Book: It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.

What a great book! The best part of this book is that there’s nothing so out of this world there, they are just talking about what we should be doing.

Hey, it’s true, it doesn’t have to be crazy at work. We can still do our best and deliver an amazing product without making ourselves miserable working like crazy to meet some made-up numbers used as “goals”. We can still be ambitious and make something our users love without driving the whole team crazy. We can have a productive environment to let people do their work in the best way possible.

Here is my raw notes about the book:

  • Having a calm and productive environment is a choice.
  • There are many great tips in this book and I already saw a situation where the solution proposed would apply. Here are my raw notes for this book:
  • People can’t get the work done at work anymore
  • The answer is not more hours, it’s less bullshit
  • You can have a calm company too. Chaos should not be the norm at work
  • Do you know where the money comes from? Customers. Not any [[venture capital]] or something like that.
  • Calm is reasonable expectations, 40 hours work week, smaller, visible horizon, meetings as a last resort, async first and real-time second, profitability
  • “The goals don’t care about how you feel” — 💭 what a weird way of thinking
  • Your work is not to love or war, it’s business. If you think you’re a commander and have to exterminate your enemy, you will do any dirty trick to get there. No morals.
  • It doesn’t matter how much market share we have. Do we have enough money to pay the bills and have some profit? Are we growing? In case both answers are YES, then we are great.
  • At the end of the day, would you prefer to win an imaginary contest by throwing sand in the eye of your competitors or by doing the best product you can?
  • Our goals? No goals! Just be profitable. We care about our products and customers, and we get better every day. We just don’t care about having specific goals.
  • They tried it once, but it was just an incentive to pretend they care about a number they made up. * It’s also not worth it to take the cultural trade-offs just to have it.
  • Let’s face it: goals are fake. They are just artificial targets for the sake of setting targets. They are a source of stress.
  • There’s a dark side to goal-setting: companies sometimes lost the integrity to reach those numbers. “Let’s reduce quality to deliver.”
  • If you stop thinking you have to change the world, you will lift a burden from your shoulder and everyone else working with you
  • You don’t have to feel discomfort all the time. Sometimes discomfort is painful, but it’s needed, but not all the time. Sometimes, if you’re uncomfortable, it’s because something is not right. — 💭 I’m not sure if I agree 100% with the arguments here. The argument on discomfort happens, but it’s not the same for “pushing yourself harder”. I think that pushing yourself harder is where you get the most out of what you want, but I also agree that having “push yourself harder” as a corporate strategy doesn’t seem very healthy and that’s probably the point of this argument.
  • Sometimes is not breaking out but driving deeper
  • You don’t need more than 40 hours. You need to remove useless interruptions and actually work 40 hours. Be a protectionist but remember to protect what matters most
  • When was the last time you had 3 or even 4 hours of uninterrupted work?
  • Effective is better than productive. Don’t focus on being busy, but being effective on what you do.
  • Not doing something which is not worth doing is a fantastic way of spending your time
  • When people have to get something done, they leave the office. The office doesn’t make much sense anymore.
  • Office hours are the time when you will be available for people to reach you and ask questions. Questions can wait
  • I don’t care about what people are doing at this particular moment, I care about the work they are delivering.
  • It’s important to know the status of people during emergencies but 1% of the time should not drive and become a rule. Assume that people are focusing on their work.
  • Companies are not families, they are supporters of families
  • It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what you do. Don’t let your managers overwork and don’t do it yourself. Be calm as you want your company to be
  • The owner’s word weighs a ton. Any comment or suggestions from the owner can make something to become a priority. Things like “it’s just a suggestion” don’t work.
  • Be careful with low-hanging fruits. Many of them look low when you’re not close enough. Take special care when you’re assigning someone else to take care of it, you may be setting this person to fail.
  • Be careful with sleep deprivation the bad parts are not always easy to notice, but they affect the whole team.
  • Benefits who? Offices with game consoles, free dinner, etc. benefit the company, not the employees. Staying in the office longer than you should is not a benefit
  • Paid vacations for employees that have more than one year working for Basecamp. They also pay the travel for this person up to 5000. 32 hours work week in the summer so the employees can have a 3 days weekend. 30 days paid sabbatical every 3 years, to do whatever you want. 1000 USD a year for education, not just related to work. Donation match, if you donate until 2k USD, the company also donates the same amount. Fresh local vegetable expense. 100 for exercises. Not a single benefits to keep people at work
  • Library rules. Make your office look like a library, where people go to study and get things done. It may have one room for noisy conversations, not the whole place
  • No fakations (fake vacations)
  • If we don’t clearly communicate why you terminate with someone, people will start finding a reason for themselves
  • Saying goodbye is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be cold. There should always be a message about what happened and the reasoning for leaving, either from the person leaving or their manager
  • Real-time chatting can be a problem because of FOMO. If you’re not reading all day, you may miss something important and not have the chance to give your two cents
  • If it’s important, slow down. Don’t process essential things one line at a time, write words down and discuss it.
  • Real-time chatting is excellent as a small slice not a whole pie of communication
  • If there’s a deadline, we keep the date, but the scope may change. We keep the must-have things and cut what can be cut. Adding more work after the deadline is unfair, we just reduce it after setting the date.
  • A deadline with a flexible scope is better than an estimation. People suck at estimates.
  • Culture is what you do. Do the right things.
  • Disagree and commit. Don’t try to convince everyone, it’s impractical. Someone should be responsible for decisions but everyone should be heard, and they need to feel it.
  • Have less to do instead of struggling with time management. Learn to say no.
  • Parts of your revenue just don’t worth it. Sometimes it’s better to trade some revenue for your time (receiving payments in checks)
  • It’s OK to take risks but not high risk all the time (double or nothing)
  • We always kept ourselves profitable with a positive account. It’s hard to be calm when you have a negative account or is almost going out of business
  • Keep the same price for all customers. It doesn’t matter how many accounts they will have, they will be just another client, and your support and features have to be great for all of them. By doing that you avoid having special changes for one client or be tied to them because of the high volume of money
  • Launch and learn. Beta processes take a lot of time and effort, let the market tell you their feedback
  • When something is wrong with your product, help your client to reach the “not a big deal conclusion”. Most of the time it’s not costly to do that, and the feedback from your service will be astonishing comparing with it may be. Example: bad air conditioning in a hotel room. You could provide a refund, cold water, ice cream, and help the customer find another hotel nearby. This attitude will probably trigger a “not a big deal” reaction to the problem.
  • A calm company is a choice, make it yours.