Thread by @karen_meep

A thread of my favorite quotes from “it doesn’t have to be crazy at work”
amazon.com/Doesnt-Have-Be…

Thanks @jasonfried and @dhh for writing this book. It reads well and and speaks to me in more ways than you’ll know.

Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.

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.

A company is like software. It has to be usable, it has to be useful. And it probably also has bugs, places where the company crashes because of bad organizational design or cultural oversights.

Creativity, progress, and impact do not yield to brute force.

Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.”

Because let’s face it: Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned.

cc @nukemberg

The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation. It’s no longer about simply making a great product or providing a great service. No, now it’s all about how this BRAND-NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING. A thousand revolutions promised all at once. Come on.

cc @shemag8

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.

If you can’t fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours. Most of what we think we have to do, we don’t have to do at all. It’s a choice, and often it’s a poor one.

Being productive is about occupying your time—filling your schedule to the brim and getting as much done as you can. Being effective is about finding more of your time unoccupied and open for other things besides work.

Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

The problem comes when you make it too easy—and always acceptable—to pose any question as soon as it comes to mind. Most questions just aren’t that pressing, but the urge to ask the expert immediately is irresistible.

cc @dkomanov this is from a chapter about you

This book is right up your alley for @swleadweekly @orenellenbogen

When someone takes your time, it doesn’t cost them anything, but it costs you everything.

If you don’t own the vast majority of your own time, it’s impossible to be calm.

Everyone’s status should be implicit: I’m trying to do my job, please respect my time and attention.

(About JOMO- Joy Of Missing Out) we want people to feel the oblivious joy of focus rather than the frantic, manic fear of missing something that didn’t matter anyway.

Whenever executives talk about how their company is really like a big ol’ family, beware. They’re usually not referring to how the company is going to protect you no matter what or love you unconditionally. >>

You know, like healthy families would. Their motive is rather more likely to be a unidirectional form of sacrifice: yours.

The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families. Allies of families.

The worst thing you can do is pretend that interpersonal feelings don’t matter. That work should “just be about work.” That’s just ignorant. Humans are humans whether they’re at work or at home.

If the boss really wants to know what’s going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask! >>

>> Not vague, self-congratulatory bullshit questions like “What can we do even better?” but the hard ones like “What’s something nobody dares to talk about?” or “Are you afraid of anything at work?”

The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you’ll know what it’s really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.

Declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you’re setting out to do.

So the next time you ask an employee to go pick some low-hanging fruit —stop yourself. Respect the work that you’ve never done before. Remind yourself that other people’s jobs aren’t so simple.

We’ve found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who’s already at their peak. We hired many of our best people not because of who they were but because of who they could become.

we look at benefits as a way to help people get away from work and lead healthier, more interesting lives. Benefits that actually benefit them, not the company.

Ambiguity breeds anxiety.

When someone is let go, we often have to clarify once they’re gone. It’s important that the reasons are clear and no questions linger unanswered.

When it comes to chat, we have two primary rules of thumb: “Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time” and “if it’s important, slow down.”

“If everyone needs to see it, don’t chat about it.” Give the discussion a dedicated, permanent home that won’t scroll away in five minutes.

👆🏻👆🏻 love this, I use google docs/slides for my proposals☝🏻☝🏻

It’s when you try to fix both scope and time that you have a recipe for dread, overwork, and exhaustion.

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

When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit. But if you start crazy, it’ll define you. You have to keep asking yourself if the way you’re working today is the way you’d want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not “later.”

Today we ship things when they’re ready rather than when they’re coordinated.

Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment.

Being clear about what demands excellence and what’s perfectly okay just being adequate is a great way to bring a sense of calm into your work.

Calm requires getting comfortable with enough.

Best practices imply that there’s a single answer to whatever question you’re facing.
...
All this isn’t to say that best practices are of no value. They’re like training wheels.

Find what works for you and do that. Create your practices and your patterns. Who cares if they’re the best for everyone else.

The only way to get more done is to have less to do.

Time isn’t something that can be managed. Time is time - it rolls along at the same pace regardless of how you try to wrestle with it. What you choose to spend it on is the only thing you have control over.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.

You can do big things with small teams, but it’s a whole hell of a lot harder to do small things with big teams.

The problem with per-seat pricing is that it makes your biggest customers your best customers. With money comes influence, if not outright power.

If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it.

Startups are easy, stayups are hard.

Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either.

No matter where you live in and organization, you can start making better choices. Choices that chip away at crazy and get closer to calm.

🙆🏻‍♀️🙆🏻‍♀️🙆🏻‍♀️
That’s all folks!
I just landed in Vilnius 💃🏼💃🏼💃🏼