“It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work” Book Summary and Quotes –by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

I’ve summarized 64 crisp and digestible points from this book. Jason Fried’s ideas on building a calm company are very counter-intuitive in today’s business world, yet provided us a new perspective on how we could/should run a company. Enjoy!

1. Focus on creating the best damn product. Ignore competitors and so-called market share. Just a deep satisfaction with doing our best work as measured by our happiness and our customers’ purchases.

2. We don’t need any target or goals to stress every employee and have an excuse to compromise morals, honesty, and integrity. We simply do the best work we can on a daily basis. Staying in business, serving our customers well, being a delightful place to work, should be the goals of a business.

3. You don’t need to change the world. Your company can improve the lives of a small group of people? Yes. Then that’s great. Set out to do good work. Set out to be fair in your dealings with customers, employees, and reality. Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world.

4. Every six weeks or so, we decide what we’ll be working on next. No long term goals. They would only lower your agility to make better decisions in the future.

5. Being comfortable is alright. Discomfort might be a sign of sensing what’s not supposed to be right in business.

6. 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. 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.

7. At basecamp, we see it as our top responsibility to protect our employees’ time and attention. We expect people to do work with a full day’s attention. So there’s no status meetings. Instead, we ask people to write updates daily or weekly on Basecamp for others to read when they have a free moment.

8. We need uninterrupted hours for ourselves and our work. Be aware of who or what is distracting you. How many things are you working on in a given hour? One thing at a time means one big thing for hours at a time or, better yet, a whole day.

9. Focus on effectiveness over productivity. How little can we do? How much can we cut it out? Being effective is about finding more of your time unoccupied and open for things besides work.

10. A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you are called upon. It’s about doing what you say you are going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customers, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with. People get ahead because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many reasons. Simply working more hours doesn’t get you ahead.

10. An office is full of distractions. People actually need an environment, which is interruption-free, to get work done.

11. Set “office hours” for experts to answer others’ questions. It could be an hour a day, or let’s say Tuesdays afternoon 14:00–17:00. It gives experts the time to really get work done.

17. Meetings should be a last resort, especially big ones. You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it. You don’t easily take others’ time and vice versa. So having an online calendar that shows others’ available timeslots (and occupy them with meetings) isn’t a good practice.

18. If others are really working, then don’t expect to get a response from them immediately. Nearly everything can wait. In Basecamp, we encourage people not to check email, or chat, or instant message for long stretches of uninterrupted time.

19. Turn fear of missing out (FOMO) to the joy of missing out (JOMO). Focus on your work at hand. If there’s anything you must know, we promise you’ll hear about it. We have a practice of writing monthly “Heartbeats”: Summaries of the work and progress that’s been done and had by a team, written by the team leaders, to the entire company.

20. Companies are a product, not a family. Coworks are only people who work together to make a product. And that we are proud of it. That’s enough. A company is here to support your family, not sacrifice your time with family and friends.

21. If you want your employees to work reasonable hours, plentiful rest, and a healthy lifestyle, you as the boss needs to set an example.

22. Image your relationship with someone else is like a charged battery. Based on your interaction with the person, it could be charged or discharged. Everyone’s way of charging the Trust Battery is different. You need new actions and new attitudes to make better relationships. Having good relationships at work and interpersonal feelings matter. Humans can’t separate work and personal feelings completely.

23. As a management level, don’t expect your employees to actively tell you what’s wrong. You have to ask! Ask specific questions 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?” Posting real, pointed questions is the only way to convey that it’s safe to provide real answers. The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you’ll know what it’s really like.

24. As the owner of the company, you need to know the weight of your own words. It takes great restraint as the leader of an organization not to keep lobbing ideas at someone else. The ripple effect may affect what your employees are working on, just because they misunderstood your curiosity as a direction.

25. Next time you ask an employee to go pick some low hanging fruit- stop yourself. 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.

26. Get a good eight hours of sleep every night. Otherwise, you are sacrificing your IQ, temper, and creativity. Yes, sometimes emergencies require extra hours. And yes, sometimes the deadline can’t be moved and you’ll need to make an extra push at the end. And that’s okay because the exhaustion isn’t sustained, it’s temporary.

27. Don’t hire the résumé, hire the work. At Basecamp, we care about who you are and what you can do. First, you have to be good people. Someone the rest of the team are excited to work with, not just someone they’d tolerate. Next, we look for candidates who are interesting and different from the people we already have, so as to bring a new perspective to the table. Lastly, we put a real project in front of the candidate so they can show us what they can do. We pay them for a sample project to accomplish within a certain period of time. No riddles, blackboard problem solving, or fake “come up with the answer on the spot” scenarios.

28. At Basecamp, people are generally responsible for setting their own short- to the medium-term direction and will only get top-level directives. We all do the work, so the influence is most effectively exerted by leading the work, not by calling for it.

29. Don’t expect new recruited senior people can immediately drive results for your company. Their previous role, job description, and experience might not directly be applied to the new workplace.

30. We 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. We don’t consider formal education. We look at people’s actual work, not at their diploma or degree. Focus on nurturing the right environment to nurture talent within people.

31. We no longer negotiate salaries or raises at Basecamp. Everyone in the same role at the same level is paid the same. Equal work, equal pay. We use the same scale to assess when someone is in line for a promotion. Every employee, new or old, fits into a level on the scale, and there is a salary pegged to each level per role. Once every year we review market rates and issue raises automatically. You’ll be paid in the top 10 percent for that position. There’s also no stock options. We’ve only vowed to distribute 5 percent of the process to all current employees if we ever sell the company. And if total profit grows year over year, we’ll distribute 25 percent of that growth to employees in that year. Everyone shares or no one gets it. There are no traditional bonuses because employees treat as expected salary, so if they ever dipped, people felt like they got a demotion.

32. Basecamp offers “outside the office benefits”, not free dinner/ free bar within the office in exchange for overtime work:

• Fully paid vacations every year for everyone who’s been with the company for more than a year. Up to $5,000 per person or family.
• Three-day weekends all summer. May through September we only work 32-hour weeks. This allows everyone to take Friday off, or Monday off.
• 30-day-paid sabbaticals every three years.
• $1,000 per year continuing-education stipend. This isn’t about learning a skill people can use at work, it’s about everything outside work.
• $2,000 per year charity match. Donate to a charity of your choice up to $2,000, and we’ll match it up to $2,000.
• A local monthly CSA (community-supported agriculture) share. This means fresh fruits and vegetables at home for people and their families.
• One monthly massage at an actual spa, not the office.
• $100 monthly fitness allowance.

33. Library Rules: create an office like a library anywhere in the world: quiet and calm. Conversations should be kept to a whisper so as not to disturb anyone who could possibly hear you. If you need full-volume collaboration, we’ve designated a handful of small rooms in the center of the office for people to work something together.

34. Basecamp offers three weeks of paid vacation, a few extra personal days to use at your discretion, and the standard national holidays every year. This is a guideline. If you need a couple of extra days, no problem. We don’t track your days off, we use the honor system. Just make sure to check with your team before taking an extended absence, so they’re not left in the lurch. Just be mindful of the impact, let your team know, then unplug entirely and have a great vacation.

35. Whenever someone leaves Basecamp, an immediate goodbye announcement is sent out companywide. It’s written by either the person leaving or their manager. It’s their choice. Either way, someone has to write one. Everyone else in the company can respond to this announcement before the day is up. Note: If their message to the company doesn’t include exact details on why they’re leaving, their manager will post a follow-up message the following week filling in the gap. If someone is let go, we often have to clarify once they’re gone. It’s important that the reasons are clear and no questions linger unanswered.

36. When it comes to chat/group chat, we have two primary rules of thumb: “Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time” and “ If it’s important, slow down.” If it’s important, we ask people to “write it up” instead. This goes together with the rule “If everyone needs to see it, don’t chat about it.” Give the discussion a dedicated, permanent home that won’t be scrolled away for a good period of time.

37. Deadlines should be fixed and fair. The date won’t move up and back. The scope of the work can only go down, not up. As we progress, the team, not CEO, decides what are the must-haves, what’s worth keeping and what can wait. Also, deadlines are based on budgets, not estimates. If we tell a team that they have six weeks to build a great calendar feature, 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. No unreasonable amount of work in a short period of time. No unreasonable expectation of quality given the resources and time. No ever-expanding amount of work in the same time frame as originally promised.

38. In Basecamp, we don't present in person. 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. No one interrupts the presenter and the listeners don’t need to react immediately.

39. New software updates are done on Monday, not Friday. So people don’t need to work over the weekend, and since Monday is the busiest day, people will be more prepared for the release.

40. Unwinding the new normal requires far more effort than preventing that new normal from being set in the first place. If you don’t want to gnarly roots in your culture, you have to mind the seeds. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s what you do. So do better.

41. If you begin a business by hiring a lot of unnecessary people, believing that the only way to work together would be face-to-face, thinking working crazily is necessary, they will become a habit, and define you. 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”.

42. Prevent most business activities to be tied up. Because the failure of one component would affect the efficiency of the other. For example, you don’t need to wait for five major new features together in one big-bang release. Instead, ship each new improvement when ready. The fewer bonds, the better.

43. Practice “ I disagree, but let’s commit”. It’s impossible to have a consensus of everyone on a decision. Companies should invite everyone to pitch their ideas, make their case, and have their say, but then the decision is left to someone else 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 after it’s being made.

44. Compromise on quality if it’s necessary. 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. Save the occasional scrutiny for the differentiating details that truly matter.

45. When we spend six weeks on something, the first week or two is for clarifying unknowns and validating assumptions. This is the time when the concept needs to hit reality and either bounce if it’s sound or shatter if it’s not. That’s why we quickly begin prototyping as soon as we can in those first two weeks. After that brief period of exploration at the beginning of a project (if it’s validated)- it’s time to focus in and get narrow. You stop chasing for new and better ideas. You commit to the idea and spend 4 weeks of a six-week project finishing things up and ramping things down, not coming up with big new ideas.

46. Doing nothing is an option. You don’t need to constantly improve new features, because your customers might got used to the current functions, and will be uncomfortable changing the way they operate. So doing nothing is an option. Or simply giving them an option to try out new functions is enough. Sometimes you have to recognize that time in doesn’t equal benefits out.

47. There’s no hard-line definition of when’s enough or what’s enough in every situation, one thing’s for sure: if it’s never enough, then it’ll always be crazy at work. You can always reply to a customer faster, 30 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes. From a customer point of view, 10 minutes is already faster than most companies in the industry, it’s not worthwhile stressing everyone to meet the 2-minute mark. Let them have time to think and write.

48. Be aware of the “best practices” in the market. People who had written them may not actually do the work themselves. The situation of the other company might be different from yours. People who designed the practice might not be smarter than you. There’s no single answer to a question, you have a choice to design and decide what works best for your company. Create your practices and your patterns.

49. Don’t say “Whatever it takes”. Say, What will it take? That’s an invitation to a conversation. One where we can discuss strategy, make tradeoffs, make cuts and come up with a simpler approach altogether, or even decide it’s not worth it after all.

50. Have less to do creates more time for important work. Identify work that doesn’t have to be done or work we don’t want to do. If receiving checks from customers used up a lot of manual work, then simply say “we won’t accept checks anymore”.

51. In Basecamp, all product work is done by teams of three. 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. Teams of three tempers your ambition in all the right ways, reduces miscommunication and improves coordination.

52. Keep your energy focused on finishing what you're working on now, and then decide what to do next once you’re done and ready to take on new work. Have 6 weeks project and don’t cut something short to start something new.

53. Be willing to say No, because it opens up opportunities for you to take on what’s important.

54. Take calculated risks, not reckless ones. The smart bet is one where you get to play again if it doesn’t come up your way. For example, double the price of your product for new customers might sound risky, but you can always lower the price again if it doesn’t work out.

55. People grow full and stiff if they stay in the same swing for too long. Have some changes to the monotony of work. For example, send seasonal fruits and veggies to people’s homes, and have different working hours in summer and wintertime.

56. You need a good profit margin to stay calm. In Basecamp, we’ve always kept our cost in check and never made a move that would push us back from calm to crazy. Profit means calming your employees, having time to think and space to explore. Don’t burn your money and people.

57. At Basecamp, the price is $99/month total, fixed. No matter you have 50, 500, or 5000 employees. The reason for not setting a “per-user-price” is because 1. no one customer should be bigger than the others, 2. helping small businesses is more satisfying work to us 3.we don’t want to do what chasing big contracts inevitably lead to, like sales meetings. 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.

58. Surveys, brainstorming, and debating what’s good for your customers are all simulated answers. The only way to be sure is shipping to your customers. Do your best, believe in the work you’ve done, and ship it. You can iterate from there with real insights and real answers from real customers who really do need your product. Launch and learn.

59. Don’t make promises to your customers, including future improvements. You want your customers to judge the product they could buy and use today, but you don’t need to promise the delivery time of a new feature or product. A promise may lead to rushing, scrambling, and a tinge of regret at the earlier pose that was a bit too easy to make. 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.

60. Don’t spend time being angry with copycats. It drains your energy and focus. When someone copies you, they are copying a moment in time, and they don’t know the thinking that’ll help you have a million more moments in time. They’re stuck with what you left behind.

61. For many customers, better doesn’t matter when comfort, consistency, and familiarity are higher up on their value chain. So sell customers on the new thing and let old customers keep whatever they already have. This is the way to keep the peace and maintain the calm. There’re 3 versions for customers at different phases in Basecamp. You can invite your customers to check out the latest offerings. But it should be an invitation, not a demand.

62. Getting a business started is easy. Staying in business is hard. Things get harder as you go, not easier. There’ll be more people, more politics. Your competitors will start to hunt you down. Be prepared and set the right expectations.

63. Imagine you are a staff in the customer service department, 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 “The end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other. Imagine you’re staying in a hotel, and the air-conditioning isn’t working right. You called the front desk, and they said it couldn’t be fixed. No apology, no tone of contribution. That’s taking the “No big deal” token. Now, imagine the front desk saying “ We’re sorry. I understand how it must be impossible to sleep when it’s so hot in your room. If I can’t fix this problem for you tonight, would you like me to refund your stay and help you find a different hotel room nearby? In any case, while we’re figuring out the solution, allow me to send a bottle of ice water and some ice cream.” This is forcing your customers to take the “It’s no big deal” token. Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either.

64. You don’t need to constantly scale up, and grow bigger and bigger as a company. You should keep your company simpler and smaller, with less complexity, hassle, and headaches. Grow slower and stay closer to the size that you enjoy the most. Grow in control. Maintain a sustainable, manageable size. Stay as a calm, profitable, and independent company.

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