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

If you've never heard of them

[CRCulver]

I've never heard of the company, though I'm pretty clued up with the tech world, and I suspect others are in the same boat. FTA:

So 37signals; we do a few different things. But primarily we design web-based applications for collaboration for small business. So you can share to-do lists. You can share ideas. You can share calendars and files and things like that with clients, or just internally online. Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire; those are our main products. We've also written a couple of books. And we do a lot of speaking around the country about our ideas about business and entrepreneurship and things like that.

Re:If you've never heard of them

[Anonymous Coward]

That information should be included in the article. I'm a developer (not Ruby/RoR obviously) and I had never heard of Jason Fried or 37signals

Re:If you've never heard of them

[The End Of Days]

Stick a wiki up on a webserver. That's pretty much 90% of Basecamp anyway. Hell, that's pretty much 90% of all 37signals apps.

Meetings Suck

[canUbeleiveIT]

I'm not sure that Fried's philosophy will continue to hold up if 37signals grows much more, but I like his point-of-view about meetings and work flow.

I have found meetings to be an extraordinary waste of time in most cases, and often the result of lack of leadership and/or organizational ability on the part of those in charge. I was recently on the board of a very small non-for-profit charity that had weekly two-hour meetings. The "leader" of the organization claimed that he needed the two hours every week to "vision-cast," but--being a typical political flack--what he really wanted to do was hear himself talk and also to run every little matter past the board so that he could cover his ass instead of just making the decisions he was paid to make.

I quit after about ten months of that. The organization folded soon thereafter when donors stopped giving due to a ridiculous administrative overhead.

Re:Meetings Suck

[SanityInAnarchy]

Not all meetings.

I work for a company that has very few meetings -- basically, we do a Scrum-style meeting every day, and that's it. The rest is just impromptu discussions -- we're all close enough that if there's an urgent question, or something which can't be communicated well via Trac or email, we walk over and talk about it.

Now, the Scrum alone might add up to an hour a week, but I think it's worth it -- makes it a lot easier to figure out who's stuck, and who can help, that kind of thing. And if it sucked, hey, it's over in 10 minutes.

It sounds like what you had wasn't a meeting, it was a lecture. Lectures do suck.

but his "campfire" sessions are just meetings

[petes_PoV]

... and just as annoying as a source of interruptions, too.

It seems that he says one thing and then instantly contradicts himself. Yes, too many meetings are bad - as are interruptions (at least for the interruptee, presumably the interrupter achieves their goals). However, having someone continually IM'ing you (or whatever - all these things are basically as bad as each other) is just as much a distraction and source of interruptions.

Oh yes, and making dumb statements like

It's really hard to change that organization if you don't have the power to change it

doesn't make him sound like he knows what he's talking about - either

Re:but his "campfire" sessions are just meetings

[Grey_14]

As someone who has spent a lot of time in 'meetings' on IRC, I can tell you without a doubt that collaboration in a chatroom is much less disruptive to workflow than a real life meeting, and certainly not nearly as distracting,

Also, his 'dumb statement' taken out of context like that does certainly sound pretty dumb, but it's a transcript of a live interview and sometimes people say things without having thought their exact wording out, (Which he states earlier in the interview, is why he prefers text mediums for communication), the paragraph above the quote means that what you quoted makes sense if you aren't a complete idiot (It's definitely not the best wording, but it's understandable). he means it's hard to change a traditional organization all at once, he then goes on to suggest ways to introduce change to those organizations even if you aren't someone who would have the power to directly implement those changes.

Re:but his "campfire" sessions are just meetings

[noidentity]

Oh yes, and making dumb statements like

It's really hard to change that organization if you don't have the power to change it

doesn't make him sound like he knows what he's talking about - either

Are you kidding? It sounds like he has a good grasp of basic logic. Based on that statement alone, I'd feel confident consulting him for questions like "If it's raining and I'm outside without cover, will I get wet?" and "If my front door is locked and I don't have the key and nobody's home, can I get in?"

Considering it's all stolen tech...

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy stole the entire idea and format of Basecamp from a start-up back in 2003. Before 2003 he ran a web design firm. Suddenly, with no warning, no prior "wait'll you see what's coming" notices, two months after the start up first sent a demo of a program called "BaseCamp" that does project management, to a client of his company, 37 signals suddenly became a software company that released the first version of Basecamp in June 2004.

Both systems are web-based, multi-user, project management software. Even the interface was laid out the same, and with the same functionality areas in it. Not surprisingly, the functional areas that were obviously necessary, but not yet implemented in the demo given to the client, also weren't present in the version Fried and his bunch released.

Pure theft. I know, I worked for the start-up that got put out of business.

Re:But...

[Odin's Raven]

I don't care what Jason is fried on, getting high is not the answer.

Dude, like seriously man - if getting high is not the answer, then you're asking the wrong question...