MinuteRead
30 min
Loading…
Book summary
by Jason Fried
Premium summary · Opens in the app · 5 min read
It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work helps you relax about the current hurry-up and work yourself to death culture and instead see why getting rid of these stressful mentalities will make you and your company more focused, calm, and productive.
It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work helps you relax about the current hurry-up and work yourself to death culture and instead see why getting rid of these stressful mentalities will make you and your company more focused, calm, and productive.
In my old engineering job, I had managers who consistently put in 60 hour weeks or longer. They’d be the first to come in and the last to leave. And most of the time they wore their weariness from it like a badge of honor.
I vowed that I would never do that. Now that I’m out of that job, however, I still often see this dangerous mentality. The average person looks down on working 40 hours a week or less, and this is wrong.
It makes sense when you consider that business owners need to keep their company profitable, but this is the wrong way to do it.
One way to help the added stress that comes from overworking is to look at the similarities between your company and a product. Start by asking yourself some questions to get you thinking.
How easy or difficult is it for employees to “use” your company? In what areas is it efficient and where is it slow? And are there any bugs that you need to fix?
Consider the mindset of any business that sells a product. They’re constantly working hard to make sure it’s as good as possible, right? In the same way, you can also keep looking for ways to make sure that your business or job is as efficient as it can be.
And don’t forget that just like software, companies and individuals will end up crashing if their problems aren’t taken care of!
As cofounders of their business, Fried and Hansson have done something radical for their employees. They’ve let them have an eight-hour workday. Doesn’t sound crazy to you? Well in this day, most managers don’t think this is enough. If you think about this, it’s kind of insane. Some long flights are eight hours and they feel like an eternity, yet the same amount of time at the office doesn’t feel nearly as long. Even with this time, why do we never feel like we can get it all done in just 40 hours a week? Comparing the flight to a regular workday, it’s not got many distractions. When you’re in the office, in contrast, you’ve got a ton of interruptions from all sorts of places. Not to mention a string of meaningless and inefficient meetings that only pull you away from focusing on your work. With all of this going on it can seem totally normal to work over 40 hours a week.…
Continue reading in the MinuteRead app
Get the complete 5-minute summary of It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work
Get the complete summary in the appWork won’t be so crazy if you treat your company like it was a product.
You can get more out of the workday if you don’t waste so much time in unimportant meetings and other time sinkholes.
Relaxation, confidence, and decisiveness are all results of taking calculated risks.
"It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work" is a strong fit if you want practical ideas around business, career, culture—especially themes like work won’t be so crazy if you treat your company like it was a product; you can get more out of the workday if you don’t waste so much time in unimportant meetings and other time sinkholes. The MinuteRead summary distills these concepts into a focused read, whether you're deciding whether to buy the book or applying its lessons at work.
Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals' products include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework. 37signals' products do less than the competition -- intentionally. 37signals weblog, Signal vs. Noise, is read by over 10…
View all summaries by Jason FriedContinue Reading
Access the complete 5-minute summary and thousands more nonfiction books in the MinuteRead app.
Continue reading the complete summary in the MinuteRead app.
