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: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.