It doesn't have to be crazy at work

March 29, 2022

Table of Contents

Here are some notes from the marvelous book “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”. If you like the notes, please consider buying the book.

First

It’s Crazy at Work

Workday is being sliced into tiny moments by an onslaught of distractions.
Unhealthy obsession with growth.
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. Fewer distractions.
No growth at-all-costs. No false busyness. No ego-driven goals.

Your Company Is a Product

Do people who work here know how to use the company? Is it simple?
We work on projects for six weeks at a time, then we take two weeks off from scheduled work to roam and decompress.

Curb Your Ambition

Bury the Hustle

You aren’t more worthy in defeat or victory because you sacrificed everything.
You’re not very likely to find that key insight or breakthrough idea north of the 14th hour in the day. Creativity, progress, and impact do not yield to brute force.

Happy Pacifists

Just serve their customers.
All is fair in love and war. Except this isn’t love, and it isn’t war. It’s business.
We come in peace. We don’t have imperial ambitions. We aren’t trying to dominate an industry or a market. We wish everyone well. To get ours, we don’t need to take theirs.
Doubling, tripling, quadrupling our market share doesn’t matter.
Mark Twain: Comparison is the death of joy. What others do has no bearing on what we’re able to do, what we want to do, or what we choose to do.
The opposite of conquering the world isn’t failure. It’s participation. Being one of many options in a market is a virtue that allows customers to have a real choice.
At the end of the day, would you rather win an imaginary context by throwing sand in your competitors’ faces or by simply forgetting about them and making the best damn product you know how?

Our Goals: No Goals

Simply do the best work we can on a daily basis.
Goals are fake. You don’t need something fake to do something real.
Goals are made-up numbers that function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re reached or abandoned. Produce expectations.

Don’t Change the World

you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you.
Ambition hyperinflation: it’s no longer about making a great product/service. It’s about this BRAND_NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING.

Make It Up as You Go

We didn’t start the business with a plan, and we don’t run the business by a plan.
Every six weeks or so we decide what we’ll be working on next.
Short term plan - you change your mind often. And that’s a huge relief. Long term planning instills a false sense of security.
The best information you’ll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution.

Comfy’s Cool

The idea that you have to constantly push yourself out of your comfort zone is the kind of supposedly self-evident nonsense you’ll often find in corporate manifestos.
Most of the time, if you’re uncomfortable with something, its’ because it isn’t right.
If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you’re going to lose yourself, your manners, and your morals.
Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm.

Defend Your Time

8’s Enough, 40’s Plenty

Most people don’t have 8h a day. Time is stolen by meetings, conference calls and other distractions.
Most of what we think we have to do, we don’t have to do at all. It’s a choice and often a poor one.
When you cut out what’s unnecessary, you’re left with what you need.

Protectionism

top responsibility to protect our employee’s time and attention. Don’t expect great work if you don’t have a full day’s attention to devote it. Partial attention is no attention at all.
No status meetings at Basecamp. We ask people to write updates daily or weekly for others to read.
Meetings break time into “before” and “after”.

The Quality of an Hour

Look at your hours. If they’re a bunch of fractions, who or what is doing the division?
When was the last time you had three or four completely uninterrupted hours to yourself and your work?

Effective > Productive

Productivity is for machines, not for people.
When people focus on productivity, they end up focusing on being busy.
Being productive is about occupying your time. Being effective is about finding more of your time unoccupied and open for other things besides work.
It is perfectly OK to have nothing to do. Or, better yet, nothing worth doing. Not doing something that isn’t worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.

The Outwork Myth

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 your 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.
Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours.

Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

When you really need to get work done you rarely go into the office.
Modern-day offices have become interruption factories.
People are working longer and later because they can’t get work done at work anymore!

Office Hours

All subject-matter expects at Basecamp now publish office hours. Like in academia. It’s up to each expert to decide their availability.
What you do when you have a question on Monday and someone’s office hours aren’t until Thursday? You wait, that’s what you do.

Calendar Tetris

You just can’t reach into someone’s calendar, find an open slot, and plat your flag.
Meetings should be the last resort, especially big ones.
When someones takes your time, it doesn’t cost them anything, but it costs you everything.

The Presence Prison

When everyone knows you’re “available”, it’s an invitation to be interrupted.
What if you need something from someone and don’t know whether they’re available? Just ask them. If the respond, then you have what you need.

I’ll Get Back to You Whenever

Common thinking: If I can write you quickly, you can get back to me quickly, right? Technically right, practically wrong.
Almost everything can wait. And almost everything should.
The culture of eventual response rather than immediate response.
If someone doesn’t get back to you quickly, it’s not because they’re ignoring you - it’s probably because they are working. Don’t you have some other work to do while you wait?

FOMO? JOMO!

Fear of missing out? Joy of missing out!
There’s absolutely no reason everyone needs to attempt to know everything that’s going on at our company.

Feed Your Culture

We’re Not Family

The company is not “our baby”. It is our product. We’ll make it great, but we won’t take a bullet for it.
When executives talk about how their company is really a big ol’ family, beware. Their motive is rather more likely to be a unidirectional sacrifice: yours.
The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families.

They’ll Do as You Do

A leader who sets an example of self-sacrifice can’t help but ask self-sacrifice of others.
Workaholism is a contagious disease. Disseminate calm instead.

The Trust Battery

It is charged at 50% when people are first hired. Every time you work with someone at the company, the trust between the two of you is either charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise.
It is a summary of all interactions to date.
Having good relationships at work takes, err, work.
The worst thing you can do is pretend that interpersonal feelings don’t matter.

Don’t Be the Last to Know

If the boss really wants to know what’s going on: They have to ask. Not vague, self-congratulatory BS questions like “What can we do even better?”, but hard ones like “What’s something nobody dares to talk about?” or “Are you afraid of anything at work?” or “It there anything you worked on recently you wish you could do over?”
The higher you go in an organization, the less you’ll know what it’s really like. The CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.

The Owner’s Word Weights a Ton

There is no such thing as a casual suggestion when it comes from the owner of the business.
It takes great restraint as the leader of an organization not to keep lobbying ideas at everyone else.
Evading responsibility with a “But it’s just a suggestion” isn’t going to calm the waters.

Low-Hanging Fruit Can Still Be Out of Reach

the further away you’re from the fruit, the lower it looks
Declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight.

Don’t Cheat Sleep

Continued sleep deprivation batters your IQ and saps your creativity.
Get a good eight hours night.
Your brain is still active at night. It works through matters you can’t address during the day.

Out of Whack

Hire the Work, Not the Resume

Whenever someone joins (or leaves) a team, the old team is gone.
You can’t land a job at Basecamp based on your resume. You’ve to be good with people. Someone the rest of the team wants to work with, not just someone they’d tolerate.
We’re looking for candidates that are interesting and different from the people we already have.
Hire finalists for a week, pay them for their time and ask them to do a sample project for us.
Avoid hiring an imaginary person.

Nobody Hits the Ground Running

unless you hire someone straight out of an identical role at an identical company, they’re highly unlikely to be instantly up to speed and able to deliver anyway.
The quickest way to disappointment is to set unrealistic expectations.

Ignore the Talent War

Talent isn’t worth fighting over. It’s not a fixed, scared resource. It rarely even transplants well.
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!
Look at people’s work, not at their diploma.
Nurturing untapped potential is fare more exhilarating than finding someone who’s already at their peak.

Don’t Negotiate Salaries

most people just don’t enjoy haggling
Everyone in the same role at the same level is paid the same. Equal work, equal pay.
Once every year we review market rates and issues raises automatically. Our target is to pay everyone at the company the top 10% of the market regardless of their role.
We don’t pay traditional bonuses.
There are no stock options.
We’ve vowed to distribute 5% of the proceeds to all current employees if we ever sell the company. It’s a pleasant surprise, it’s not compensation.
If total profits grow year over year, we’ll distribute 25% of that growth to employees that year. This isn’t tied to role, it’s not about individual performance.
Some amount of turnover is a good thing, but salary shouldn’t be the main driver for most people.
Hiring and training people is not only expensive, but draining.

Benefits Who?

fancy benefits blur the lines between work and play to the point it’s mostly just work.
Dinners, lunches, game rooms, late nights - these mainly exist at companies that work 60_ hours a week, not 40. Sounds more like a bribe, than benefits.
Benefits benefit the employees, not the company:
- 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
- $100 monthly fitness allowance
Not a single benefit aimed at trapping people at the office.

Library Rules

When sales or service people, who often need to be loud and jovial on the phone, have to share accommodations with people who need long stretches of quiet, you’re not only destroying productivity, you’re forming resentment.
Distractions spread like viruses. Before you know it, everyone’s infected.
Rather than thinking of it as an office, we think of it as a library.
We’ve designated a handful of small rooms in the center of the office where people can go if they need to work on something together or make a private call.

No Fakecations

The whole purpose of a vacation is to get away. Work should not be on your mind.
Fakecations put employees on a leash - liable to be yanked back and pulled into work at any moment.
Unlimited vacation is a stressful benefit because it is not truly unlimited.
Ambiguity breeds anxiety.
The world will still be standing when you return.

Calm Goodbyes

A dismissal opens a vacuum, and unless you fill that vacuum with facts, it’ll quickly fill with rumors, conjecture, anxiety and fear.
Whenever someone leaves Basecamp, an immediate goodbye announcement is sent out companywide. It is written be either the person leaving or their manager.

Dissect Your Process

The Wrong Time for Real-Time

Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It’s completely exhausting.
When it comes to chat, we have two primary rules of thumb: “Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time” and “If it’s important, slow down.”
Chat is a great as a small slice but not the whole pie of communication.

Dreadlines

Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can’t work calmly.
Few things are so demoralizing as working on projects with no end in sight.
You can’t fix a deadline and then add more work to it. Our projects can only get smaller over time, not larger.
Not the CEO, not the CTO. The team that’s doing the work has control over the work. They wield the “scope hammer”.
Our deadlines are based on budgets, not estimates. Humans suck at estimating. But it turns out that people are quite good at setting and spending budgets.

Don’t be a Knee-Jerk

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 don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read over it. Twice. Three times even. Sleep on it. Take your time and gather and prsent thoughts.
Don’t meet, write. Don’t react, consider.

Watch Out for 12-Day Weeks

Ship software on Monday, not Friday.

The New Normal

Normal comes on quick. First it starts an outlier. Some behaviour you don’t love, but tolerate. Then someone else follows suit.

Bad Habits Beat Good Intentions

What we do repeatedly hardens into habits. The longer you carry on, the tougher is to change.
Later is where excuse live. Make change now.

Independences

We want our teams to be able to glide by one another independently rather than tripped up in lockstep. Things should fit together rather than stick together.
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. Customers get the value when it’s ready wherever, not when it’s ready everywhere.
Don’t tie more knots, cut more ties. The fewer bonds, the better.

Commitment, Not Consensus

When you get a bunch of people in a room under the assumption that consensus is the only way out, you’re in for a war of attrition. Whoever can keep arguing the longest, stands the best chance.
Good decisions are always going to be the product of consultation, evidence, arguments and debate. But the only sustainable method in business is to have them made by individuals.
I disagree, but let’s commit.
Allow everyone to be heard and then turn the decision over to one person to make the final call. It’s their job to listen, consider, contemplate and decide.
The final decision should be explained clearly to everyone involved. It’s not just decide and go, it’s decide, explain and go.

Compromise on Quality

Attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy.
Put efforts into separating what really matters from what soft of matters from what doesn’t matter at all.

Narrow as You Go

Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing. Confidently close that door.
Answer to new ideas that arrive too late: You’ll just have to wait.

Why Not Nothing?

“Nothing” should be always on the table.
It’s easier to mess up something that’s working well than it is go genuinely improve it.

It’s Enough

If it’s never enough, then it’ll be crazy at work.
Spend more time thinking, helping and writing - and less time rushing.

Worst Practices

What counts as the best practice for a company of 10,000 is very rarely so for a company of 10.
Many best practices are purely folklore.
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.
Best practices are like training wheels.

Whatever It Doesn’t Take

Reasonable expectations are out the window with whatever it takes. So you know you’re going to grossly underestimate the difficulty and complexity required to make it happen.
s/whatever does it take?/what will it take?/

Have Less to Do

it’s not time management, it’s obligation elimination.
Peter Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Become ruthless about eliminating either work that doesn’t need to be done or work we don’t want to do.

Three’s Company

Two programmers and one designer. If not three, it’s one or two rather than four or five.
Three is a wedge. Three has a sharp point. It’s an odd number and there are no ties. It’s powerful enough to make a dent, but weak enough to to break what isn’t broken.
Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.
Three keeps you honest. It tampers your ambition in all the right way.
Three people can talk directly with one another without introducing hearsay.

Stick With It

We make every idea wait a while. Generally a few weeks, at last. That’s just enough time either to forget about it completely or to realize you can’t stop thinking about it.

Know No

No is easier to do, yes is easier to say.
No is no to one thing, yes is no to a thousand things.
No is a precision instrument, yes is a blunt object.
When you say no to one thing, it’s a choice that breeds choices. Tomorrow you can be as open to new opportunities as you were today.
When you say yes now, it’s harder to say no later.
No is calm but hard, yes is easy but a flurry.

Mind Your Business

Risk Without Putting Yourself at Risk

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.

Season’s Greetings

We celebrate the summer months by cutting out a workday every week.
Winter is when we buckle down and take on larger, more challenging projects.
Celebrate the seasons, find ways to melt the monotony of work.

Calm’s in the Black

Crazy’s in the red (numbers).
Profit means time to think, space to explore. It means being in control of your own destiny and schedule.

Priced to Lose

The worst customer is the one you can’t afford to lose.
The problem with per-seat pricing is that it makes your biggest customers your best customers.
Becoming a calm company is all about making decisions who you are, who you want to serve, and who you want to say no to.

Launch and Learn

If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it.
Simulated situations give you simulated answers. Shipping real products gives you real answers.
We don’t show any customers anything until every customer can see it. We don’t beta-test with customers. We don’t ask people what they’d pay for something.

Promise Not to Promise

We’ve never committed to a product road map.
Promises lead to rushing, dropping, scrambling and a tinge of regret at the earlier promise that was a bit too easy to make.
Promises pile up like dept, and they accrue interest, too. The longer you wait to fulfill them, the more they cost to pay off and the worse the regret.
Promises are easy and cheap to make, actual work is hard and expensive.

Copycats

Getting angry only hurts you.
Do you think your customers are going to care? They just want a good product at a great price.

Change Control

People have no problem wit change they asked for. What people don’t like is forced change.
Sell the new customers the new thing and let old customers keep whatever they already have.
Be proud of your heritage.

Startups are Easy, Stayups Are Hard

The easiest day is day one.

No Big Deal or the End of the World?

People don’t like to have their grievances downplayed or dismissed. When that happens, even the smallest irritation can turn into an obsessive crusade.
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.
Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It doesn’t matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.

The Good Old Days

If the good days were so good, we’d do best to simply settle there. So we’ve decided to stay as small as we can for as long as we can.

Last

Choose Calm

If you don’t have the power to make things change at the company level, find your local level. You always have the choice to change yourself and your expectations. Change the way you interact with people. Change the way you communicate. Start protecting your own time.