Jason Fried Quotes

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.

no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too.)

It’s a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.

It’s JOMO that lets you turn off the firehose of information and chatter and interruptions to actually get the right shit done. It’s JOMO that lets you catch up on what happened today as a single summary email tomorrow morning rather than with a drip-drip-drip feed throughout the day.

Chat rooms are basically all-day meetings with an unknown set of participants and many different topics, all at once. They’re basically virtual open offices running 24/7.

Set out to do good work. Set out to be fair in your dealings with customers, employees, and reality. Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.

Contrast (failure) that with learning from your successes. Success gives you real ammunition. When something succeeds, you know what worked - and you can do it again. And the next time, you'll probably do it even better.

The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration

What distinguishes people who are ten times more effective than the norm is not that they work ten times as hard; it’s that they use their creativity to come up with solutions that require one-tenth of the effort.

Time-management hacks, life hacks, sleep hacks, work hacks. These all reflect an obsession with trying to squeeze more time out of the day, but rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn’t the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.

Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a delegator’s best friend. That’s where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile, everyone else who attends is pulled away from getting real work done.

you can’t let your employees work from home out of fear they’ll slack off without your supervision, you’re a babysitter, not a manager. Remote work is very likely the least of your problems.

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

The expectation of an immediate response is the ember that ignites so many fires at work.

At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.