Jason Fried

“These two staples of work life - meetings and managers - are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office. In fact, the further away you are from both meetings and managers, the more work gets done.”

“Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that's important - speed.”

“The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done. In fact, offices have become interruption factories.”

“It's incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your workday has been shredded into work moments.”

“Whenever I speak at a conference, I try to catch a few of the other presentations. I tend to stand in the back and listen, observe, and get a general sense of the room.”

“What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.”

“We don't want to bank all our risk on a small collection of big companies. We don't want to lose 20 percent of our business if one big account goes away.”

“When meetings are the norm - the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem - they no longer work.”

“I'm a designer, but I rely on programmers to bring my ideas to life. By learning to code myself, I think I can make things easier for all of us. Similarly, I want to be able to build things on my own without having to bother a programmer.”

“I'd love to see more businesses take this approach - intentionally rightsizing themselves. Hit a number that feels good and say, 'Let's stick around here.'”

“I've run into a lot of companies that invent positions for great people just so they don't get away. But hiring people when you don't have real work for them is insulting to them and hurtful to you.”

“A diverse customer base helps insulate you; a few large accounts can leave you vulnerable to their whims.”

“Fix a few things here, improve a few things there, launch a new feature every so often. That's coasting. And I don't want Basecamp to coast.”

“When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.”

“People pulling 16-hour days on a regular basis are exhausted. They're just too tired to notice that their work has suffered because of it.”

“Customers buy Basecamp without ever having to interact with us. If they do have a question, we handle everything via email. We've been in the business of automation. We've never really valued full service.”

“I think that sleep and work are very closely related - not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events.”

“I believe if you start a business with the intent of making it huge, you're already prioritizing the wrong thing. Size is important, but it's a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things that are worth way more of your mental energy - customers, service, quality.”

“You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.”

“Success isn't about being the biggest. It's about letting the right size find you.”