The past three or four weeks have been absolute chaos for me — a part-time blogger and a full-time corporate drone. As the saying goes, promotions can feel like a death sentence.
This post looks at fixes for the daily nonsense many of us face. A big part of why the hamster wheel is so miserable is how inefficiently we work.
Work-life balance books are everywhere, but this one actually delivers: It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is full of practical ideas. Some of them go against traditional management thinking — and that’s a good thing for modern businesses.
What I love about this brisk, engaging 240-page read is how surprising it is. Basecamp, the tech company behind the book, has been around since 1999 and has purposely done things that run counter to what you’d expect from a young, innovative firm.
You’d expect long hours, a cult-like “family” culture, chaotic open offices with free snacks and energy drinks, and wildly varying pay based on “talent” supply and demand. According to the authors, Basecamp does none of that.
The book is full of profiles of writers, academics, and business people who produce huge amounts of quality work by structuring their days. Charles Dickens, for example, might write for five hours and then take a three-hour walk to recharge.
Concentration, focus, and a quiet culture sum up Basecamp’s approach. Meetings, emails, and instant messages are distractions that kill productivity.
Now, when I see someone with headphones on, I have a new respect for their need to focus. Dickens would have loved those headphones if he had to write in today’s so-called workspaces.
Fried and Heinemeier Hansson compare the Basecamp office to a library — a place where silence is expected and sometimes enforced. Why? Because quiet helps people focus, learn, and be creative.
Outside the office, they advocate for sane rules too: a strict 40-hour workweek, 32-hour weeks in summer, and even a 30-day sabbatical every three years. Sounds amazing.
Basecamp isn’t a flash-in-the-pan startup. This Chicago-based company has been around for 20 years, serves over 100,000 clients, and is clearly doing something right. Their benefits and focus on sustainable work were intentional from the start, with some policies refined over time. For example, “unlimited vacation” failed — people gravitate to the lowest common denominator out of fear or FOMO. If Joey only takes a week and a half off, others follow to prove their commitment.
At my company some campuses use shared workspaces and everyone hates them. Only the bean counters who want to save on real estate seem to like those germy, distracting rows of desks. Basecamp values cubicles because they give people space to think and create.
Pay at my company is based on supply and demand, and only managers know what some employees earn. It’s inconsistent. We struggle to keep pay equitable, and our “performance-based” bonuses often leave many contributors with nothing.
Basecamp, by contrast, pays people equally and aims to be within the top 10% of industry pay, using San Francisco as a baseline. I’m tempted to apply after reading this.
My company is trying to cut back on telecommuting. Basecamp welcomes remote applicants. If someone produces quality work, does it matter whether they’re in the office or on their couch? Plus, remote work saves on office space.
My job feels like surviving on meetings and email. I spend a lot of time replying to messages or sitting in meetings where my contribution is questionable. I do remove obstacles and hire strong teammates, but sometimes I wonder what value I’m really adding. Basecamp makes it hard to schedule meetings and favors an “office hours” model where questions get answered in set blocks of time. Apparently, it works.
My company doesn’t offer paid new-parent leave for fathers or partners; Basecamp gives six weeks. We don’t offer paid massages; Basecamp gives employees $100 a month to stay relaxed.
I could list more, but I’d just get sentimental.
Maybe I’m ready to move on, despite some setbacks in my early retirement plan. Maybe I just need a company like Basecamp. Even their hiring process is refreshing: instead of grilling candidates with trick questions, they have them do real work. Novel idea — see if someone can code, find bugs, or design a UI rather than relying on a resume and a thirty-minute interview.
I probably won’t change jobs right now, but if I did, Basecamp would be high on my list. It’s still a job and you have to deliver, but the founders get sustainability — they value keeping long-term talent instead of constantly hiring and retraining.
Sadly, many companies still view employees as line items on a spreadsheet rather than the heart of the organization.
As for me, I’m just glad I had time to read this 240-page book. I dog-eared a lot of pages and plan to try some of its ideas with my team inside the Fortune 50 “whale.” We’ll see if a few small changes can stick — or if I get shot out of the blowhole.
Do you have a favorite work-life balance book? Share it in the comments. Oh look — it’s beer-30!