Scatter. Scatter is the silent killer at work. Scatter is tools siloed by teams. Scatter is multiple apps to do one thing. Scatter is doing the same thing at the same time in multiple places. Scatter is asking around rather than doing it right now. Scatter is pulling people off this to jump on that. Scatter is wondering where something...

So much talk about hacking productivity these days. There’s an endless stream of methodologies and tools promising to make you more productive. But more productive at what? Productivity is for machines, not for people. There’s nothing meaningful about packing some number of work units into some amount of time or squeezing more into les...

What you see above is a 17-day sales sequence, or cadence. A friend of mine just sent it over and it creeped me out. From email to LinkedIn to phone to email back to LinkedIn back to phone, and so on. I assume day 18 would be a bullhorn outside your window. Somehow this is allowed to be called sales. But in any other realm it would be ...

Way back when we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we ran all our credit card charges through a merchant account provided by JP Morgan Chase. Charging credit cards wasn't easy in the early 2000s. This was back when being an "internet company" was a major red flag. The process required mounds of paperwork, proof, and busin...

There's so much chatter and advice out there about how to handle "the competition". How much should you worry about them, what you can do to beat them, how much should you pay attention to what they're doing, how you should respond when they release or say something new, what you should say when a customer compares you to them, etc. Es...

Look around in the tools you use. Especially project management tools. You'll likely find the products proudly displaying the percentage of this or that that's been completed. This project is 73% done. This task list is 57% done. This process is 42% complete. It's almost certainly wrong. A lie would be more accurate. Most of these perc...

Since the beginning of Basecamp, we’ve been loath to make promises about future product improvements. We’ve always wanted customers to judge the product they could buy and use today, not some imaginary version that might exist in the future. It’s why we’ve never committed to a product road map. It’s not because we have a secret one in ...

Hey there! Here’s the 15th installment of my popular Heard Something, Read Something, Saw Something series. So, what do we have this time... Heard Something These 11 minutes will restore your faith in humanity. A student pilot loses her front nose gear on takeoff on her 3rd solo flight ever. An incredible amount of support comes in ove...

The internet's a living, breathing, professional self-help platform. If advice on how to run your company isn't coming at you 280 characters at a time on Twitter, you can hear it on a podcast, read it on a Substack, or get it right here on your LinkedIn feed. There's hardly a CEO, an entrepreneur, or a cultural figure these days who do...

What an interesting moment. We're staring at two distinctly different visions of the future. They may co-exist, but they are radically different takes on what's modern, what's current, and where things are headed. One vision gets the UI out of the way. The other vision is UI everywhere you look. One vision gets the computer out of the ...

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 precious: their emplo...

Business is often seen as the art of acquisition. Acquiring talent, customers, revenue, profits, mindshare, marketshare. Building and growing requires consumption, addition, parlaying some of this into a lot of that. But the smartest businesses — the ones that tend to stick around for the long haul — know that existence is also about a...

In the past I’ve written about how I used to be a hothead, reacting instantly to whatever I disagreed with. I didn’t even let someone finish their thought before I started forming my rebuttal. The remainder of their statement was just filler before I could slam back. I’m far from perfect, and I still occasionally catch myself doing thi...

What do they got? A big team, lots of money, a strong brand, seemingly unlimited resources, panache, reputation, all that. They’re established. They’re your competitors. You want to look away, but you see them everywhere. Their ads on your social, their name in the media, your dream clients on their website. But you know what else they...

Throw a dart on LinkedIn, or toss one into the ether on Twitter, and you'll likely hit a post proclaiming that you better "learn AI" or you're falling behind. Master the tools and become a prompt engineer or someone else will tell the AI to summarize the long documents, kick off initial first drafts, and rewrite the headlines for you! ...

Out of all things I’m asked about, hiring tops the list. From the actual hiring process, to reviews, to motivation and retention strategies, curiosity about hiring is on full charge. There’s a lot to cover, but I’d like to share some thoughts about a moment that doesn’t get enough attention: The end of the first year and the beginning ...

Hey! It’s been many months since my last installment of the Heard Something, Read Something, Saw Something series. Let’s get back into it. So, what do we have this time... Heard Something A buddy randomly sent me this Turkish Electro Funk Güzel Mix on YouTube. This wasn’t on my radar at all, which is all the more reason I was glad he s...

We're fortunate we get to make things. But sometimes something sticks around long enough that we have the good fortune to have a chance to remake it. When evaluating a redesign, your first instinct is to compare the new design to the old design. But don’t do that. The first step is to understand what you’re evaluating. If you just put ...

Founder & CEO is a common title, especially in tech. It happens to be my title too. I've come to believe it's an impossible title. You're either CEO, or you're Founder. You can't hold both full-time jobs. And unless your company is probably 100+, CEO isn't really a job anyway. It's more of a role someone needs to play occasionally. The...

Yesterday I was speaking to a university class and, as it usually does, a question about innovation came up. "How do you stay innovative? How do you encourage innovative thinking at work?" My answer: You don't stay innovative and you don't encourage innovative thinking at work. WHAT? Yes. Innovation should almost never happen. It's inc...

A friend of mine called. He was overwhelmed by a home renovation project that ballooned in size. What started as a simple kitchen countertop replacement turned into more work in the kitchen, new lighting throughout the house, a master bathroom gut rehab, and new flooring in every room. It became too much. He felt like he was sinking an...

The product development process encompasses many moments. Moments of novel breakthrough, moments of mundane maintenance, and everything in between. But some of the most rewarding moments consistently come from making something simply useful. Yesterday we shipped a feature in HEY called "Reply to Everyone" that was exactly that: Simply ...

Last week I was talking with another business owner from a different industry. He was frustrated with an employee who kept asking him what to do if x, y, or z happens. This was a long-time employee who'd been in these situations before, not someone new who was learning the ropes. With this particular employee, it's always the same set ...

At most companies, people put together a deck, reserve a room (physical or virtual), and call a meeting to pitch a new idea. If they're lucky, no one interrupts them while they're presenting. When it's over, people react. This is precisely the problem. The person making the pitch has presumably put a lot of time, thought, and energy in...

We recently received this email from a REWORK Podcast listener who had a question... “...I think it was in Shape Up that the idea of delegating projects rather than tasks came up. And I'm trying to move this way, of working with my own team. I just wonder if you guys have any tips or help for making that transition, helping team member...

There's a lot of talk right now about smaller, slimmer, tighter teams. Economics are forcing companies to cut back, and what they're finding is progress. Trim the overgrown crown, let the sunshine meet the ground, and all sorts of new life blooms on the forest floor. Even Zuck, master of a megacorp, is noticing it: https://twitter.com/...

I'm out. Today marks my last day of work until March. I'm taking my first sabbatical in 23 years. It's embarrassingly overdue. I do the 8 hour day, 40 hour week thing just fine, but when it comes to taking extended time away from work, I'm terrible. Subtracting time away when my kids were born, and aside from from personal days dotted ...

Normal comes on quick. First it starts as an outlier. Some behavior you don't love, but tolerate. Then someone else follows suit, but either you miss it or you let it slide. Then people pile on — repeating what they've seen because no one stepped in to course correct. Then it's too late. It's become the culture. The new normal. This ha...

The feature doesn't work. It's not critical, but there's a rush to fix it. Two people are pulled off something else to deal with this. The code is sloppy, but the original problem is gone so the fix is deployed. A post-mortem is scheduled so 9 people can review what happened. New QA procedures are applied to every project moving forwar...

I have no idea how the the Musk-era Twitter saga plays out. That's a time will tell situation. And this isn't a post about Elon, his personality, his management style, decisions being made, talent drain, morale at the company, or the thousands of people who've been laid off or outright quit. There's plenty to be said there, and plenty ...