every existing industry. But if you label your own work as disruption, it probably isn’t.
Basecamp isn’t changing the world. It’s making it easier for companies and teams to communicate and collaborate. That’s absolutely worthwhile and it makes for a wonderful business, but we’re not exactly rewriting world history. And that’s okay.
If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you. There’s no longer this convenient excuse for why it has to be all work all the time. The opportunity to do another good day’s work will come again tomorrow, even if you go home at a reasonable time.
So it becomes much harder to justify those 9 p.m. meetings or weekend sprints. And, as an added bonus, you won’t sound like a delusional braggart when you describe what you do at the next family get-together. “What do I do? Oh, I work at PetEmoji—we’re changing the world by disrupting the pet health-care insurance space.” Riiiiight.
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.
We don’t do grand plans at Basecamp—not for the company, not for the product. There’s no five-year plan. No three-year plan. No one-year plan. Nada.
We didn’t start the business with a plan, and we don’t run the business by a plan. For nearly 20 years, we’ve been figuring it out as we go, a few weeks at a time.
For some that may seem shortsighted. They’d be right. We’re literally looking at what’s in front of us, not at everything we could possibly imagine.
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.”
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. We simply believe that you’re better off steering the ship with a thousand little inputs as you go rather than a few grand sweeping movements made way ahead of time.
Furthermore, long-term planning instills a false sense of security. The sooner you admit you have no idea what the world will look like in five years, three years, or even one year, the sooner you’ll be able to move forward without the fear of making the wrong big decision years in advance. Nothing looms when you don’t make predictions.
Much corporate anxiety comes from the realization that the company has been doing the wrong thing, but it’s too late to change direction because of the “Plan.” “We’ve got to see it through!” Seeing a bad idea through just because at one point it sounded like a good idea is a tragic waste of energy and talent.
The further away you are from something, the fuzzier it becomes. The future is a major abstraction, riddled with a million vibrating variables you can’t control. The best information you’ll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution. We wait for those moments to make a call.
The idea that you have to constantly push yourself out of your comfort zone is the kind of supposedly self-evident nonsense you’ll often find in corporate manifestos. That unless you’re uncomfortable with what you’re doing, you’re not trying hard enough, not pushing hard enough. What?
Requiring discomfort—or pain—to make progress is faulty logic. NO PAIN, NO GAIN! looks good on a poster at the gym, but work and working out aren’t the same. And, frankly, you don’t need to hurt yourself to get healthier, either.
Sure, sometimes we stand at the threshold of a breakthrough, and taking the last few steps can be temporarily uncomfortable or, yes, even painful. But this is the exception, not the rule.
Generally speaking, the notion of having to break out of something to reach the next level doesn’t jibe with us. Oftentimes it’s not breaking out, but diving in, digging deeper, staying in your rabbit hole that brings the biggest gains. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.
Most of the time, if you’re uncomfortable with something, it’s because it isn’t right. Discomfort is the human response to a questionable or bad situation, whether that’s working long hours with no end in sight, exaggerating your business numbers to impress investors, or selling intimate user data to advertisers. If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you’re going to lose yourself, your manners, and your morals.
On the contrary, if you listen to your discomfort and back off from what’s causing it, you’re more likely to find the right path. We’ve been in that place many times over the years at Basecamp.
It was the discomfort of knowing two people doing the same work at the same level were being paid differently that led us to reform how we set salaries. That’s how we ended up throwing out individual negotiations and differences in pay, and going with a simpler system.
It was how uncomfortable it felt working for other people at companies that had taken large amounts of venture capital that kept us on the path of profitable independence at Basecamp.
Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm.
Working 40 hours a week is plenty. Plenty of time to do great work, plenty of time to be competitive, plenty of time to get the important stuff done.
So that’s how long we work at Basecamp. No more. Less is often fine, too. During the summer, we even take Fridays off and still get plenty of good stuff done in just 32 hours.
No all-nighters, no weekends, no “We’re in a crunch so we’ve got to pull 70 or 80 hours this week.” Nope.
Those 40-hour weeks are made of 8-hour days. And 8 hours is actually a long time. It takes about 8 hours to fly direct from Chicago to London. Ever been on a transatlantic flight like that? It’s a long flight! You think it’s almost over, but you check the time and there’s still 3 hours left.
Every day your workday is like flying from Chicago to London. But why does the flight feel longer than your time in the office? It’s because the flight is uninterrupted, continuous time. It feels long because it is long!
Your time in the office feels shorter because it’s sliced up into a dozen smaller bits. Most people don’t actually have 8 hours a day to work, they have a couple of hours. The rest of the day is stolen from them by meetings,
