It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

Workaholism is a contagious disease.

If the boss is looking over there, then clearly we should all be looking over there!

It’s not worth trading sleep for a few extra hours at the office. Not only will it make you exhausted, it’ll literally make you stupid. The science is clear on this: Continued sleep deprivation batters your IQ and saps your creativity.

Yet somehow it’s still frequently seen as heroic to sacrifice yourself, your health, and even your ability to do your job just to prove your loyalty to THE MISSION. Fuck the mission.

Don’t you want to wake up with new solutions in your head rather than bags under your eyes?

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.

“Not exactly what we already have” is a quality in itself.

Great pedigree, great school, impressive list of previous employment. What’s not to love? This is how companies hire the wrong people all the time. They hire someone based on a list of previous qualifications, not on their current abilities.

Great people who are eager to do great work come from the most unlikely places and look nothing like what you might imagine.

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.

On top of not considering provenance or location, we don’t consider formal education, either. We look at people’s actual work, not at their diploma or degree.

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.

Whoever managed to rebrand the typical open-plan office—with all its noise, lack of privacy, and resulting interruptions—as something hip and modern deserves a damn medal from the Committee of Irritating Distractions. Such offices are great at one thing: packing in as many people as possible at the expense of the individual.

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.

a library for work rather than an office for distraction.

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.

But the reality is that most companies don’t actually offer their employees any real vacation time. All they offer is a “fakecation” where employees can still be reeled into conference calls, asked to “hop on a quick call about something,” or expected to be available whenever a question comes up.

Fakecations put employees on a leash—liable to be yanked back and pulled into work at any moment. Time off isn’t much of a benefit if it can be taken right back. That’s more like a shitty loan with terrible terms. Plus interest. And worries. Screw that.

At many companies, when someone’s let go, all you get are vague euphemisms. “Hey, what happened to Bob?” “Oh, Bob? We don’t talk about Bob anymore. It was simply time for him to move on.” Fuck that.

“Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time” and

Important topics need time, traction, and separation from the rest of the chatter. If something is being discussed in a chat room and it’s clearly too important to process one line at a time, we ask people to “write it up” instead.

Most deadlines aren’t so much deadlines as dreadlines. Unrealistic dates mired by ever-expanding project requirements. More work piles on but the timeline remains the same. That’s not work, that’s hell.

Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can’t work calmly. When you don’t trust the date, or when you think it’s impossible to do everything someone’s telling you to do within a specific period of time, or when someone keeps piling on more work without giving you more time, you work frantically and maniacally.

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.

Don’t meet, write. Don’t react, consider.

What we do repeatedly hardens into habits. The longer you carry on, the tougher it is to change. All your best intentions about doing the right thing “later” are no match for the power of habits.

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.”

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.

Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment.

“I disagree, but let’s commit”

It’s not just decide and go, it’s decide, explain, and go.

You just can’t bring your A game to every situation. Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be.

attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy.

The challenge lies in figuring out where you can be just kinda okay or even downright weak.

If you do one thing at 100 percent, you’ve spent 100 percent to get that one thing. If you spend 20 percent each on getting five things to 80 percent, well, then, you’ve done five things! We’ll almost always take that trade.

“That’s fine” is such a wonderfully relaxing way to work most of the time.

the work required to finish a project should be dwindling over time, not expanding. The deadline should be comfortably approaching, not scarily arriving. Remember: Deadlines, not dreadlines.

It’s not that new approaches or ideas are bad, but their timing may well be. Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing. Confidently close that door. Accept that better ideas aren’t necessarily better if they arrive after the train has left the station. If they’re so good, they can catch the next one.

That’s really the answer to new ideas that arrive too late: You’ll just have to wait!

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

Change makes things worse all the time. It’s easier to fuck up something that’s working well than it is to genuinely improve it. But we commonly delude ourselves into thinking that more time, more investment, more attention is always going to win.

If it’s never enough, then it’ll always be crazy at work.

Every mature industry is drowning in best practices. There are best practices about how to price a product, conduct employee reviews, do content marketing, design a website, or make an app scalable to millions of users.

Yet so much of it is not merely bullshit but quite possibly the worst thing you could do. What counts as the best practice for a company of 10,000 is very rarely so for a company of 10.

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:

best practices imply that there’s a single answer to whatever question you’re facing.

You’re probably just trying to meet some arbitrary deadline set by those who don’t actually have to do the work. Or trying to meet some fantastical financial “stretch goal” that nobody who actually has to do the stretching would think reasonable.

You probably aren’t ready to say no to all the things you’ll have to skip out on because you said yes to whatever it takes.

Time-management hacks, life hacks, sleep hacks, work hacks. These all reflect an obsession with trying to squeeze more time out of the day, but rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn’t the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.

The only way to get more done is to have less to do.