Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing.
Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.
You can absolutely run a great business without a single goal. You don’t need something fake to do something real. And if you must have a goal, how about just staying in business? Or serving your customers well? Or being a delightful place to work? Just because these goals are harder to quantify does not make them any less important.
We don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Sleep on it. Take your time to gather and present your thoughts – just like the person who pitched the original idea took their time to gather and present theirs.
If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company.
Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That’s the dirty little secret of business.
There’s simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers.
Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can’t work calmly. When you don’t trust the date, or when you think it’s impossible to do everything someone’s telling you to do within a specific period of time, or when someone keeps piling on more work without giving you more time, you work frantically and maniacally. Few things are as demoralizing as working on projects with no end in sight.
Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned.
So, coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There’s no guarantee of productivity.
Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.
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.
The quickest way to disappointment is to set unreasonable expectations.
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.
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.
That’s because offices have become interruption factories. A busy office is like a food processor – it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there.