What Basecamp’s CEO taught me about burnout, simplicity, and saying no

Jason Fried has been one of my favourite business leaders since I read Rework, which he wrote with his Basecamp co-founder, David Heinemeir Hansson in 2010. Jason is a vocal thought leader on topics like leadership, culture, and creativity, and regularly publishes bold and refreshing perspectives on Twitter and the Signal vs Noise blog.

I had the chance to jump on a call with Jason in April when I interviewed him for HR is Dead. It gave me the opportunity to dive deeper into some of his philosophies — what interested me most were his thoughts on the glorification of burnout and his belief that 40 hours a week is plenty.

“I think the way a lot of people are working isn’t sustainable,” Jason told me. “If you’re looking to build a company that’s going to be sold in three years, fine, you can burn everyone out. But we want to be in business for 20, 25, whatever plus years, so we need to come up with some sustainable practices, and part of that is giving people the time off that they need, making sure we don’t ruin people’s hours during the week and leave them with almost no time left to do the actual work.”

In addition to encouraging a 40-hour work week, Basecamp offers three paid weeks off a year, summer hours from May to October (they only work four-day weeks), and a month-long sabbatical every three years. They previously dabbled with offering unlimited vacation but found it was having the reverse effect of what they’d hoped for.

“What we found was that that’s actually a bad idea because there’s not really an expectation of what that means, and people inherently have this conflict with, ‘Well, is it too much, or not enough?’ It’s just better to be clear with people, so we revised that since.”

The value of creating an intrinsically motivated culture

Jason’s beliefs and values have gone beyond policy, and are deeply interwoven into Basecamp’s culture, which promotes things like remote work in order to weed out distractions, needless meetings, and nix commute time.

Jason is also big on promoting autonomy, which is a proven key to intrinsic motivation. As author Dan Pink described in Drive, “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.” The book, which centres on the keys to motivation — specifically intrinsic motivation — echoes a lot of philosophies adopted at Basecamp.

“I think those kinds of things — giving people ample time off, showing them that we respect their time outside of work, not burning them out — all go towards helping people stay motivated,” Jason said. “If you’re exhausted and tired, even if the work’s great, at some point you’re like, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I don’t feel good anymore. This doesn’t feel right.’ I think there are a few carrots you can dangle — sort of, kind of — but they have to enjoy the work and the people they’re working with.”

While we were on the topic, Jason noted the importance of modeling healthy behaviour as a leader.

“People follow the leader, in most cases, and if they see you working late at night or weekends, no matter what you say, they’re going to think there’s a quiet expectation that you do the same. I think you need to set the example and be really firm about that, otherwise people are going to end up sliding down that slope and end up working too many hours or late at night.”

To help enforce this, the team built a feature called Work Can Wait into Basecamp 3, which mutes notifications outside of work hours.

The importance of saying no

When I asked Jason for his number one piece of business advice, it was “know what you’ll say no to.” Especially as the leader of a company, there are no shortages of opportunities, requests, or offers coming in, and they can be distracting, time-consuming, and draining. In other words, they offer a fast track to burnout.

“There will be an endless number of opportunities and ideas, and so many things you can do,” he said of running a business. “Getting good at saying no about the things that aren’t right for your business, or aren’t the right things for you, or aren’t the right things for what you want to do, is a really important skill to develop.

“It’s a lifelong pursuit to get better at it, but I think it’s very important. When you have good boundaries around yes and no, a lot of decisions just become much easier.”

That philosophy is spilling over into the rest of the company, where Jason is trying to create calmer conditions to enhance focus and maximize wellbeing. As we got onto the topic of filtering noise to distill what really matters, Jason brought up again that 40 hours should be more than sufficient to get things done.

“It’s a lot of time, especially when you start getting people together. When you have three or four people working on a problem, that’s 120 or 160 hours a week of time that people are spending on that problem. That is a lot of time. It’s more than enough time if you squeeze out all the stuff that doesn’t matter, if you don’t pay attention to things that are distracting you, if you cut the noise down.”

A calmer pace of work fosters better health, focus, and time for what matters

“A big part of what we’re trying to do at Basecamp is creating a calmer, more peaceful way to work,” Jason explained. “That’s both in our company and in our new product, Basecamp 3.

“We’re trying to go the opposite way of the industry, which is about more notifications, more real-time. Everyone’s trying to get ahold of everyone all the time, but really I think it’s a toxic, terrible way to work, frankly. We’ve worked that way in the past, and it’s so crazy. It’s unhealthy. We’re now trying to go in the opposite direction by slowing things down, being more deliberate, calming things down, being more peaceful, not interrupting each other. And then you end up having plenty of time to do great work.”

It’s a refreshing perspective, especially from a leader in the tech industry where fervent hustling, late nights, and workaholism are celebrated. I commend Jason for taking a stance on these topics; few people have, but voices like his are vital to the momentum we need if we want to build healthier companies and healthier livelihoods.