It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

Work doesn’t happen at work Ask people where they go when they really need to get something done. One answer you’ll rarely hear: the office. That’s right. When you really need to get work done you rarely go into the office. Or, if you must, it’s early in the morning, late at night, or on the weekends. All the times when no one else is around. At th

We’ve also recently put a new profit growth-sharing scheme in place. If total profits grow year over year, we’ll distribute 25 percent of that growth to employees in that year. This isn’t tied to role, it’s not about individual performance, and since we don’t have salespeople, it’s not commission. Everyone shares or no one gets it.

We don’t believe in busyness at Basecamp. We believe in effectiveness. How little can we do? How much can we cut out? Instead of adding to-dos, we add to-don’ts.

When you stick with planning for the short term, you get to change your mind often. And that’s a huge relief! This eliminates the pressure for perfect planning and all the stress that comes with it.

Tobias Lütke, CEO at Shopify, coined the term. Here’s how he explained it in a New York Times interview: “Another concept we talk a lot about is something called a ‘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 char

Short-term planning has gotten a bum rap, but we think it’s undeserved. Every six weeks or so, we decide what we’ll be working on next. And that’s the only plan we have. Anything further out is considered a “maybe, we’ll see.”

Take managerial direction, for example. At Basecamp, we’ve designed the organization to be largely manager-free. This means people are generally responsible for setting their own short- to medium-term direction and will only get top-level directives. That can be an

So we borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours. For some that means an open afternoon every Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It’s up to each expert to decide their availability.

Don’t meet, write. Don’t react, consider.

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.