only be somewhere else entirely, but to think about something else entirely. Work should not be on your mind. Period.

Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It’s completely exhausting.

And who makes the decision about what stays and what goes in a fixed period of time? The team that’s working on it. Not the CEO, not the CTO. The team that’s doing the work has control over the work. They wield the “scope hammer,” as we call it. They can crush the big must-haves into smaller pieces and then judge each piece individually and objectively. Then they can sort, sift, and decide what’s worth keeping and what can wait.

frenzied

Nice word

They work at their own pace, in their own place.

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 t...

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.

About Later. Because the moment is now and this is exactly how you live

But in business, you may have to make multiple major decisions monthly. If every one of them has to be made by consensus, you’re in for an endless grind with significant collateral damage. The cost of consensus is simply too much to pay over and over again.

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.