It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

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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.

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?

Calm is a destination

Less jumping over exploding cars and wild chase scenes, more laying of bricks and applying another layer of paint.

When you think of yourself as a military commander who has to eliminate the enemy (your competition), it’s much easier to justify dirty tricks and anything-goes morals. And the bigger the battle, the dirtier it gets.

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.

Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.

Oftentimes it’s not breaking out, but diving in, digging deeper, staying in your rabbit hole that brings the biggest gains. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.

If you listen to your discomfort and back off from what’s causing it, you’re more likely to find the right path.

Your time in the office feels shorter because it’s sliced up into a dozen smaller bits.

One thing at a time doesn’t mean one thing, then another thing, then another thing in quick succession; it means one big thing for hours at a time or, better yet, a whole day.

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.

How fast you can reach someone [at work] has nothing to do with how quickly they need to get back to you.

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.

If the boss really wants to know what’s going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask! Not vague, self-congratulatory bullshit questions like “What can we do even better?” but the hard ones like “What’s something nobody dares to talk about?” or “Are you afraid of anything at work?” or “Is there anything you worked on recently that you wish you could do over?” Or even more specific ones like “What do you think we could have done differently to help Jane succeed?” or “What advice would you give before we start on the big website redesign project?”

So the next time you ask an employee to go pick some low-hanging fruit — stop yourself. Respect the work that you’ve never done before.

A great night’s sleep enhances every waking hour.

A company clearly benefits, too, from having healthier, more interesting, well-rested workers.

Ambiguity breeds anxiety.

“If it’s important, slow down.”

Give the discussion a dedicated, permanent home that won’t scroll away in five minutes.

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.

If you don’t want gnarly roots in your culture, you have to mind the seeds.

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.

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

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.

Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be.

You can always go back later, but only if you actually finish.

Doing nothing can be the hardest choice but the strongest, too.

Are you building your company to last, or are you starting with an exit strategy in mind? Different practices.

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.”

[…] small things are often all that’s necessary. The occasional big thing is great, but most improvements come as small incremental steps.

People aren’t stupid — they know that burning cash means the good times won’t last.

The worst customer is the one you can’t afford to lose.

Thanks but no thanks.

[…] since no one customer can pay us an outsized amount, no one customer’s demands for features or fixes or exceptions will automatically rise to the top. This leaves us free to make software for ourselves and on behalf of a broad base of customers, not at the behest of any single one or a privileged few.

But then why not just […] sell to small businesses on one model and also have a group of people dedicated to servicing big businesses? Because we don’t want to be a two-headed company with two cultures. Selling to small businesses and selling to enterprises take two very different approaches with two very different kinds of people.

Becoming a calm company is all about making decisions about who you are, who you want to serve, and who you want to say no to.

Launch and learn.

That’s what promises lead to—rushing, dropping, scrambling, and a tinge of regret at the earlier promise that was a bit too easy to make.

You’ll often hear that people don’t like change, but that’s not quite right. People have no problem with change they asked for. What people don’t like is forced change — change they didn’t request on a timeline they didn’t choose.

Startups are easy, stayups are hard.

Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.

Whatever the pressures, there’s no law of nature dictating that businesses must grow quickly and endlessly. There’s only a bunch of business-axiom baloney like “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” Says who?

We decided that if the good old days were so good, we’d do our best to simply settle there. Maintain a sustainable, manageable size. We’d still grow, but slowly and in control. We’d stay in the good days — no need to call them old anymore.

Cutting back when times are great is the luxury of a calm, profitable, and independent company.

Are you going to keep pulling people off one incomplete thing to jump onto another incomplete thing? Or are you going to choose to finish what you started before moving on to the next?