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It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by David Hansson and Jason Fried…
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by David Hansson and Jason Fried
General Ideas
The Book In Three Or More Sentences
The modern workplace is sick. It’s chaotic. It’s noisy and distracting. The book offers a way on how to design your company differently, less stressful, and more profitable. David Hansson and Jason Fried show us how to structure a calm company. A less busy place where people will actually enjoy visiting.
The core Ideas
To stop celebrating crazy at work. To stop squeezing your employees for doing more work for less time. To start giving people the needed, uninterrupted time so they can do their job. Also, to build a company that has values and it’s comfortable with having enough – clients, profit, goals.
Highlights
Your company too is a product. So, make sure you build a great product (company);
Don’t set goals for the sake of setting goals. Simply do great work continuously;
Cleanse multitasking and replace it with unfractured working hours were people can focus on what truly matters;
if you really want to stay in business, you need to focus on doing
fewer things but better.
Lessons
1. Your company is a product
Since the people inside the company are the ones creating the actual product, or service, you should focus on making your company the best product ever.
And how do you improve a product? You revise and you update. Improve what’s already available and try to make it better than the previous version. You ask questions to clarify what’s missing or what’s broken and you apply fixes.
Above all, your company should be useful to others. But not only to your customers, but it should also consider the desires of the people working inside.
2. Don’t Compare and Don’t Set Goals
Initially, you’ll probably have to observe your opponents but after a while, your expertise will be enough to keep your existing clients satisfied and eventually gain some more.
By not setting goals you free your mind from the pointless pursue for more so you can have enough time to focus on what’s truly important – being more effective, making your products more useful, making customers and employees happy.
3: Defend Your Time
Companies guard so many things (trademark, brand), but all too often they fail to protect what’s both most vulnerable and most precious: their employees’ time and attention.”
Instead of giving their employees the time they need to do their job, a lot of firms waste it with pointless meetings, chat rooms, and grandiose projects that never see the light of day.
The best way to slice one hour is like this: 1 x 60 = 60. This means that the hour was completely uninterrupted. This means that you actually did something productive.
But often working hours look like: 20 + 5 + 15 + 10 + 5 + 5 = 60
The best way to get more done, though, without having to regularly stay hours after your workday is to remove the distractions and protect your time.
4: Ask Difficult Questions
f you really want to know what’s wrong, you should be actually ready to hear it. This can be done only by asking questions, difficult questions. Stuff like: “How is the workload?”; “What do you think we can improve in the way we communicate?”; “Are you afraid of anything at work?”; “Is there anything you worked on recently that you wish to go through together?”
The questions is: Are you ready to really hear what your employees have to say about you?
5: Startups Are Easy
Starting a podcast, setting up a website, opening a restaurant, doing whatever venture you desire, is relatively hard in the beginning, yes. However, things don’t get easier over time. They tend to get even harder.
The main reason businesses bust, it’s because people who found them don’t start with the intention to keep this operating in the long-term. They push to the max in the beginning, but they never consider that business, in order to thrive, requires quite a lot of maintenance work.
If you really want to start a business, you need to think more about staying in business.
Actionable Notes
Time-box your projects
: Getting lost in a certain project, losing track of time is something common. Prevent this by deciding how long a project will take initially – for example, “I’ll work on this for 2 weeks, not more.” This will not only help you ship sooner, but also prompt you to be more focused on the task at hand.
Create interruption-free zones:
If your office is advocating for transparency – glass doors and stuff – no wonder you don’t have enough time to do your job. If you work for yourself, designate a place where you’ll only work. Something like an HQ for your creative projects – no social media and texting allowed. If you have a 9 to 5 job, and if you’re constantly interrupted in the office, you probably have to talk with your boss.
Have less to do
: Too often we want everything. We spend an awful amount of time trying to put 100 features in our new projects. But this is not practical, nor easy to be executed.
Get comfortable with the word enough
– enough features, enough staff, enough clients. By doing so, you’ll have less to do, thus be more focused and more productive.
Notable Quotes
You can play with your kids and still be a successful entrepreneur. You can have a hobby. You can take care of yourself physically. You can read a book. You can watch a silly movie with your partner. You can take the time to cook a proper meal. You can go for a long walk. You can dare to be completely ordinary every now and then.
Eight people in a room for an hour doesn’t cost one hour, it costs eight hours.
When you start to think about your company as a product, all sorts of new possibilities for improvements emerge. When you realize the way you work is malleable, you can start molding something new, something better.
A business is a collection of choices. Every day is a new chance to make a new choice, a different choice.