It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

Office hours We have all sorts of experts at Basecamp. People who can answer questions about statistics, JavaScript event handling, database tipping points, network diagnostics, and tricky copyediting. If you work here and you need an answer, all you have to do is ping the expert. That’s wonderful. And terrible. It’s wonderful when the right answer

I’ll get back to you whenever The expectation of an immediate response is the ember that ignites so many fires at work. First someone emails you. Then if they don’t hear from you in a few minutes, they text you. No answer? Next they call you. Then they ask someone else where you are. And that someone else goes through the same steps to get your att

or a dozen questions in a single day, who knows. What’s worse, they don’t know when these questions might come up. You can’t plan your own day if everyone else is using it up randomly. 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 Tues

It’s become fashionable to blame distractions at work on things like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But these things aren’t the problem, any more than old-fashioned smoke breaks were the problem 30 years ago. Were cigarettes the problem with work back then? The major distractions at work aren’t from the outside, they’re from the inside. The wander

There are lots of ways to slice 60 minutes. 1 × 60 = 60 2 × 30 = 60 4 × 15 = 60 25 + 10 + 5 + 15 + 5 = 60 All of the above equal 60, but they’re different kinds of hours entirely. The number might be the same, but the quality isn’t. The quality hour we’re after is 1 × 60. A fractured hour isn’t really an hour—it’s a mess of minutes. It’s really har

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

Things would stay exactly as they were for current customers (but they could also opt into the new approach if they wanted to). Nothing was better for customers. And, self-servingly, nothing was better for us, too. It meant less work, it meant shrinking the project, it meant shaving weeks off the deadline, and it meant shipping sooner. Nothing was

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

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