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Don’t you want to wake up with new solutions in your head rather than bags under your eyes?
All-nighters are red flags, not green lights. If people are pulling them, pull back. Nearly everything can wait until morning.
But trying to teach a small company how to act like a big one rarely does anyone any good. You’re usually better off finding someone who’s familiar with the challenges at your company’s size or thereabouts.
We’ve found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who’s already at their peak. We hired many of our best people not because of who they were but because of who they could become.
After all, where you live has nothing to do with the quality of your work, and it’s the quality of your work that we’re paying you for. What difference does it make that your bed is in Boston, Barcelona, or Bangladesh?
This gives everyone at the company the freedom to pick where they want to live, and there’s no penalty for relocating to a cheaper cost-of-living area. We encourage remote work and have many employees who’ve lived all over the world while continuing to work for Basecamp.
insidious.
Proceeding in gradual subtlewy
When companies act like they own all of their employees’ time, they breed a culture of neurotic exhaustion. Everyone needs a chance to truly get away and reboot.
Ambiguity breeds anxiety.
If you don’t clearly communicate to everyone else why someone was let go, the people who remain at the company will come up with their own story to explain it. Those stories will almost certainly be worse than the real reason.
Offboarding
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.
the reality is that specific designs encourage specific behaviors. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.
But it turns out that people are quite good at setting and spending budgets. If we tell a team that they have six weeks to build a great calendar feature in Basecamp, they’re much more likely to produce lovely work than if we ask them how long it’ll take to build this specific calendar feature, and then break their weekends and backs to make it so.
Instead of asking estimates from developers, have them commit to this 1 month worth of features. If estimates are far, what can we move to the next month or how do we make it leaner
A deadline with a flexible scope invites pushback, compromises, and tradeoffs—all ingredients in healthy, calm projects. It’s when you try to fix both scope and time that you have a recipe for dread, overwork, and exhaustion.
they require you to embrace budgets and shun estimates. Great work will fill the time allotted if you allow it to.
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.
When we present work, it’s almost always written up first. A complete idea in the form of a carefully composed multipage document. Illustrated, whenever possible.
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.
Friday is the worst day to release anything.
BBR days.
if you work the weekends, you don’t get a chance to recharge. Basically, when you’ve worked all week and you’re forced to work the weekend, the following Monday is the eighth day of the last week, not the first day of next week. This means that if you keep working through that following week, you’re working 12-day weeks. That’s no good.
No chance to calibrate. You need to recalibrate just like a tesla battery after 3-5 years
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.
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.
Today we ship things when they’re ready rather than when they’re coordinated. If it’s ready for the web, ship it! iOS will catch up when they’re ready. Or if iOS is first, Android will get there when they’re ready.
Customers get the value when it’s ready wherever, not when it’s ready everywhere. So don’t tie more knots, cut more ties. The fewer bonds, the better.
If every one of them has to be made by consensus, you’re in for an endless grind with significant collateral damage. The cost of consensus is simply too much to pay over and over again.
When you get a bunch of people in a room under the assumption that consensus is the only way out again, you’re in for a war of attrition. Whoever can keep arguing the longest stands the best chance of winning.
Someone in charge has to make the final call, even if others would prefer a different decision. Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment.
Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
“I disagree, but let’s commit” is something you’ll hear at Basecamp after heated debates about specific products or strategy decisions.
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.
Last thing: What’s especially important in disagree-and-commit situations is that the final decision should be explained clearly to everyone involved. 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.
I needed to hear this!
attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy.
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.
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. “That’s fine” is such a wonderfully relaxing way to work most of the time. Save the occasional scrutiny for the differentiating details that truly matter.
Commit to an idea. See it through. Make it happen. You can always go back later, but only if you actually finish.
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!
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.
Sometimes we assume that someone has to like or dislike something. Often they just get used to something and that’s what they prefer. Taking that away is a violent act, not a gentle one.
Sometimes you have to fight against the obvious. And sometimes you have to recognize that time in doesn’t equal benefits out. Doing nothing can be the hardest choice but the strongest, too.
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.
every best practice should come with a reminder to reconsider.
But you’re not actually capturing a hill on the beach of Normandy, are you? 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.
Shots fired
Whatever it takes means sloppy work in the service of just delivering something.
Rather than demand whatever it takes, we ask, What will it take?
The only way to get more done is to have less to do. Saying no is the only way to claw back time.
Management scholar Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago when he said “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Bam!
boom
Any conversation with more than three people is typically a conversation with too many people.
It’s powerful enough to make a dent, but also weak enough to not break what isn’t broken. Big teams make things worse all the time by applying too much force to things that only need to be lightly finessed.
