It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy At Work
A mighty book on working without bullshit.
"It doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work" was among the books that influenced me the most last year and has continued influencing me ever since.
Learned about it while listening to a podcast with one of its authors, Jason Fried, about a year ago.
Fell in love with the ideas that ran so contrary to typical business and entrepreneurial speak and to how most of us run our businesses and teams…
Downloaded the book the moment I stepped down the treadmill.
Read it almost in one go, painfully recognizing how crazy it had recently been.
Loved the book.
Talked about it to a dozen different persons.
Shared some of the ideas with my team.
Implemented gradual small changes in the way I work and think about work.
Offered the book to my CEO.
The cover image has been pinned to my blackboard ever since as a reminder that doing great work is not mutually exclusive with being a calm company. That our company is a product and we can and should build it, shape it and tweak it to make it better.
It doesn't have to be crazy at work.
My key takeaways:
Out of the 60, 70, or 80 hours a week many people are expected to pour into work, how many of those hours are really spent on the work itself? And how many are tossed away in meetings, lost to distraction, and withered away by inefficient business practices? The bulk of them. The answer isn't more hours, it's less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. Less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.
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. 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? When you realize the way you work is malleable, you can start molding something new, something better.
Bury the hustle. The human experience is so much more than 24/7 hustle to the max. To put in a good day’s work, day after day, but nothing more.
Comparison is the death of joy. The opposite of conquering the world isn’t failure, it’s participation.
No Goals. Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. Chasing goals often leads companies to compromise their morals, honesty, and integrity to reach those fake numbers. 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.
Don't change the world. 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. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.
Defend your time. 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.
Effective > Productive. Productivity is for machines, not for people. There’s nothing meaningful about packing some number of work units into some amount of time or squeezing more into less. Machines can work 24/7, humans can’t. Being productive is about occupying your time—filling your schedule to the brim and getting as much done as you can. Being effective is about finding more of your time unoccupied and open for other things besides work. Time for leisure, time for family and friends. Or time for doing absolutely nothing. Yes, it’s perfectly okay to have nothing to do. Or, better yet, nothing worth doing.
A great work ethic. 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.
JOMO. The joy of missing out. It’s JOMO that lets you turn off the firehose of information and chatter and interruptions to actually get the right shit done. It’s JOMO that lets you catch up on what happened today as a single summary email tomorrow morning rather than with a drip-drip-drip feed throughout the day. JOMO, baby, JOMO.
We’re not family. 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.
It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what you do.
The Trust Battery. It’s charged at 50 percent when people are first hired. And then every time you work with someone at the company, the trust battery between the two of you is either charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise. The work of recharging relationships is mostly one to one.
Don't cheat sleep. Nearly everything can wait until morning.
Hire the work, not the resume.
Nobody hits the ground running. The quickest way to the disappointment is to set unreasonable expectations.
Ignore the talent war. nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who’s already at their peak.
No fakecations. Time off isn’t much of a benefit if it can be taken right back. That’s more like a shitty loan with terrible terms. Plus interest. And worries. Screw that.
Dreadlines. Most deadlines aren’t so much deadlines as dreadlines. Unrealistic dates mired by ever-expanding project requirements. More work piles on but the timeline remains the same. That’s not work, that’s hell.
Commitment, not consensus. Someone in charge has to make the final call, even if others would prefer a different decision. Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment.
Compromise on quality. You just can’t bring your A-game to every situation. Attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy. Rather than put endless effort into every detail, put lots of effort into separating what really matters from what sort of matters from what doesn’t matter at all.
Doing nothing can be the hardest choice but the strongest, too.
Best practices = worst practices. because of that powerful label - best practice - people often forget to even question them. Someone much smarter than us must have come up with them, right? Everyone who follows them is experiencing great success, right? If we aren’t doing well by them, it’s got to be our fault, right? Most of those rights are probably wrongs.
Know No. No is easier to do, yes is easier to say. No is no to one thing. Yes is no to a thousand things. No is a precision instrument, a surgeon’s scalpel, a laser beam focused on one point. Yes is a blunt object, a club, a fisherman’s net that catches everything indiscriminately. No is specific. Yes is general. When you say no now, you can come back and say yes later. If you say yes now, it’s harder to say no later. No is calm but hard. Yes is easy but a flurry. Knowing what you’ll say no to is better than knowing what you’ll say yes to. Know no.
Until you’re running a profitable business, you’re always almost out of business. you can’t go broke generating a profit. Profit means time to think, space to explore. It means being in control of your own destiny and schedule. Without profit, something is always on fire. When companies talk about burn rates, two things are burning: money and people. Once you’re burning up, one you’re burning out.
Launch and Learn. If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it. Maybe it’ll be spot-on. Maybe it’ll suck. Maybe it’ll be somewhere in between. But if you want to know, you have to put it on the market. The real market. It’s the only place you’ll find the truth.
Change control. People have no problem with the 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. Getting things off the ground is so hard that it’s natural to expect it’ll just get easier from here. Except it doesn’t. Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That’s the dirty little secret of business.