It doesn’t have to be crazy at work, summarized!

I have always been fascinated with the simplicity and practicality of the books by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp (37Signals earlier) including Getting Real, Remote and Rework. After reading all these three books I was so interested in reading more from them, but they took a while to come up with “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”. As soon as I got to know about the book being published, I couldn’t wait much to read through it, and trust me it’s so simple that I read the whole book in 5 days with just about 1 Pomodoro (25 minutes) a day.

As the title of the book suggests, it’s pretty clear that the book includes the tips based on how Jason and David runs Basecamp while keeping the environment within the company calm while being productive and getting things done. There are lot of examples on how the anxiety and stress is not actually required to operate the company smoothly and maintain peace within each individuals.

Here is the summary of “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY AT WORK” as pointers.

Our company is a product. We want you to think of yours as one, too. Whether you own it, run it, or “just” work there, it takes everyone involved to make it better.

It doesn’t have to be crazy at work

How to run a calm company:

• 8-Hours Days
• 40-Hour Weeks
• Plenty of Time to Myself
• Comfortably Paced Days
• No Weekend Work
• Rarely A Meeting
• No Rushing
• Realistic Deadlines
• No Knee-Jerk Reactions
• Time to Consider
• A Great Night’s Sleep
• Ample Autonomy
• Work From Anywhere

What is Calm?

• Calm is protecting people’s time and attention.
• Calm is about 40 hours of work a week.
• Calm is reasonable expectations.
• Calm is ample time off.
• Calm is smaller.
• Calm is a visible horizon.
• Calm is meetings as a last resort.
• Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second.
• Calm is more independence, less interdependence.
• Calm is sustainable practices for the long term.
• Calm is profitability.

Throughout the book, various key personalities are featured with their approaches on how they maintained their calm while making a dent in the universe:

• British naturalist Charles Darwin published 19 books, including “On the origin of Species”, while working just 4.5 Hours a Day.
• Atul Gawande, a surgeon who’s written four bestselling books, blocks off 25% of his time for unscheduled but important tasks to avoid getting swallowed up by email and meetings.
• Novelist Isabel Allende has two offices, one just for writing that has no internet or telephone, and another for tackling administrative tasks.
• Pulitzer prize-winning author Colson Whitehead writes for just five hours a day and takes a year off between projects to play video games and cook.
• Alice Waters, the chef who pioneered the slow food movement, starts her day by taking a walk or making a fire.
• The physicist Stephen Hawking took a long view of research and work, encouraging his students to spend time on other activities like listening to music and socializing with friends.
• Bruno Cucinelli, founder of The Eponymous Italian fashion brand, forbids his employees from working past 5:30 PM because he believes sending email after business hours intrudes into their private lives.
• Television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes runs multiple primetime shows while sticking to a policy of not answering phone calls or returning emails after 7PM and during weekends.
• Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard spends part of the year in Wyoming, where he hikes, fly fishes, and checks in with the office just twice a week.
• Charles Dickens maintained a strict schedule comprising five hours of writing in silence, followed by a three-hour walk.
• The poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou preferred to write alone in a modest hotel room and would wrap up at 2 PM, giving herself enough time to decompress before dinner with her husband.
• Novelist Haruki Murakami writes international best-sellers and gets to bed by 9PM every night.
• Composer Gustav Mahler wrote his symphonies during solitary summers in the alps, where he worked in a small cottage and walked for hours after work.
• Astrophysicist Sandra Faber, who has made groundbreaking discoveries about dark matter and how galaxies are formed, said her work benefited from a daily routine where she’d focus on her family during evenings and weekends.
• French intellectual and writer Simone De Beauvoir broke up her day by taking a four-hour break each afternoon to visit friends.
• Playwright Tony Kushner writes longhand with fountain pens on yellow legal pads, and stops when he runs out of ink.
• Japanese marathon runner Yuki Kawauchi, who won the 2018 Boston Marathon, trains just once a day because he has a full-time government job and believes in respecting his body’s natural “Mileage Limit”.
• Even with everything Oprah’s involved with, she still takes time to meditate, walk her docs, and spend time in her garden.

The above points can be considered as the basic summary, while the book is divided into chapters and titles, each title is self-explanatory and is simplified in the book with the help of 2-4 pager explanations. Reading through it kind of feels like reading sequential blog articles. Hence, below are the different chapters and headings within it, basically table of contents.

First:

• It’s crazy at work
• A quick bit about us
• Your company is a product

Curb Your Ambition

• Bury the hustle
• Happy pacifists
• Our goal: No goals
• Don’t change the world
• Make it up as you go
• Comfy’s cool

Defend Your Time

• 8’s enough, 40’s plenty
• Protectionism
• The quality of an hour
• Effective > Productive
• The outwork myth
• Work doesn’t happen at work
• Office hours
• Calendar Tetris
• The presence prison
• I’ll get back to you whenever
• FOMO? JOMO! (Joy of Missing out 😀 )

Feed Your Culture

• We’re not family
• They’ll do as you do
• The trust battery
• Don’t be the last to know
• The owner’s word weighs a ton
• Low-hanging fruit can still be out of reach
• Don’t cheat sleep
• Out of whack
• Hire the work, not the resume
• Nobody hits the ground running
• Ignore the talent war
• Don’t negotiate salaries
• Benefits who?
• Library rules
• No fakecations
• Calm goodbyes

Dissect Your Process

• The wrong time for real-time
• Dreadlines
• Don’t be a knee-jerk
• Watch out for 12-day weeks
• The new normal
• Bad habits beat good intentions
• Independencies
• Commitment, not consensus
• Compromise on quality
• Narrow as you go
• Why not nothing?
• It’s enough
• Worst practices
• Whatever it doesn’t take
• Have less to do
• Three’s company
• Stick with it
• Know no

Mind Your Business

• Risk without putting yourself at risk
• Season’s greetings
• Calm’s in the black
• Priced to lose
• Launch and learn
• Promise not to promise
• Copycats
• Change control
• Startups are easy, stayups are hard
• No big deal or the end of the world?
• The good old days

Last

• Choose calm

Of course, this article won’t do justice to the book, “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”, most of the titles are pretty intuitive but please feel free to ask me through any points which you can’t grasp the idea about. I’d be more than happy to help. 🙂