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Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
Calm is meetings as a last resort.
But you rarely hear about people working three low-end jobs out of necessity wearing that grind with pride. It’s only the pretenders, those who aren’t exactly struggling for subsistence, who feel the need to brag about their immense sacrifice.
To get ours, we don’t need to take theirs. 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.
Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.” We’re with Mark.
Because at the end of the day, would you rather win an imaginary contest by throwing sand in your competitors’ faces or by simply forgetting about them and making the best damn product you know how?
Haha
We simply do the best work we can on a daily basis.
Because let’s face it: Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets.
On a positive note it can be a guide, a blueprint for priorities but most of the time - we transcend beyond our goals.
These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned. And when that happens, you’re supposed to pick new ones and start stressing again. Nothing ever stops at the quarterly win. There are four quarters to a year. Forty to a decade. Every one of them has to produce, exceed, and beat EXPECTATIONS. Why would you do that to yourself and your business? Doing great, creative work is hard enough. So is building a long-lasting sustainable business with happy employees.
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.
They want to make it hard for you to cancel so it’s easier for them to hit their numbers.
You can absolutely run a great business without a single goal. You don’t need something fake to do something real. And 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.
The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation. It’s no longer about simply making a great product or providing a great service. No, now it’s all about how this BRAND-NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING.
Nothing encapsulates this like the infatuation with disruption.
exactly rewriting world history. And that’s okay. If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you. There’s no longer this convenient excuse for why it has to be all work all the time. The opportunity to do another good day’s work will come again tomorrow, even if you go home at a reasonable time.
We’re literally looking at what’s in front of us, not at everything we could possibly imagine.
The best information you’ll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution.
Discomfort is the human response to a questionable or bad situation, whether that’s working long hours with no end in sight, exaggerating your business numbers to impress investors, or selling intimate user data to advertisers. If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you’re going to lose yourself, your manners, and your morals.
On the contrary, if you listen to your discomfort and back off from what’s causing it, you’re more likely to find the right path. We’ve been in that place many times over the years at Basecamp.
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.
They guard so many things, but all too often they fail to protect what’s both most vulnerable and most precious: their employees’ time and attention.
At Basecamp, we see it as our top responsibility to protect our employees’ time and attention. You can’t expect people to do great work if they don’t have a full day’s attention to devote to it. Partial attention is barely attention at all.
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.
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.
Being effective is about finding more of your time unoccupied and open for other things besides work. Time for leisure, time for family and friends. Or time for doing absolutely nothing.
Not doing something that isn’t worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.
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.
Modern-day offices have become interruption factories.
People are working longer and later because they can’t get work done at work anymore!
Meetings should be a last resort, especially big ones.
When someone takes your time, it doesn’t cost them anything, but it costs you everything. You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it.
So when someone takes that from you, they crush your feeling of accomplishment from a good day’s work. The deep satisfaction you’d experi...
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If you don’t own the vast majority of your own time, it’s impossible to be calm. You’ll always be stressed out, feeling robbed of the ability to actually do your job.
The only way to know if work is getting done is by looking at the actual work. That’s the boss’s job. If they can’t do that job, they should find another one.
Just enough to keep someone in the loop without having to internalize dozens of details that don’t matter.
Monthly heart beats
we want people to feel the oblivious joy of focus rather than the frantic, manic fear of missing something that didn’t matter anyway.
Their motive is rather more likely to be a unidirectional form of sacrifice: yours.
Eyyy
What the boss most needs to hear is where they and the organization are falling short. But who knows how a superior is going to take such pointed feedback? It’s a minefield, and every employee knows someone who’s been blown up for raising the wrong issue at the wrong time to the wrong boss.
The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you’ll know what it’s really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.
Not all the time, because you shouldn’t ask before you’re willing and able to act on the answer, but often enough to know most of what’s going on most of the time.
Declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you’re setting out to do. And any estimate of how much work it’ll take to do something you’ve never tried before is likely to be off by degrees of magnitude.
100%. Just stop please. Lol
The idea that you’ll instantly move needles because you’ve never tried to move them until now is, well, delusional.
Respect the work that you’ve never done before. Remind yourself that other people’s jobs aren’t so simple. Results rarely come without effort. If momentum and experience are on your side, what is hard can masquerade as easy, but never forget that not having done something before doesn’t make it easy. It usually makes it hard.
Focus on your strengths.
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.
Prevent yourself from being dumb by sleeping the right amount of hours. You need to reset.
Sleep-deprived people aren’t just short on brains or creativity, they’re short on patience.
Even well-rested individuals can get caught up in a storm of nonsense if it’s started by their superior.
Ask anyone who’s been on a two-week bender with little sleep if they can remember what they did last Tuesday. Most probably cannot. And no, “lots of stuff” doesn’t count.
A great night’s sleep enhances every waking hour. Isn’t that what you’re looking for anyway?
