It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

What we care about is who you are and what you can do.

We’ve found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who’s already at their peak.

The thing is, most people just don’t enjoy haggling, period.

Hiring and training people is not only expensive, but draining.

There’s a fountain of happiness and productivity in working with a stable crew.

Sounds more like bribes than benefits, doesn’t it?

Benefits that actually benefit them, not the company.

Rather than thinking of it as an office, we think of it as a library. In fact, we call our guiding principle: Library Rules.

“If it’s important, slow down.”

This goes together with the rule “If everyone needs to see it, don’t chat about it.”

Chat is great as a small slice but not the whole pie of communication.

But the rest of the people in the room are asked to react. Not absorb, not think it over, not consider—just react. Knee-jerk it. That’s no way to treat fragile new ideas.

We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Sleep on it.

Unwinding the new normal requires far more effort than preventing that new normal from being set in the first place.

Culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do. So do better.

Instead, we hire when it hurts.

Not in anticipation of possibly maybe.

All lined up, beautifully choreographed. But such a ballet of interdependence is a performance we’d rather skip.

Whenever someone is waiting on someone else, there’s a dependency in the way.

It makes for a great splash, but big-bang releases bundle the risk from every component, so if one thing falls behind, the whole thing can get held up. Which it always does.

We’ve been practicing disagree and commit since the beginning, but it took Bezos’s letter to name the practice.

We compromise on quality all the time at Basecamp.

We publish essays on our blog that may have a grammatical error or two.

Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be.

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.

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.

Week four of a six-week project should be about finishing things up and ramping things down, not coming up with big new ideas.

“Doing nothing isn’t an option.” Oh, yes, it is. And it’s often the best one. “Nothing” should always be on the table.

It’s easier to fuck up something that’s working well than it is to genuinely improve

There are many reasons to be skeptical of best practices, but one of the most common is when you see someone deriving them purely from outside observations about how another company does it:

What’s more, best practices imply that there’s a single answer to whatever question you’re facing. It implies that you really don’t have a choice in the matter. Resist the implication. You always have a choice.

Reasonable expectations are out the window with whatever it takes.

Rather than demand whatever it takes, we ask, What will it take?

Too much shit to do is the problem. The only way to get more done is to have less to do.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.

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

That’s why rather than jumping on every new idea right away, we make every idea wait a while. Generally a few weeks, at least. That’s just enough time either to forget about it completely or to realize you can’t stop thinking about it.

No is no to one thing. Yes is no to a thousand things.

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. 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.

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.

The smart bet is one where you get to play again if it doesn’t come up your way.

Be it in hours, degrees of difficulty, or even specific benefits that emphasize seasonality, find ways to melt the monotony of work.

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.

Anything else is a simulation, and simulated situations give you simulated answers.

Promises are easy and cheap to make, actual work is hard and expensive.

Getting angry only hurts you. It zaps energy you could have spent doing better work still.

What people don’t like is forced change—change they didn’t request on a timeline they didn’t choose.

It also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invite your customers to check out your latest offering. But it should be an invitation, not a demand.

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.

With an answer like that, you’re almost forced to pick the “It’s no big deal” token. Yeah, sure, some water and ice cream would be great!