TEDxMidwest
Jason Fried: Why work doesn't happen at work
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Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn't a good place to do it. He calls out the two main offenders (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make the workplace actually work.
Jason Fried - Software entrepreneur
Jason Fried thinks deeply about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. He's the co-founder of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and other web-based collaboration tools, and co-author of "Rework." Full bio
Jason Fried thinks deeply about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. He's the co-founder of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and other web-based collaboration tools, and co-author of "Rework." Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:15
So I'm going to talk about work,
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specifically why people can't seem
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to get work done at work,
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which is a problem we all kind of have.
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But let's, sort of, start at the beginning.
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So we have companies and non-profits and charities
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and all these groups
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that have employees
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or volunteers of some sort.
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And they expect these people who work for them
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to do great work --
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I would hope, at least.
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At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work --
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hopefully great work.
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And so what they typically do is they decide
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that all these people need to come together in one place
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to do that work.
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So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind,
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they typically -- unless you're working in Africa,
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if you're really lucky to do that --
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most people have to go to an office every day.
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And so these companies,
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they build offices.
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They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building,
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or they lease some space,
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and they fill the space with stuff.
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They fill it with tables, or desks,
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chairs, computer equipment,
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software,
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Internet access,
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maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things,
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and they expect their employees, or their volunteers,
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to come to that location every day to do great work.
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It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that.
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However, if you actually talk to people
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and even question yourself,
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and you ask yourself,
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where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done?
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You'll find out that people don't say
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what businesses think they would say.
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If you ask people the question: where do you really need to go
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when you need to get something done?
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Typically you get three different kinds of answers.
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One is kind of a place or a location or a room.
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Another one is a moving object
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and a third is a time.
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So here's some examples.
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When I ask people -- and I've been asking people this question for about 10 years --
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I ask them, "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?"
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I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck,
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the kitchen.
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I'll hear things like an extra room in the house,
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the basement,
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the coffee shop, the library.
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And then you'll hear things like the train,
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a plane, a car -- so, the commute.
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And then you'll hear people say,
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"Well, it doesn't really matter where I am,
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as long as it's really early in the morning or really late at night or on the weekends."
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You almost never hear someone say the office.
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But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office,
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and they're making people go to it all the time,
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yet people don't do work in the office.
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What is that about?
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Why is that?
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Why is that happening?
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And what you find out is that, if you dig a little bit deeper,
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you find out that people --
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this is what happens --
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people go to work,
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and they're basically trading in their workday
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for a series of "work moments."
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That's what happens at the office.
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You don't have a workday anymore. You have work moments.
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It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart,
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and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits,
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because you have 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there,
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and then something else happens and you're pulled off your work,
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and you've got to do something else, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch.
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Then you have something else to do.
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Then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you this question,
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and before you know it, it's 5 p.m.,
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and you look back on the day,
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and you realize that you didn't get anything done.
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I mean, we've all been through this.
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We probably went through it yesterday,
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or the day before, or the day before that.
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You look back on your day, and you're like, I got nothing done today.
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I was at work.
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I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer.
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I used the software they told me to use.
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I went to these meetings I was asked to go to.
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I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff.
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But I didn't actually do anything.
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I just did tasks.
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I didn't actually get meaningful work done.
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And what you find is that, especially with creative people --
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designers, programmers,
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writers, engineers,
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thinkers --
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that people really need
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long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done.
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You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes
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and really think about a problem.
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You might have a quick idea,
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but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully,
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you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.
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And even though the workday is typically eight hours,
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how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office?
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How about seven hours?
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Six? Five? Four?
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When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office?
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Two hours? One, maybe?
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Very, very few people actually have
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long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
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And this is why people choose to do work at home,
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or they might go to the office,
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but they might go to the office really early in the day,
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or late at night when no one's around,
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or they stick around after everyone's left, or they go in on the weekends,
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or they get work done on the plane,
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or they get work done in the car or in the train
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because there are no distractions.
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Now, there are different kinds of distractions,
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but there aren't the really bad kinds of distractions
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that I'll talk about in just a minute.
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And this sort of whole phenomenon
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of having short bursts of time to get things done
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reminds me of another thing
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that doesn't work when you're interrupted,
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and that is sleep.
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I think that sleep and work are very closely related,
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and it's not just that you can work while you're sleeping
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and you can sleep while you're working.
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That's not really what I mean.
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I'm talking specifically about the fact
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that sleep and work
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are phased-based,
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or stage-based, events.
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So sleep is about sleep phases, or stages --
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some people call them different things.
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There's five of them,
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and in order to get to the really deep ones, the really meaningful ones,
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you have to go through the early ones.
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And if you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones --
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if someone bumps you in bed,
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or if there's a sound, or whatever happens --
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you don't just pick up where you left off.
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If you're interrupted and woken up,
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you have to start again.
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So you have to go back a few phases and start again.
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And what ends up happening -- sometimes you might have days like this
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where you wake up at eight in the morning, or seven in the morning,
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or whenever you get up,
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and you're like, man, I didn't really sleep very well.
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I did the sleep thing -- I went to bed, I laid down --
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but I didn't really sleep.
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People say you go to sleep,
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but you really don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep.
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It just takes a while. You've got to go through these phases and stuff,
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and if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well.
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So how do we expect -- does anyone here expect someone to sleep well
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if they're interrupted all night?
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I don't think anyone would say yes.
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Why do we expect people to work well
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if they're being interrupted all day at the office?
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How can we possibly expect people to do their job
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if they're going to the office to be interrupted?
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That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense to me.
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So what are these interruptions that happen at the office
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that don't happen at other places?
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Because in other places, you can have interruptions,
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like, you can have the TV,
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or you could go for a walk,
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or there's a fridge downstairs,
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or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do.
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And if you talk to certain managers,
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they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home
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because of these distractions.
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They'll also say --
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sometimes they'll also say,
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"Well, if I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?"
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which is ridiculous, of course, but that's one of the excuses that managers give.
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And I'm one of these managers.
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I understand. I know how this goes.
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We all have to improve on this sort of thing.
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But oftentimes they'll cite distractions.
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"I can't let someone work at home.
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They'll watch TV. They'll do this other thing."
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It turns out that those aren't the things that are really distracting.
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Because those are voluntary distractions.
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You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV.
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You decide when you want to turn something on.
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You decide when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk.
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At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions
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that really cause people not to get work done
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are involuntary.
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So let's go through a couple of those.
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Now, managers and bosses
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will often have you think that the real distractions at work
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are things like Facebook and Twitter
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and YouTube and other websites,
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and in fact, they'll go so far
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as to actually ban these sites at work.
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Some of you may work at places where you can't get to these certain sites.
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I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here?
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You can't go to a website at work,
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and that's the problem, that's why people aren't getting work done,
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because they're going to Facebook and they're going to Twitter?
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That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy.
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And today's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube,
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these things are just modern-day smoke breaks.
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No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes
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10 years ago,
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so why does everyone care about someone going to Facebook here and there,
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or Twitter here and there, or YouTube here and there?
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Those aren't the real problems in the office.
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The real problems are what I like to call
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the M&Ms,
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the Managers and the Meetings.
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Those are the real problems in the modern office today.
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And this is why things don't get done at work --
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it's because of the M&Ms.
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Now what's interesting is,
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if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work --
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like at home, or in a car, or on a plane,
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or late at night, or early in the morning --
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you don't find managers and meetings.
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You find a lot of other distractions, but you don't find managers and meetings.
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So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere,
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but you do find at the office.
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And managers are basically people
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whose job it is to interrupt people.
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That's pretty much what managers are for. They're for interrupting people.
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They don't really do the work,
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so they have to make sure everyone else is doing the work, which is an interruption.
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And we have a lot of managers in the world now,
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and there's a lot of people in the world now,
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and there's a lot of interruptions in the world now because of these managers.
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They have to check in: "Hey, how's it going?
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Show me what's up," and this sort of thing
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and they keep interrupting you at the wrong time,
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while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do,
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they tend to interrupt you.
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That's kind of bad.
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But what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all,
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which is call meetings.
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And meetings are just toxic,
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terrible, poisonous things
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during the day at work.
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We all know this to be true,
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and you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees.
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It doesn't work that way.
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The manager calls the meeting
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so the employees can all come together,
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and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people --
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is to say, "Hey look,
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we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting.
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I don't care what you're doing.
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Just, you've got to stop doing what you're doing, so you can have this meeting."
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I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop?
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What if they're thinking about something important?
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What if they're doing important work?
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All of a sudden you're telling them that they have to stop doing that
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to do something else.
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So they go into a meeting room, they get together,
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and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter usually.
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Because meetings aren't work.
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Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later.
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But meetings also procreate.
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So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting
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and tends to lead to another meeting.
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There's often too many people in the meetings,
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and they're very, very expensive to the organization.
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Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting,
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but that's not true, unless there's only one person in that meeting.
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If there are 10 people in the meeting, it's a 10-hour meeting; it's not a one-hour meeting.
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It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization
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to have this one one-hour meeting,
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which probably should have been handled by two or three people
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talking for a few minutes.
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But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting,
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because meetings are scheduled the way software works,
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which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour.
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You don't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook.
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You can't. I don't even know if you can.
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You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour.
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And so we tend to fill these times up
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when things should really go really quickly.
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So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today,
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especially to offices.
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These things don't exist outside of the office.
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So I have some suggestions
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to remedy the situation.
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What can managers do --
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enlightened managers, hopefully --
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what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work,
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so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort?
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It's that people start to say,
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"When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office."
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Because the offices are well equipped,
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everything should be there for them to do their work,
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but they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that?
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I have three suggestions I'll share with you guys.
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I have about three minutes, so that'll fit perfectly.
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We've all heard of the casual Friday thing.
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I don't know if people still do that.
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But how about "no-talk Thursdays?"
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How about --
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pick one Thursday once a month
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and cut that day in half and just say the afternoon -- I'll make it really easy for you.
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So just the afternoon, one Thursday.
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The first Thursday of the month -- just the afternoon --
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nobody in the office can talk to each other.
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Just silence, that's it.
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And what you'll find
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is that a tremendous amount of work actually gets done
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when no one talks to each other.
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This is when people actually get stuff done,
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is when no one's bothering them, when no one's interrupting them.
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And you can give someone -- giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time
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is the best gift you can give anybody at work.
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It's better than a computer.
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It's better than a new monitor. It's better than new software,
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or whatever people typically use.
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Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office
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is going to be incredibly valuable.
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And if you try that, I think you'll find that you agree.
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And maybe, hopefully you can do it more often.
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So maybe it's every other week,
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or every week, once a week,
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afternoons no one can talk to each other.
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That's something that you'll find will really, really work.
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Another thing you can try
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is switching from active
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communication and collaboration,
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which is like face-to-face stuff,
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tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings,
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and replace that with more passive models of communication,
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using things like email and instant messaging,
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or collaboration products -- things like that.
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Now some people might say email is really distracting
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and I.M. is really distracting,
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and these other things are really distracting,
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but they're distracting at a time of your own choice and your own choosing.
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You can quit the email app; you can't quit your boss.
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You can quit I.M.;
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you can't hide your manager.
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You can put these things away,
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and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time,
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when you're available, when you're ready to go again.
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Because work, like sleep, happens in phases.
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So you're going to be kind of going up and doing some work,
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and then you're going to come down from that work,
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and then maybe it's time to check that email, or check that I.M.
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And there are very, very few things that are that urgent
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that need to happen, that need to be answered right this second.
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So if you're a manager,
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start encouraging people to use more things like I.M. and email
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and other things that someone else can put away
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and then get back to you on their own schedule.
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And the last suggestion I have
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is that, if you do have a meeting coming up,
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if you have the power,
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just cancel. Just cancel that next meeting.
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Today's Friday -- so Monday, usually people have meetings on Monday.
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Just don't have it.
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I don't mean move it;
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I mean just erase it from memory, it's gone.
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And you'll find out that everything will be just fine.
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All these discussions and decisions you thought you had to make
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at this one time at 9 a.m. on Monday,
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just forget about them, and things will be just fine.
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People have a more open morning, they can actually think,
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and you'll find out that maybe all these things you thought you had to do,
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you don't actually have to do.
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So those are just three quick suggestions I wanted to give you guys
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to think about this.
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And I hope that some of these ideas
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were at least provocative enough
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for managers and bosses and business owners
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and organizers and people who are in charge of other people
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to think about laying off a little bit
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and giving people some more time to get some work done.
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And I think it'll all pay off in the end.
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So thanks for listening.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jason Fried - Software entrepreneurJason Fried thinks deeply about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. He's the co-founder of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and other web-based collaboration tools, and co-author of "Rework."
Why you should listen
Jason Fried is the co-founder and president of 37signals , a Chicago-based company that builds web-based productivity tools that, in their words, "do less than the competition -- intentionally." 37signals' simple but powerful collaboration tools include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework.
Fried is the co-author, with David Heinemeier Hansson, of the book Rework, about new ways to conceptualize working and creating. Salon's Scott Rosenberg called it "a minimalist manifesto that's profoundly practical. In a world where we all keep getting asked to do more with less, the authors show us how to do less and create more."
Jason Fried | Speaker | TED.com