It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

if you must have a goal, how about just staying in business? Or serving your customers well? Or being a delightful place to work? Just because these goals are harder to quantify does not make them any less important.

When people focus on productivity, they end up focusing on being busy.

Basecamp is not “our baby.” Basecamp is our product. We’ll make it great, but we won’t take a bullet for it. And neither would you for yours. We don’t need to bullshit ourselves or anyone else. We’re people who work together to make a product. And we’re proud of it. That’s enough.

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.

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?”

In the long run, work is not more important than sleep.

Open-plan offices suck at providing an environment for calm, creative work done by professionals who need peace, quiet, privacy, and space to think and do their best.

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

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.

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 almost impossible to work on something and not be tempted to chase all the exciting new what-if and we-could-also ideas that come up. There’s always one more thing it could do, one more improvement it should have. But if you actually want to make progress, you have to narrow as you go.

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

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.

No is easier to do, yes is easier to say. No is no to one thing. Yes is no to a thousand things.

When you say no now, you can come back and say yes later. If you say yes now, it’s harder to say no later.

Louis Gassée, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. 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.

But over the years we’ve talked to many entrepreneurs stuck in always-in-growth mode. And while many of them are proud of what they’ve achieved, just as many speak with longing in their voices about the good old days when their business was simpler and smaller. The days with less complexity, hassle, and headaches.