I finished this book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Basecamo’s co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinmeier. It talks about Basecamo’s work philosophy. Of course, every company’s situation is unique, Basecamp’s best practices may not work for other companies. I took notes mosly during commute, while listening to the audio book.

A few things stood out to me, that I think would be precious for other companies:

• View your company development just like product development, they both go through problem explorations, design, implementation and evaluation periods. Lots of iterations along the way.
• Meeting as the last resort. With Slack and all other instant chat tools, it’s easy to address things in async way, rather than requiring a block of time to meet in person. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can take away other’s time whenever you want, be mindful about that.
• Leave time for deep thinking. People in departments like design, engineering need to spend time on deep thinking, so that they can think through problems more thoroughly.