It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

Key Concepts

“Your Company Is a Product”

“Yes, the things you make are products (or services), but your company is the thing that makes those things. That’s why your company should be your best product.” (p. 9)

“If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company. But when it comes to companies, many stand still. They might change what they make, but how they make it stays the same.” (p. 9)

“But when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use the company? Is it simple? Complex? Is it obvious how it works? What’s fast about it? What’s slow about it? Are there bugs? What’s broken that we can fix quickly and what’s going to take a long time?” (p. 9)

“Happy Pacifists”

“The business world is obsessed with fighting and winning and dominating and destroying. This ethos turns business leaders into tiny Napoleons.” (p. 20)

“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. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.” (p. 21)

“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?” (p. 22)

“Make It Up as You Go”

“Short-term planning has gotten a bum rap, but we think it’s undeserved. Every six weeks or so, we decide what we’ll be working on next. And that’s the only plan we have. Anything further out is considered a ‘maybe, we’ll see.’” (p. 32)

“Furthermore, long-term planning instills a false sense of security. The sooner you admit you have no idea what the world will look like in five years, three years, or even one year, the sooner you’ll be able to move forward without the fear of making the wrong big decision years in advance. Nothing looms when you don’t make predictions.” (p. 32)

“8’s Enough, 40’s Plenty”

“Working 40 hours a week is plenty. Plenty of time to do great work, plenty of time to be competitive, plenty of time to get the important stuff done. So that’s how long we work at Basecamp. No more. Less is often fine, too. During the summer, we even take Fridays off and still get plenty of good stuff done in just 32 hours.” (p. 41)

“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.” (p. 41)

“When you cut out what’s unnecessary, you’re left with what you need. And all you need is 8 hours a day for about 5 days a week.” (p. 42)

“The Quality of an Hour”

“A fractured hour isn’t really an hour—it’s a mess of minutes. It’s really hard to get anything meaningful done with such crummy input. A quality hour is 1 × 60, not 4 × 15. A quality day is at least 4 × 60, not 4 × 15 × 4.” (p. 46)

“Office Hours”

“Imagine the day of an expert who frequently gets interrupted by everyone else’s questions. They may be fielding none, a handful, or a dozen questions in a single day, who knows. What’s worse, they don’t know when these questions might come up. You can’t plan your own day if everyone else is using it up randomly.” (p. 57)

“So we borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours.” (p. 57)

“But what if you have a question on Monday and someone’s office hours aren’t until Thursday? You wait, that’s what you do. You work on something else until Thursday, or you figure it out for yourself before Thursday. Just like you would if you had to wait to talk to your professor.” (p. 57)

“We’re Not Family”

“Companies love to declare “We’re all family here.” No, you’re not. Neither are we at Basecamp. We’re coworkers. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about one another. That doesn’t mean we won’t go out of our way for one another. We do care and we do help. But a family we are not. And neither is your business.” (p. 77)

“The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families. Allies of families. They’re there to provide healthy, fulfilling work environments so that when workers shut their laptops at a reasonable hour, they’re the best husbands, wives, parents, siblings, and children they can be.” (p. 78)

“Out of Whack”

“Balance is give and take. The typical corporate give-and-take is that life gives and work takes. If it’s easier for work to claim a Sunday than for life to borrow a Thursday, there ain’t no balance.” (p. 96)

“If work can claim hours after 5:00 p.m., then life should be able to claim hours before 5:00 p.m.” (p. 97)

“Hire the Work, Not the Résumé”

“We do better work, broader work, and more considered work when the team reflects the diversity of our customer base. “Not exactly what we already have” is a quality in itself.” (p. 101)

“For example, when we’re choosing a new designer, we hire each of the finalists for a week, pay them $1,500 for that time, and ask them to do a sample project for us.” (p. 102)

“Great people who are eager to do great work come from the most unlikely places and look nothing like what you might imagine. Focusing just on the person and their work is the only way to spot them.” (p. 103)

“Library Rules”

“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.” (p. 119)

“That’s what we did with our Chicago office at Basecamp. Rather than thinking of it as an office, we think of it as a library. In fact, we call our guiding principle: Library Rules.” (p. 120)

“To account for the need for the occasional full-volume collaboration, we’ve designated a handful of small rooms in the center of the office where people can go to if they need to work on something together (or make a private call).” (p. 121)

“Skeptical? Make the first Thursday of the month Library Rules day at the office. We bet your employees will beg for more.” (p. 121)

“Dreadlines”

“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. Few things are as demoralizing as working on projects with no end in sight.” (p. 136)

“Our deadlines remain fixed and fair. They are fundamental to our process—and making progress.” (p. 136)

“What’s variable is the scope of the problem—the work itself. But only on the downside. You can’t fix a deadline and then add more work to it.” (p. 137)

“And who makes the decision about what stays and what goes in a fixed period of time? The team that’s working on it.” (p. 137)

“It’s critical that the scope be flexible on the downside because almost everything that can take six months can also be done in some other form in six weeks. Likewise, small projects balloon into large projects all the time if you’re not careful. It’s all about knowing where to cut, when to say stop, and when to move on.” (p. 137)

“Don’t Be a Knee-Jerk”

“At Basecamp we flip the script. 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. And then it’s posted to Basecamp, which lets everyone involved know there’s a complete idea waiting to be considered.” (p. 139)

“We don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback.” (p. 140)

“That’s how you go deep on an idea.” (p. 140)

“Give it a try sometime. Don’t meet, write. Don’t react, consider.” (p. 140)

“Have Less to Do”

“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.” (p. 172)

“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.’” (p. 172)  

“Three’s Company”

“Nearly all product work at Basecamp is done by teams of three people. It’s our magic number. A team of three is usually composed of two programmers and one designer. And if it’s not three, it’s one or two rather than four or five. We don’t throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three.” (p. 174)

“The problem with four is that you almost always need to add a fifth to manage. The problem with five is that it’s two too many. And sex, seven, or eight on a team will inevitably make simple things more complicated than they need to be.” (p. 175)

“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.” (p. 175) 

“Launch and Learn”

“If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it. You can test, you can brainstorm, you can argue, you can survey, but only shipping will tell you whether you’re going to sink or swim.” (p. 197)

“Real answers are only uncovered when someone’s motivated enough to buy your product and use it in their own natural environment—and of their own volition. Anything else is simulation, and simulated situations give you simulated answers. Shipping real products gives you real answers.” (p. 198)

Quotables

“The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.” (p. 4)

“So you hereby have our permission to bury the hustle. To put in a good day’s work, day after day, but nothing more.” (p. 18)

“Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.” We’re with Mark.” (p. 22)

“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.” (p. 27)

“Yes, it’s perfectly okay to have nothing to do. Or, better yet, nothing worth doing. If you’ve only got three hours of work to do on a given day, then stop.” (p. 51)

“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.” (p. 52)

“If you can’t be bothered to schedule a meeting without software to do the work, just don’t bother at all. It probably wasn’t necessary in the first place.” (p. 64)

“‘But how do you know if someone’s working if you can’t see them?’ Same answer as this question: “How do you know if someone’s working if you can see them?” You don’t. 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.” (p. 65)

“It’s work, it’s not news. We must all stop treating every little fucking thing that happens at work like it’s on a breaking-news ticker.” (p. 71)

“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.” (p. 92)

“The people who brag about trading sleep for endless slogs and midnight marathons are usually the ones who can’t point to actual accomplishments.” (p. 93)

“We’re not suggesting you put shit work out there. You need to be able to be proud of it, even if it’s only “okay.” But attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy.” (p. 155)

“‘Doing nothing isn’t an option.’ Oh, yes, it is. And it’s often the best one. “Nothing” should always be on the table.” (p. 159)

“No is easier to do, yes is easier to say. No is no to one thing. Yes is no to a thousand things.” (p. 178)

“Without profit, something is always on fire. When companies talk about burn rate, two things are burning: money and people. One you’re burning up, one you’re burning out.” (p. 191)

“Saying “Yes, later” is the easy way out of anything. You can only extend so many promises before you’ve spent all your future energy. Promises are easy and cheap to make, actual work is hard and expensive. If it wasn’t, you’d just have done it now rather than promised it later.” (p. 201)

“Besides, copying does more harm to the copier than to the copied. When someone copies you, they are copying a moment in time. They don’t know the thinking that went into getting you to that moment in time, and they won’t know the thinking that’ll help you have a million more moments in time. They’re stuck with what you left behind.” (p. 205)

“On day one, every startup in the world is in business. On day one thousand, only a fraction remain standing. That’s reality. So pace yourself. Don’t burn out early thinking the hard part is behind you.” (p. 211)