Too busy to read?

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 Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It's up to each expert to decide their availability.

Fuck that. People should be missing out! Most people should miss out on most things most of the time. That's what we try to encourage at Basecamp. JOMO! The joy of missing out.

You'll often hear that people don't like change, but that's not quite right. People have no problem with change they asked for. What people don't like is forced change--change they didn't request on a timeline they didn't choose. Your "new and improved" can easily become their "what the fuck?" when it is dumped on them as a surprise.

Besides, the next morning (or week) has a way of telling the truth. It's good to sleep on something. You might well wake up the next day to see what was the world's best idea yesterday doesn't seem quite as important now. Taking a breather gives you perspective.

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.

Companies love to protect. They protect their brand with trademarks and lawsuits. They protect their data and trade secrets with rules, policies, and NDAs. They protect their money with budgets, CFOs, and investments. They guard so many things, but all too often they fail to protect what's both most vulnerable and most precious: their employees' time and attention. Companies spend their employees' time and attention as if there were an infinite supply of both. As if they cost nothing. Yet employees' time and attention are among the scarcest resources we have.

There are two primary reasons: (1) The workday is being sliced into tiny, fleeting work moments by an onslaught of physical and virtual distractions. And (2) an unhealthy obsession with growth at any cost sets towering, unrealistic expectations that stress people out.

The problem, as we've learned over time, is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks. Once you get up close, you see it's quite a bit higher than you thought. We assume that picking it will be easy only because we've never tried to do it before.

When you start to think about your company as a product, all sorts of new possibilities for improvement emerge. When you realize the way you work is malleable, you can start molding something new, something better.

One way we push back against this at Basecamp is by writing monthly "Heartbeats." Summaries of the work and progress that's been done and had by a team, written by the team lead, to the entire company. All the minutiae boiled down to the essential points others would care to know. Just enough to keep someone in the loop without having to internalize dozens of details that don't matter.

We've been practicing disagree and commit since the beginning, but it took Bezos's letter to name the practice. Now we even use that exact term in our discussions. "I disagree, but let's commit" is something you'll hear at Basecamp after heated debates about specific products or strategy decisions.

But the thing is, there's not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there's hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do

A deadline with a flexible scope invites pushback, compromises, and tradeoffs--all ingredients in healthy, calm projects. It's when you try to fix both scope and time that you have a recipe for dread, overwork, and exhaustion.

It's taken us a long time and a number of missteps to learn this core truth about selling: Sell new customers on the new thing and let old customers keep whatever they already have. This is the way to keep the peace and maintain the calm.

Saying no is the only way to claw back time. Don't shuffle 12 things so that you can do them in a different order, don't set timers to move on from this or that. Eliminate 7 of the 12 things, and you'll have time left for the 5. It's not time management, it's obligation elimination. Everything else is snake oil.

Focus on your work at hand. That's all we ask. That's all we require. If there's anything you must know, we promise you'll hear about it. If you're curious, cool--follow whatever you want--but we want people to feel the oblivious joy of focus rather than the frantic, manic fear of missing something that didn't matter anyway.

Mark Twain nailed it: "Comparison is the death of joy." We're with Mark.

You just can't bring your A game to every situation. Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be. We're not suggesting you put shit work out there. You need to be able to be proud of it, even if it's only "okay." But attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy.

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."