It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy at Work

“Working like mad” seems to have become the norm for many. For one thing, our days in the office are more and more broken up, because of continuous distractions and interruptions, both physical and virtual; for another, there is a collective and unhealthy obsession for growth at any cost, which puts enormous and often unrealistic expectations on people. As a result, we end up with hardly any free time left. Having said that, constant exhaustion is not a badge of honour, more like a sign of stupidity, because people tend to work at a rapidly growing pace and obtain less results.

The problem isn’t solved by working longer hours but by wasting less time, having less distractions and less worry: it is time to stop glorifying those who work like mad. Contrary to the standards in the working world, the authors of this book, the founders of Basecamp, a Cloud based app that helps companies to organise projects and internal communications, rather than being driven by stress or haste, and have managed to do so for over twenty years, maintaining a profitable business. This is why they decided to share their choices and their motivations, showing that a “calm” company is within everyone’s reach. Their philosophy is based on the assumption that a company is the first of an entrepreneur’s products and as in product development, progress in business is achieved through repetition: if you want to improve, you must constantly fine tune, revise and repeat. Yet there are very few companies that apply this process to the business itself. Most continue to repeat established practices, even when something is clearly not working. Thinking of your business as a product leads you to ask yourself certain questions. For example, are all the employees clear about how the business works? Is the business user-friendly? Just like software, a company has to be functional and useful.

It will probably have bugs, and knots to untangle due to bad organizational planning or to some cultural aspects that might have been overlooked, and can only be resolved by turning your attention to them. When you start to think of your company as a malleable product, new possibilities for improvement start to emerge. You need to continually ask yourself if the way that you are working today is the way that you want to work in 10, 20 or 30 years: if this is not the case, it is time to make a change, now, not later.