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.

What’s worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.

The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.

If it’s constantly crazy at work, we have two words for you: Fuck that. And two more: Enough already. It’s time for companies

You can dare to be completely ordinary every now and then.

What’s our market share? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.

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. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.

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.”

Furthermore, long-term planning instills a false sense of security. The sooner you admit you have no idea what the world will look like in five years, three years, or even one year, the sooner you’ll be able to move forward without the fear of making the wrong big decision years in advance. Nothing looms when you don’t make predictions.

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. The rest of the day is stolen from them by meetings, conference calls, and other distractions. So while you may be at the office for 8 hours, it feels more like just a few.

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.

Look at your hours. If they’re a bunch of fractions, who or what is doing the division? Are others distracting you or are you distracting yourself? What can you change? How many things are you working on in a given hour? One thing at a time doesn’t mean one thing, then another thing, then another thing in quick succession; it means one big thing for hours at a time or, better yet, a whole day.

Productivity is for machines, not for people. There’s nothing meaningful about packing some number of work units into some amount of time or squeezing more into less. Machines can work 24/7, humans can’t.

We don’t believe in busyness at Basecamp. We believe in effectiveness. How little can we do? How much can we cut out? Instead of adding to-dos, we add to-don’ts.

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.

But what if you have a question on Monday and someone’s office hours aren’t until Thursday? You wait, that’s what you do. You work on something else until Thursday, or you figure it out for yourself before Thursday. Just like you would if you had to wait to talk to your professor.

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.

At many companies these days, people treat every detail at work like there’s going to be a pop quiz. They have to know every fact, every figure, every name, every event. This is a waste of brain power and an even more egregious waste of attention.

Companies love to declare “We’re all family here.” No, you’re not. Neither are we at Basecamp. We’re coworkers. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about one another. That doesn’t mean we won’t go out of our way for one another. We do care and we do help. But a family we are not. And neither is your business.

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.”

Balance is give and take. The typical corporate give-and-take is that life gives and work takes. If it’s easier for work to claim a Sunday than for life to borrow a Thursday, there ain’t no balance.

So you have to be good people. Someone the rest of the team wants to work with, not just someone they’d tolerate. It doesn’t matter how good you are at the job if you’re an ass. Nothing you can do for us would make up for that.

That work is mostly about the environment, anyway. Even if you had the most precious orchid planted in your garden, it would quickly die without the proper care. And if you do pay attention to having the best environment, you can grow your own beautiful orchids with patience. No need to steal them from your neighbor!

If someone is below that target, they get a raise large enough to match the target. If someone is already above the target, they stay where they are. (We’re not going to cut the pay for existing employees if the market dips for their role.) If someone is promoted, they get a raise to match the market rate for the new level.

These fancy benefits blur the lines between work and play to the point where it’s mostly just work. When you look at it like that, it isn’t really generous—it’s insidious.

Here’s a list of relevant “outside the office” benefits we offer all employees, regardless of position, regardless of salary:

Fully paid vacations every year for everyone who’s been with the company for more than a year.

Three-day weekends all summer.

30-day-paid sabbaticals every three years.

1,000 per year continuing-education stipend.

2,000 per year charity match. Donate to a charity of your choice up to $2,000, and we’ll match it up to $2,000.

One monthly massage at an actual spa, not the office. $100 monthly fitness allowance.

People who visit our office for the first time are startled by the silence and serenity. It doesn’t look, sound, or behave like a traditional office. That’s because it’s really a library for work rather than an office for distraction.

When someone takes a vacation at Basecamp, it should feel like they don’t work here anymore. We encourage them to go completely dark: Log out of Basecamp on their computer, delete the Basecamp app from their phone, and don’t check in. Go away for real. Be gone. Off our grid.

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.

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. That’s how you have calm goodbyes.

What’s variable is the scope of the problem—the work itself. But only on the downside. You can’t fix a deadline and then add more work to it. That’s not fair. Our projects can only get smaller over time, not larger. As we progress, we separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves and toss out the nonessentials.

Here are some of the telltale signs that your deadline is really a dreadline: An unreasonably large amount of work that needs to be done in an unreasonably short amount of time. “This massive redesign and reorganization needs to happen in two weeks. Yeah, I know half the team is out on vacation next week, but that’s not my problem.” An unreasonable expectation of quality given the resources and time. “We can’t compromise on quality—every detail must be perfect by Friday. Whatever it takes.” An ever-expanding amount of work in the same time frame as originally promised. “The CEO just told me that we also need to launch this in Spanish and Italian, not just English.”

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. That’s how you go deep on an idea.

We totally agree. We’ve been practicing disagree and commit since the beginning, but it took Bezos’s letter to name the practice. Now we even use that exact term in our discussions. “I disagree, but let’s commit” is something you’ll hear at Basecamp after heated debates about specific products or strategy decisions.

“Pull-offs” can happen for a number of reasons, but the most common one is that someone senior has a new idea that Just Can’t Wait. These half-baked, right-in-the-middle-of-something-else new ideas lead to half-finished, abandoned projects that litter the landscape and zap morale.

We don’t need to shoot up on risk to get excited about work. We’ll take a risk, but we won’t put the company at risk.

Change is often seen as stressful, but the polar opposite, monotony, can be even worse. You can only work exactly the same way, at the same pace, doing the same work for so long before monotony bites. When you’re growing up, life is seasonal. Even if you live in a place where the weather doesn’t change, there’s a change in rhythm to the year. There’s school, there’s summer. Different things happen at different times. But unless you work in a seasonal business, work in March is usually the same as work in May. June’s the same as January. And it would be hard to tell December’s work from February’s work. Not at Basecamp.

First, since no one customer can pay us an outsized amount, no one customer’s demands for features or fixes or exceptions will automatically rise to the top.

Second, we wanted to build Basecamp for small businesses like ourselves: members of the Fortune 5,000,000. And not just build software for them, but really help them.

Third, we didn’t want to get sucked into the mechanics that chasing big contracts inevitably leads to.

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.

But why worry? Do your best, believe in the work you’ve done, and ship it. Then you’ll find out for sure.

You can follow the spec. You can test it forever. You can talk to potential customers and ask them what they’d pay for this thing you’re making. You can run surveys and ask people if they’d buy your product if it did this thing or that thing.

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.