157: "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work" (Free-up Founder Time Excerpt)

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In honor of Momentum Doors reopening for enrollment on March 17th. That's my private community for heart based solopreneurs looking to build their ideal six figure businesses in 2020 and beyond. I'm including here another free excerpt from my course Free Up Founder Time. This is a really fun course. It's completely free. If you want to free up your time to work on your business and not just in your business or even on a side hustle or creative project, this is the mini course for you. It's about 15 micro lessons. Just some of them are a couple minutes each of audio or text. However you prefer to learn and I share my best strategies for navigating time, thinking about time, and figuring out the systems, software and tools you need to create more space, ease and joy in your life and work. And ultimately to create more impact. If you're interested in taking this course, head on over to pivotmethod.com foundertime that's pivotmethod.com foundertime I hope you enjoyed this preview.

You're listening to Free up foundertime, a Momentum Mini course with Jenny Blake, author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one. That's me. Now let's dive into the next lesson.

Book RX it doesn't have to be crazy at work. What kind of company are you building? Are you optimizing for chaos or for calm? One of my hands down favorite books from recent years as it relates to company culture. Even if you're a culture of one or one plus is it doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work by Basecamp co founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansen. This book is a must read. I was jumping out of my chair up and down the whole time while reading this book. Jason and David optimized for a calm company. So every chapter and business area is about asking the question, how do we create calm? How do we choose calm? Here's an excerpt.

A business is a collection of choices. Every day is a new chance to make a new choice, a different choice. You have a choice. And if you don't have the power to make things change at the company level. Find your local level. You always have the choice to change yourself and your expectations. Change the way you interact with people. Change the way you communicate. Start protecting your own time.

Another gem quote it's no wonder people are working longer hours, starting earlier and staying later, even on weekends and whenever they have a spare moment. People can't get work done at work anymore. That turns life into work's leftovers. The doggy bag Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it's a mark of stupidity. End quote. And the last excerpt I'll share for this lesson dives even deeper into what it means to run a calm company.

The modern workplace is sick. Chaos should not be the natural state at work. Anxiety isn't a prerequisite for progress. Sit in meetings all day is not required for success. These are all perversions of work, side effects of broken models and follow the lemming off the cliff. Worst practices Step aside and let the suckers jump.

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 a smaller team. 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 sustaining sustainable practices for the long term. Calm is profitability. When we say crazy, we're calling situations crazy, not people. With that, let's get started. End quote. Woo. And that is just from the introduction to the book before they outline their many innovative workplace practices. So as you peruse this next list, I'm going to share some of the practices that stood out most to me. Consider what you could add or remove from your current company setup. So a couple examples from basecamp they have 40 hour work weeks and they encourage employees to leave by five if they even want to come into the office at all. Everyone is allowed to be remote if they want to be. They even have a book called Remote in case that applies to you and you want to check that one out. In the summer they take Fridays off and everyone still gets paid the same for 32 hours. They pay $100 a month toward everyone's health and fitness. They not only give three weeks of paid vacation a year, they pay for the vacation. They pay up to sometimes a $5,000 stipend toward the vacation. They pay for a food co op for employees to have healthy, seasonal fruits and vegetables. They aim for a minimum number of meetings. They Think that meetings and any calendar tool where you can automatically grab time on someone's calendar is stealing time. So instead you have to email to coordinate and ask for a meeting. They do weekly updates with everyone on the team. Those can be written and they have a lot of transparency so that others can see what members of the team are working on. There's a chat room, but you don't have to be on Slack. They're anti anything like Slack, where you feel you have to be constantly checking in or responding asap. They're really big on nothing is urgent and they say really? If it's truly urgent, which happens once or twice a year, no problem. This is also revolutionary. They don't set any goals, they don't track a crazy number of metrics, and they don't have revenue targets. Basecamp is a subscription service. It's $99 a month whether you're a company of one or a company of 100 or 1 million employees. They don't change the pricing based on the size of the company because they don't want to be beholden and give more favorability just because it's a bigger client. They don't want to create a different sales strategy, different customer support, and they don't want to change the product only to please the bigger clients or customers while treating the small fish as less than. They're only ever working in six week sprints, so they may pick a discrete project, a new feature they're going to add. Then they sprint for six weeks. Everyone knows the deadline, and after that they take two weeks off to meander, to recharge, to regroup and catch up on other things. Finally, they don't have a product roadmap and they don't have a business plan. They say that all plans are really just guesses about the future. So if you're going to have a business plan, call it a business guess. If you're going to have a product roadmap, call it a product guess.

My team and I were so inspired by their six week Sprint idea that we started running two day strategy sprints to map out our most important projects for the next few weeks and to make key decisions to minimize meetings for the next phase of work. So you can check out the two day strategy Sprint. That's hard to say. Check out the two day Strategy Sprint template in the course materials if you'd like to run one with your team. And I also did a podcast episode on a recent Sprint the first the kickoff that my team and I ran. That's@pivotmethod.com 126 so if you want to listen to the podcast, it's@pivotmethod.com 126 and I'd also highly recommend the Basecamp blog that's called Signal versus Noise. And they also have a podcast, Rework, which is based on their best selling book of the same name.