Bookworm: It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

Basecamp founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson take a look today’s ‘hustle culture’ and teach us how to make work schedules less crazy.

Since when was working hard a bad thing?

Since it encouraged us to work a 70-hour week, compromising our sleep, fitness and diet; since it stole time from family and friends, making us less connected and supported by the people who care about us most, and ince it created a toxic culture of ‘embattled’ workplaces where competitors are the enemy, customers are ‘targeted’ by a sales ‘force’ keen to make a ‘killing’, and peers get ‘head-hunted’ in the ‘war’ for talent.

So say Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of tech company Basecamp – a project and time-management platform. They take a refreshingly critical look at who and what is to blame, and why we shouldn’t just accept ‘hustle culture’ and ‘grinding’ a s part of modern life. 

I see where they're coming from. How can we make it a bit less crazy?

A good starting point is to remember that working long hours doesn’t make us productive. Quite the opposite, actually.

Really? But I have so much to do!

We all have loads to do. And we’ll never tick off everything on our to-do list. But to make work calmer, a two-pronged attack is needed. Prong one is about the things we can do as an individual to protect our time, and prong two covers the things that our company can do.

So, as an individual, what can I do?

Don’t schedule meetings when a call or a message would suffice. Find quicker and more efficient ways of sharing updates and making decisions. Only engage with the relevant people at the relevant time.

Trust your colleagues. Trust is like a battery that starts at 50% when you meet someone new. Your experience with them can charge or drain it. Give colleagues opportunities to charge the battery, so they can do more on their own in future. To help this go well, iterate your process, and don’t expect perfection at first.

Give yourself time for focus. Remove distractions, block out your time and don’t keep switching focus – concentrating on one thing for 60 minutes is far, far better than working on six things for 10 minutes each.

And what can my company do?

Think about your company as a product, and think of staff as the users. Every product has flaws that need perfecting. Where is there a bug? Where is it too slow and unwieldy? Invest time in fixing the bugs, and you’ll win it back tenfold in the future.

Here are a few practical tips:  

Stop setting organisational goals. Setting a an audacious’ goal of 20% growth per quarter is commonplace, but everyone knows it’s entirely arbitrary. Goals can cause companies to compromise their integrity to meet them. 

Introduce ‘office hours’. Managers can have an assigned (digital) open door for questions at set times each week. Outside of those, everyone needs to wait. Real emergencies are vanishingly rare.

Promote a JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) not a FOMO culture. Nost employees don’t need to know everything about the business, so turn off the ‘firehose’ of internal updates and let people get on with their specific jobs.

Drop ‘dreadlines’. If a manager sets a deadline, they mustn’t bring it forward without reducing the scope. If they increase the scope, they must extend the deadline. This applies to clients, too.

Stop ‘real-time’ presentations. Presenting to a group, only for them to give you a knee-jerk response, isn’t helpful. Instead, write or record presentations and leave them online for people to respond to over a few days. This saves time, avoids distraction, removes stress for the presenter, and gives people a chance to reflect before responding.

Put a stop to senior leaders' ‘casual suggestions’. When the boss makes a passing comment, people take it almost as seriously as a directive. Too many random ad-hoc ideas from the top can be very disruptive.

Don’t let ‘big accounts’ be back-seat drivers. Many companies have a handful of ‘important’ accounts they’d do anything to keep. These companies can end up dictating product features, timelines and even processes. Being agnostic about the size of each customer helps smooth that out.

This all sounds dreamy. But is it realistic?

Not every company will adjust its pace and ambitions like this, but those that do stop to question their need to be the best, or the most profitable, or the fastest growing might realise that these goals are all illusions, and we might as well just chill out.

What am I most likely to say after reading this book?

“Let’s slow down – time is precious.”

What am I least likely to say after reading this book?

“Let’s speed up – time is money!”