It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

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.

That’s why we don’t have goals at Basecamp. We didn’t when we started, and now, nearly 20 years later, we still don’t. We simply do the best work we can on a daily basis.

Plus, there’s an even darker side to goal setting. Chasing goals often leads companies to compromise their morals, honesty, and integrity to reach those fake numbers. The best intentions slip when you’re behind. Need to improve margins by a few points? Let’s turn a blind eye to quality for a while. Need to find another $800,000 this quarter to hit that number? Let’s make it harder for customers to request refunds.

In the few months that we tried reaching for the big nine-digit goal, we ended up launching several projects that at best we had misgivings about and at worst made us feel a little dirty. Like spending big bucks with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to juice our signups. Cutting checks like that to further the erosion of privacy and splintering of attention just made us feel icky, but we closed our eyes for a while because, hey, we were reaching for that big number.

We didn’t start the business with a plan, and we don’t run the business by a plan. For nearly 20 years, we’ve been figuring it out as we go, a few weeks at a time. For some that may seem shortsighted. They’d be right. We’re literally looking at what’s in front of us, not at everything we could possibly imagine. Short-term planning has gotten a bum rap, but we think it’s undeserved. 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.”

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.

Your time in the office feels shorter because it’s sliced up into a dozen smaller bits. Most people don’t actually have 8 hours a day to work, they have a couple of 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.

we don’t have status meetings at Basecamp. We all know these meetings —one person talks for a bit and shares some plans, then the next person does the same thing. They’re a waste of time. Why? While it seems efficient to get everyone together at the same time, it isn’t. It’s costly, too. Eight people in a room for an hour doesn’t cost one hour, it costs eight hours.

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. A 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.

Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.

The person with the question needed something and they got it. The person with the answer was doing something else and had to stop. That’s rarely a fair trade.

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.

“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.

we’ve tried to create a culture of eventual response rather than immediate response. One where everyone doesn’t lose their shit if the answer to a nonurgent question arrives three hours later. One where we not only accept but strongly encourage people not to check email, or chat, or instant message for long stretches of uninterrupted time.

Trying to supplant the family you likely already have is just another way to attempt to put the needs of the company above the needs of your actual family. That’s a sick ploy. The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families.

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.

There’s no such thing as a casual suggestion when it comes from the owner of the business. When the person who signs the paychecks mentions this or that, this or that invariably becomes a top priority.

It takes great restraint as the leader of an organization not to keep lobbing ideas at everyone else. Every such idea is a pebble that’s going to cause ripples when it hits the surface. Throw enough pebbles

So we give people real work to do and the appropriate time to do it in. It’s the same kind of work they’d be doing if they got the job. The idea here is that by focusing on the person and their work, we can avoid hiring an imaginary person. It’s really easy to fall for someone’s carefully crafted story.

At Basecamp, we all do the work, so influence is most effectively exerted by leading the work, not by calling for it.

It’s especially tempting to think that if you work in a small company, you could really benefit from someone with the experience from a big company to help you “grow up.” But trying to teach a small company how to act like a big one rarely does anyone any good. You’re usually better off finding someone who’s familiar with the challenges at your company’s size or thereabouts.

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.

A dismissal opens a vacuum, and unless you fill that vacuum with facts, it’ll quickly fill with rumors, conjecture, anxiety, and fear.

whenever someone leaves Basecamp, an immediate goodbye announcement is sent out companywide. This announcement is written by either the person leaving or their manager. It’s their choice (but most people who’ve left Basecamp chose to write their own). Either way, someone has to write one. The person who’s leaving then gets to see all the responses to this announcement from everyone else in the company before the day is up. These responses usually include sharing photos, memories, and stories. Saying goodbye is always hard, but it doesn’t have to be formal or cold. We all know things change, circumstances shift, and shit happens. Note: If their message to the company doesn’t include exact details on why they are leaving, their manager will post a follow-up message the following week filling in the gaps. When someone leaves for another job, the whole story is usually shared by the person who’s leaving. But when someone is let go, we often have to clarify once they’re gone. It’s important that the reasons are clear and no questions linger unanswered.

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.

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 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. 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.

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. Jeff Bezos put it well in his 2017 letter to shareholders: I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my 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. Instead, they should allow everyone to be heard and then turn the decision over to one person to make the final call. It’s their job to listen, consider, contemplate, and decide.

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.

Whatever it takes is an iceberg. Steer clear lest it literally sink your ship. Just ask Edward Smith, the captain of the Titanic, who gave orders to do whatever it took to get to New York faster than expected to break a record.

It’s not time management, it’s obligation elimination.

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

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

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.

Any conversation with more than three people is typically a conversation with too many people.

tripling the entry price worked out great. We gave up some new signups, but we more than made up for it with the higher price. That’s what we were aiming for. Bull’s-eye!

The idea isn’t to cram more stuff into fewer hours, so we adapt our ambition, too. Winter is when we buckle down and take on larger, more challenging projects. Summer, with its shorter 4-day weeks, is when we tackle simpler, lighter projects.

But then why not just do both? Sell to small businesses on one model and also have a group of people dedicated to servicing big businesses? Because we don’t want to be a two-headed company with two cultures. Selling to small businesses and selling to enterprises take two very different approaches with two very different kinds of people.

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.

When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says “It’s no big deal” or the token that says “It’s the end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.