Quotes from Jason Fried

rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn't the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.

People have no problem with change they asked for. What people don't like is forced change—change they didn't request on a timeline they didn't choose. Your "new and improved" can easily become their "what the fuck?" when it is dumped on them as a surprise.

These half-baked, right-in-the-middle-of-something-else new ideas lead to half-finished, abandoned projects that litter the landscape and zap morale.

Everyone on your team should be connected to your customers—maybe not every day, but at least a few times throughout the year. That's the only way your team is going to feel the hurt your customers are experiencing. It's feeling the hurt that really motivates people to fix the problem. And the flip side is true too: The joy of happy customers or ones who have had a problem solved can also be wildly motivating. So

People are creatures of habit. That's why they react to change in such a negative way. They're used to using something in a certain way and any change upsets the natural order of things. So they push back. They complain. They demand that you revert to the way things were. But that doesn't mean you should act. Sometimes you need to go ahead with a decision you believe in, even if it's unpopular at first.

But what if …?" "What happens when …?" "Don't we need to plan for …?" Don't make up problems you don't have yet. It's not a problem until it's a real problem. Most of the things you worry about never happen anyway.

Long projects zap morale. The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now—while you've got the motivation and momentum to do so.

Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says "It's no big deal" or the token that says "It's the end of the world." Whichever token you pick, they'll take the other.

The same thing is true with weekday nights. If work can claim hours after 5:00 p.m., then life should be able to claim hours before 5:00 p.m. Balance, remember. Give and take.

borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours. For some that means an open afternoon every Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It's up to each expert to decide their availability.

new customers today expect something different than new customers did a decade ago.

The quickest way to disappointment is to set unreasonable expectations.

Machines can work 24/7, humans can't.

Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It's completely exhausting.

When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit. But if you start crazy, it'll define you. You have to keep asking yourself if the way you're working today is the way you'd want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not "later.

Working 40 hours a week is plenty. Plenty of time to do great work, plenty of time to be competitive, plenty of time to get the important stuff done.

If you can't fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours.

What's worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great "work ethic" because they're always around, always available, always working. That's a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who's overworked.

Given that, you're only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

The person with the question needed something and they got it. The person with the answer was doing something else and had to stop. That's rarely a fair trade.

Remember: Deadlines, not dreadlines.

Workaholism is a contagious disease.