Enough

Management books don’t really thrill me. Maybe that is an odd admission for someone who writes about the world of work, and who reads pretty much anything that comes under her nose. But I am reading one now that does indeed thrill me, and I’d like you to read it too. Would you, please? And then we can talk about it, and see if we can do something about making our world of work a better place.

The book is It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by the founders and leaders of the software company Basecamp. They lead off with two bits of wisdom I’d plaster on my office door, if they didn’t contain profanity:

“Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity”

“If it’s constantly crazy at work, we have two words for you: fuck that.”

So there you go. If you are on board with that, or even if you disagree with it and you want to get all riled up disagreeing with a book, read it. Not everything they write is applicable to my workplace, at all – a software company is a different animal than a donor-funded Center in a large university. But there are enough good ideas in there to keep the pages turning, and there aren’t even that many pages.

One chapter I liked is on the power of “enough.” It comes down to this:

“If it’s never enough, then it’ll always be crazy at work.”

The past decade for me have been a process of getting to enough, and not to perfect. At home that means the house is clean enough, the meals nutritious enough, and the homework done enough. I try to be a good enough mom, wife, sister, daughter, and friend. Letting go of perfect in those realms hasn’t been too hard, maybe because my ambition was never tied up in those things to begin with. But at work? It’s harder to say “it’s enough” because it sounds like we are compromising on quality, or quantity, or commitment, or something.

So what? Compromise isn’t a dirty word. And of course we compromise quality, quantity, and commitment all the time – we balance them against timeliness, focus, and work-life balance every day. If we don’t recognize that – if we refuse to admit that there is a point that is “enough” – we will be forever chasing more, no matter what we are already achieving. More grants, more products, more time, more money, more results, more gold stars. And then, of course, it will always be crazy at work.

An ethos of “enough” would mean that we give ourselves and each other permission to put in a good day’s work, and then go home at going-home time. It would mean evaluating each new opportunity not by asking “could we manage to take this on,” but by asking “is this compelling enough to go after, and do we have enough bandwidth to do it without going crazy?” It would mean looking at a complex process and wondering “would it still work well enough if we didn’t do everything, but just did the essential bits?”

I don’t want to be crazy I work. I want to be productive, cheerful, and calm. I want to do really good work that I am proud of, and that makes the world a better place. I wonder if this book might help us do that. Read it, and let’s talk.