Jason Fried On Focus and Avoiding Interruptions

BigTimOBrien writes "Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, talks about the day-to-day operations of 37signals. How does the company work, and what are the guiding principles behind the design of Basecamp and Campfire? He talks about the importance of avoiding interruptions and the relative unimportance of both physical space and mandatory meetings."

Comments

Re:So basically....

[NoNeeeed]

This thread will be nothing but one big slashvertisement for some company that nobody would otherwise know or care about.

You mean, apart from the several hundred thousand readers of their blogs on management and software development.

Or indeed many people who use Ruby on Rails? They are the guys behind that. Whether you use/like it, you have probably heard of it.

Just because you don't know who they are, doesn't mean that others don't, and it doesn't stop what they have to say being interesting.

Perhaps we should have no more articles that mention any companies, just in case you don't know who they are?

Re:If you've never heard of them

[NoNeeeed]

You have just helped demonstrate their point.

If you don't like their product then you are free to use something else, a huge number of people are very happy with their products. If they tried to provide everything that you, and everyone, else wants (which will of course be different things), then the end result would be a mess. There are *always* people who don't like a product. 37s are just honest about this and don't try to make out that their products will be right for everyone.

Out of curiosity, what did you move to? Basecamp is too expensive for me, so I'm on the lookout for something that that does that kind of job.

Paul

Probably not lecture

[Moraelin]

While I'll aggree with your main point, actually, it doesn't sound to me like he was having a lecture kind of meeting. A lecture at least involves someone, essentially, telling you, "I know how it's done, I decided it's done this way, I'll tell you in detail how." YMMV, but that's the basic idea. The meetings he's talking about, if I understood him right, are more the kind where someone doesn't want to be personally responsible for taking any decision. Quite the opposite. If he can't back out in dumbly applying some semi-irrelevant regulation or rule, he'll back out into, basically, "we all talked about it until everyone was too bored to give a shit any more, therefore we _all_ took that decision, therefore _I_ am not to blame." That is, if a decision is taken at all. Some end without anything being achieved whatsoever.