Hey all! Wow the last few months were busy for us. You too?
We’ve got a lot of new stuff to share with everyone. Everything listed below has already shipped and available in your Basecamp.
Here’s what’s new
Ever wish you could mark something you already read as unread again? Well now you can! And you can also turn notifications off for almost anything right from the Hey! menu as well.
Mark read as unread, and “stop notifying” right from the Hey! menu
The Sample Basecamp now includes a quick tour video in the lower left corner to help everyone get acquainted with the basics.
Huge cleanup of the Notifications Settings screen. We’ve grouped the options into three sections: What, How, and When. Now it’s much easier to see the options and understand the controls.
You can get to your Notifications Settings screen by clicking your avatar in the top right corner in Basecamp 3 and clicking the “Change notifications settings” link.
We’ve also made it possible to replace the numbers inside the orange unread indicators with a small orange dot. If you’re like me, I don’t like being nagged by numbers. An indication that there’s something new is enough. Now it’s much calmer around here.
You’ll see this option under the “How” heading on the Notifications Settings screen. Check the box if you want numbers, uncheck it if you just want the quieter, more peaceful dots.
We’ve made it simpler to turn notifications off on a thread on the iOS app. Now it’s just a single tap at the bottom of any thread. Before you had to go into a menu and deselect yourself.
Made composing new messages and documents friendlier on smaller laptop screens and big huge screens. The buttons no longer fall off-screen on the MacBook Air and you get a full-screen experience on a Cinema display.
Replaced stars with pins on Basecamps and Campfires. This update rolled out across the desktop apps and the native mobile apps as well.
Added two new wonderful email reports to keep you up to date every morning and once a week: 1. You can subscribe to the Daily Activity report and have all of yesterday’s activity emailed to you in a single email the next morning at 9am (to subscribe, click Latest Activity in the menu bar and look for the button top right), and 2. You can subscribe to the “What’s on my plate?” report and get all your assignments emailed to you every Monday morning at 9am (to subscribe, click the avatar menu top right, select “My assignments” in the menu, and then look for the button top right).
Summaries delivered to your inbox. In this example I’ve turned both on.
Made it possible to view your to-do assignments sorted by due date. Big improvement here. On the My Assignments screen you’ll see two tabs if you have any dated to-dos.
To-dos with dates are neatly grouped together, with the ones due soonest at the top.
Added an “applause report” that show you who’s clapped for you. You can access that from your avatar menu, then by selecting the “Who’s clapped for me?” option in the menu.
Shipped a brand new marketing site at Basecamp.com which does a better job explaining what Basecamp is all about.
And a variety of bug fixes and performance enhancements as well. Thanks for everyone who’s helped us track down issues — Basecamp gets better every day because of your help.
April’s just around the corner. More updates to share in about a month! Thanks again for using Basecamp 3!
Not a Basecamp 3 customer yet? We forgive you. But come on — it’s time to make it easier to keep everyone on the same page about whatever it is you’re working on together. It’s entirely free to try with no time limit, too.
We’ve been working at Basecamp for 5, 6, 5, 1, 5, 4, 2, 3, 15, 1, 2, 1, 5, 2, 3, 8, 17, 7, 5, 1, 8, 9, 4, 5, 6, 5, 1, 5, 4, 1, 5, 7, 4, 3, 5, 6, 6, 13, 11, 8, 5, 2, 6, 3, 2, 3, 6, and 3 years.
Collectively, across just 48 people, that’s 244 years of experience together. As a business owner it makes me feel great seeing longevity, loyalty, and low turnover as a common theme. In return we try to offer the best benefits in the business.
Something I always keep in mind: Behind these people are family trees. Husbands, wives, partners, children. As a business owner I feel a responsibility to these other people too — I don’t want to create tired, anxious, resentful employees who bring those emotions home with them. It’s not just the quantity of hours at work that affect life at home, it’s the quality and impact of those hours spent at work, too. A healthy work-life balance isn’t about separation as much as it’s about how one influences the other.
At Basecamp we’re not just building a different kind of product, we’re building a different kind of company. The kind of company we’d want to do business with if we were in the market for a product to help our company communicate clearly, work together better, and form stronger bonds with each other.
An observation: Looking at the picture at the top of this post, it’s clear need to work harder on diversity. We’d also like to have a roughly 50/50 split male to female to better represent the population at large. It’s tricky for us since we don’t hire often — maybe just a few people a year — so it’ll take some more time to get to the ideal mix, but we’re aware of it, working on it, and have been getting much better at it over the last couple years.
Want to join the crew? We’re currently looking to add two new designers to our team. One focused primarily on product design (Basecamp the apps), and one focused primarily on marketing design (Basecamp.com the site). From time to time we cross over — product designers work on marketing stuff and marketing designers work on product stuff. If you’re interested, email me in a way that demonstrates your skills, your character, and helps you stand out amongst the hundreds who apply whenever we have openings. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Want to see what this team makes together? What we spend our days improving and perfecting? Then check out the all-new Basecamp 3. It’s unlike any Basecamp before it, and a unique product in the industry. In many ways it’s our company operating system, and we’ve seen how it can turn any small business into a better business. Want to find out more about Basecamp 3? Email me and I’ll give you a personal tour. — Jason Fried, CEO, Basecamp
From teams to individuals, we aimed for a straightforward, consistent system to communicate the occasional, the week-to-week, and the day-to-day to everyone across our company.
No matter the company, once you reach a certain size — and it’s not very big — you begin to have communication challenges.
There are dozens of challenges, but for this article I’d like to focus on this one: Keeping people across the company in the loop about what’s going on in the company. By what’s going on I mean what everyone’s working on at a macro and micro level. What are we making together?
I happen to believe this is one of the most important things for any reasonably-sized company to get right. To me, reasonably sized means fewer than 100 employees (which represents 98% of all companies in the US according to the 2012 business census data). The method I’ll describe below can work with companies of any size, but you’d implement it a bit differently.
The challenge
As companies grow, keeping everyone up-to-date on everything that’s going on gets harder and harder. I’m not referring to statistics, spreadsheets, slide decks, reports, or abstract representations of what’s going on, but the simple way people describe what they’re working on to their friends. Everyone’s own words.
In some cases companies begin to under-communicate internally (people are left wondering what’s going on). To compensate, others begin to over-communicate internally (sharing the wrong level of detail too often, and sharing it in ways that make it difficult to follow or find).
The hard part is striking the right balance. The just-right spot where everyone knows enough, no one feels like they know too little, and no one feels like they’re being over-informed to the point of it being annoying or distracting. And doing it all at a variety of resolutions — big picture, medium-picture, and small picture — without overdoing it.
Our goal
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to do this right. At any one time we have dozens of projects in motion, so there’s a lot going on. We’ve experimented with a variety of methods over the years. We think we’ve finally landed on the perfect fit, the perfect way to do it.
For us the goal was simple: On a regular, ongoing basis, help everyone at the company learn things they didn’t know, discover stuff they might not have known was going on, and develop a better appreciation for their fellow co-workers and the work everyone does every day.
And, tangentially, as a positive side-effect, automatically create a library of progress — a collection of institutional knowledge, with day-by-day documentation by dozens of individual authors in their own words.
The solution
Here’s exactly what we did. It took 2 minutes to set up in Basecamp 3.
1. First, we created a new Basecamp in our account called “Heartbeats”. We invited everyone in the company to this Basecamp. We enabled three Basecamp tools: The Message Board, Automatic Check-Ins, and To-dos.
With these three tools turned on, our Heartbeats Basecamp looks like this:
3 simple tools all in one place keep every single person at Basecamp in the loop.
2. Next, in that Basecamp we created two recurring questions using Basecamp 3’s Automatic Check-ins tool. One check-in asks everyone “What did you work on today?” at the end of every weekday, and the other automatically asks “What will you be working on this week?” every Monday morning.
Automatic Check-ins puts Basecamp to work for you — it goes out and asks the questions, gathers the responses, and publishes them back to the Basecamp, and shares them with everyone automatically.
Like clockwork, Basecamp automatically asks Automatic Check-in questions via push on the mobile apps, in-app on the desktop, or via email depending on how people set up their notification settings. It then gathers up all the responses and then posts them back to the Basecamp as individual organized threads for everyone to see. And since they’re individual threads, people can attach follow-up questions, comments, or thoughts to anyone’s answer.
3. Next, we created a single To-do list called “Heartbeat requests” where anyone in the company can post a request for an update. Curious to know something that hasn’t been shared in a while? Add a to-do and request it! If you know who should write it, just assign it to them and Basecamp will let them know. If you don’t, just add the to-do with no assignment and someone will pick it up. You’ll see there’s a request for me to update the company on the progress of our designer search (we’re hiring!). I’ll write up that heartbeat shortly.
What do you want to know? Just say so!
4. And last, we posted a message to the Message Board letting everyone know that someone from their team should post a detailed update (which we call a “Heartbeat”) about what their team is working on every few weeks or so. There’s no exact time requirement, just every so often. A natural rhythm evolves. There’s also no specific guideline about how to write a heartbeat. People write in their own style, some follow other people’s leads. It’s just natural.
Here’s what our Heartbeat message board looks like:
Messages are automatically sent out to everyone in the company. People can then comment, ask detailed follow-up questions, and the discussions are kept nice and neat as separate threads so they’re easy to read now and easy to refer back to later. They are especially useful for bringing employees up to speed on how we work and how we share our work.
In the example above, you’ll see on February 26 Kristin updated everyone on a couple of new hires (welcome Carrie and Elizabeth!) for the support team, on March 8 Shaun updated everyone on the latest listener numbers on The Distance, on March 8 Ryan updated everyone on a new add-people-to-Basecamp UI he’s working on with George, on the 14th Conor filled everyone in on the progress on some major updates they’re making to the sign-in process, and on the 16th Taylor updated everyone on an important project the ops team has been working on. Note: Heartbeats are long messages and complete thoughts — usually a few hundred words each. I’ve shared an example down below later in this article.
The three amigos
With just three simple tools — a Message Board, Automatic Check-ins, and a To-do list, everyone in the company can now:
Stay up to date every few weeks on major updates from every group across the company. People can also request an update if they feel like they’re missing something.
Share what they’re planning on working on this week. This helps everyone have a general sense of what specific projects are happening, and what sort of progress we might all expect by Friday.
Share what they did today. This isn’t about holding any accountable or for tracking performance — it’s simply used as a way for everyone to celebrate what actually happened in the company today. It’s a wonderful way to discover new work, see creative solutions to problems we’re trying to tackle, ask follow-up questions or offer an idea on something that’s being explored, and gain an appreciation for everyone’s day-to-day.
And because it’s all in a single Basecamp, everything is neatly organized and easily accessible all from one place that everyone in the company has access to all the time. And since every answer, every heartbeat, every to-do is its own unique self-contained thread, people can post follow-ups questions, request more detail, and discuss things in context without the conversation spilling over into other conversations.
It’s all right here in the “Heartbeats” Basecamp for everyone in the company to see.
The Director’s cut
Want to go deeper behind the scenes? Ok, let’s look at some actual examples of stuff that was written in our Heartbeats Basecamp.
A Heartbeat on the Message Board:
Conor shares some updates on a major rejiggering of the sign-in process. This was sent to everyone in the company so now everyone knows what that team will be working on over the next few weeks.
A “What did you work on today?” answer:
Sam shares what he worked on today.
And here’s another what did you work on today answer. This time from Ryan, with some sketches as well.
Ryan had a busy day. And he shared some rough cuts of an idea he’s working on.
Here’s a “What will you be working on this week?” answer by Wailin:
Andrea chimed in with her support.
A “What did you work on today?” by Jason Zimdars with some embedded product shots plus a few comments:
Nice work on that revised notification settings screen, JZ!
And one for those who really love behind the scenes stuff… Dylan wrote up a short “What did you work on today?” answer. A couple hours after he posted, I happened to notice he said “Discussion around whether we should allow file uploading to Basecamps that don’t have the Docs tool currently enabled.” I was curious what the team decided, so I posted a comment and asked a question. And a long and awesome, deep, well considered discussion ensued over the next few hours (not in-a-row, but spread out asynchronously). Check it out!
Ok… I know it was a lot, but I hope it was useful. Really it’s very simple. Spin up a Basecamp, flip on a few tools, set up a couple questions, and make an announcement. It just takes a couple minutes. And that same exact day everyone in your company will begin learning things they didn’t know, hearing about stuff they’ll be excited to hear, and overall having a better appreciation for the work everyone does every day.
Not a Basecamp 3 customer yet? What are you, crazy? Jump on! It’s entirely free to try (you can even just make a free Heartbeats Basecamp like the one I shared above). Just last week another 10,786 companies signed up to get started using Basecamp 3! We’d love to have you as a customer too. Any questions? Want a personal tour? Need help setting something up? Just let me know, I’m happy to help any way I can. Thanks. -Jason Fried, CEO, Basecamp
For years people have asked us how we work at Basecamp. We’ve shared our business and development philosophies in Getting Real, REWORK, and REMOTE, but we’ve never lifted the veil on our unusual work methods. And unusual they are! Whenever we give this workshop, and show people behind the scenes, we hear “woah!”
What does our day-to-day look like? How do we organize and manage work? How do we communicate across the company? When do we communicate? What do we tell everyone, vs what do we only tell a few people? How do teams coordinate? How do designers and developers work together? How do we gather ideas, consider feedback, break work into digestible chunks, build, and deliver. How do we make so much progress in a short time with a small team?
On March 31, we’ll go behind the scenes and share everything. We’ll show you how we use Basecamp 3 to run Basecamp. Everything will be exposed.
After this workshop you’ll have a new perspective on how people can work together, how and when to communicate this way vs that way, and how keeping everything together in one place is the secret to a few small teams making some really big things. You’ll have new insights into how your own organization, group, or team can shift its perspective and work better together.
None of this has been shared in an interactive setting like this before.
The workshop will be hosted by Basecamp CEO Jason Fried.
Seating is limited, and the first two workshops sold out within 24 hours, so don’t miss this one. Get your ticket here. We look forward to seeing you in Chicago on March 31st!
Note: People often ask… Will this be recorded? Streamed? Can I attend remotely? At this time we’re only doing these workshops live for a small group so we can address everyone’s questions personally and go hands-on when we need to. We may offer an abridged, recorded version of this workshop down the road, we’ll see.
Every six weeks we start working on a new set of improvements and enhancements for Basecamp 3. A new 6-week cycle just began last week so our designers and developers have been collaborating closely. The early days of any initiative are an exciting time. There are lots of concepts, designs, and code being tried out, tossed out, kept in play, and so on. I’m a hands-on guy, so I relish times like these. The further away I am from the product, I’ve found, the less I enjoy my job.
But the process has also highlighted a problem I’ve struggled with for a long time: As the CEO and majority owner of my company, I ultimately have the last word. But because of this, sometimes any word, suggestion, or recommendation is taken as final even when it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve mentioned this to several other CEO-owners lately, and I’ve come to realize it’s a situation many of them face as well.
The way I see it, the last word should always be the last resort, reserved for the most delicate and important issues, ones that can’t be resolved without my input and that affect every one of my employees. Otherwise, I’d much prefer that other people make decisions. If people are waiting around for me to tell them what to do next, then I’m not doing my job well, and I haven’t created an environment where they can do their job well either.
The root of the challenge is that the people I work with closely hear from me quite a bit. I tend to offer up a number of ideas, a lot of suggestions, and plenty of feedback about the work we’re all doing together. Ninety-nine percent of the time, a suggestion from me is just that — one of many ideas on the table. But power dynamics being what they are, no matter how carefully I phrase them, my suggestions are often considered more seriously than those offered up by others. I don’t like that.
I’ve been trying a variety of approaches to see whether I can change this dynamic. I’ve tried stepping back a bit, forcing myself to be less involved day to day in the actual work — but that ultimately results in the opposite of what I want. People tend to notice when someone who doesn’t speak up a lot suddenly chimes in, and I want my words to carry less weight, not more. I’ve tried wrapping my suggestions in friendly disclaimers — “Hey, this is just a thought” or “Hey, just a small suggestion” — but it doesn’t feel right to be stepping so gingerly when the point is to have a free exchange of ideas. I want to be a natural part of the conversation.
I’ve also tried offering my thoughts directly to the people on the team, one on one. I’ve made some progress this way, because it prevents group acquiescence to what I say. But it’s inefficient and still defines my ideas as somehow separate from the wider process.
As it turns out, the tactic I’ve had the most success with is to come full circle and speak up even more in group settings. The more I join the discussion and throw ideas into the mix, the more I diminish the value of each individual piece of my input. But there’s an important additional reason I like this direction: The deeper involved I am, the more chances I have to highlight ideas that are better than mine. And the more I do that, the more I can begin to demonstrate that my suggestions can be easily tossed aside. Which is exactly what I want. I want the best ideas to emerge, not my ideas.
Then, when I really do need to make a last-word decision, I can be very clear about that. I can be definitive. I can announce that this decision is the decision, and here’s why.
A version of this article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of Inc. magazine.
Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.
In 2006 we launched Campfire, the first modern SAAS group chat and messaging tool for business.
Since then, quite a few business chat and messaging tools like Hipchat, Flowdock, Slack and others have sprung up. And we’ve since rolled group chat and instant messaging (we call them “pings”) into the all new Basecamp 3.
As a company, we’ve been around group/business chat longer than just about any other company in business today. In addition to hearing from our customers for years, our own daily experiences over ten years of extensive group chatting have taught us a lot about what works and what doesn’t. All together, we’ve messaged nearly 10,000,000 lines to one another at 37signals/Basecamp since 2006.
Back in the 90s, just about all at once, everyone decided fat was terrible for you. So an industry sprung up — lead by a company called Snackwells — that replaced all the fat in your cookies and baked goods with mountains of delicious fat-free sugar.
Grocery store isles were stacked with green boxes of Snackwells. Only 50 calories per cookie pack, and zero grams of fat. Guiltless crackers. Brownies without the downside. Eat all you want!
And we all ate! Cause fat is bad! Zero fat is good! Pop ’em in your mouth! Pop another one before you finish the other one! I ate a shitton of these things — especially the devil’s food cake ones. Remember those?
But then something strange happened… We all got fatter eating low-fat foods. We’d never been fatter, never unhealthier. We were sold a solution, but we bought a problem.
We gave up something, replaced it with something else, and eventually looked back and realized we ended up far worse off than we started. We’re still recovering from that epidemic 20 years later.
Turns out fat isn’t so bad. What’s really bad in nearly every situation, however, is sugar. Horribly bad. It leads to lots and lots of bad. As we’ve gotten smarter, we’ve begun to link some of the worst forms of disease to sugar.
This reminds me of a trend happening today. It’s not about food. Any guesses?
One of the hardest answers in the client business.
When we launched Basecamp 3 a few months back, we launched a flavor called “Basecamp With Clients.” This version of Basecamp 3 has one big thing that’s different from the standard version of Basecamp 3 — it has something called “The Clientside”.
The Clientside is an exclusive feature in Basecamp 3 built to specifically separate the back of the house (unfinished work in progress that’s only visible to your team) from the front of the house (finished work, client presentations, and communications that the client can see and participate in).
The Clientside allows firms to be 100% sure the client can’t see anything they shouldn’t see, or hear anything they shouldn’t hear. It eliminates all the fear and anxiety that’s often tied up in “Oh shit, that wasn’t for them” moments. I’ll be writing more about the backstory, research, and ideas behind the Clientside in a future post.
For now, I want to share a big improvement we just launched: Approvals.
A ton of client services firms (design firms, consultants, development shops, accountants, lawyers, etc) use Basecamp to run their projects, present work to their clients, and keep their client’s feedback on the record.
Having talked to hundreds — maybe thousands — of client services firms over the years, and having been in the client business for many years, one thing is clear: Getting to “yes” can be difficult. Not a sorta yes, but a real yes. And firms need definitive yesses in order to make sure something was approved. Since future work is based on the approval of earlier work, clear approvals are fundamental to a healthy client relationship.
Yes is the only thing that means yes.
Sometimes people show work to a client using Basecamp and they get a “Looks great!” or a “Wow, nice!” or a “Sweet! Love it”. Sound great, doesn’t it? Problem is it’s not a yes or a no, it’s still a maybe. It’s unclear if “wow, nice” means “yes we approve” or just “wow, nice… looking forward to seeing more.” When money and relationships are at stake, clarity around yes or no is essential. The last thing you want to do is assume someone approved something, then build other work on top of that approval, and then find out that the foundational approval wasn’t actually an approval, it was just a reaction. “That’s great” does not equal yes.
So, we set off to help firms and client alike bring clarity to their working relationships.
Now in Basecamp 3 you’ll see a new button on the Clientside called “Get their approval on the record”. When it’s time to get a definitive yes or no, this is the button to click.
The button is on the right.
Next you’ll see a screen like this that asks you which person on the client side needs to approve this work, what you want to ask them to approve (you can attach files, images, etc), when you need the approval by (whenever, or an exact date), and anyone on your team you want to cc.
The who, the what, and then when.
The request for approval is then emailed to the client and marked waiting on your end.
Waiting for approval.
The client then gets an email that looks like this:
No log-in required — they just click the button to go through the simple approval process.
When the client clicks the button they’ll see a web page — no login required — which shows the work you want them to see along with any additional description you’ve added. Below that, they’ll see two simple buttons: “Yes, I approve” and “No, not yet”.
“Do we have your approval?”
The client can click either Yes or No. They’ll then have a spot to leave additional feedback or commentary to support their choice or ask a follow up question. Whatever they say will be record back in Basecamp:
Beth on the client side said yes, and added something about how delicious those pancakes actually look.
The team on the firm side will also get a notification and a receipt confirming the approval (or non-approval) which they can then comment on and carry on the discussion. Every single step of the way is stored on the record so there’s never any confusion about who said what when. It’s clear for both sides to see, which is key for accountability and part of the fundamental value of Basecamp.
Getting to a definitive yes or no is one of the hardest things in the client business. You don’t want to pester, you don’t want to hassle, you don’t want to have to have an awkward conversation about what “Looks great!” means — especially when thousands of dollars and important deadlines are on the line.
But when you use a system like Basecamp to help you get a clear yes (or no), you eliminate the moments for miscommunication that can unfortunately happen when people use different language to mean different things. Assumptions around approval can really hurt a project. We’re aiming to help you replace assumptions with definitive answers and clarity.
We hope you find this useful!
And it’s just the start of where we’ll be taking Basecamp With Clients in 2016. Lots of very cool stuff coming your way.
You can now complete to-dos directly on reports. Before you had to click through to a to-do from a report to complete it. Much faster now and less back and forth too.
We’ve revamped the way you address emails to your client on the Clientside. The new design better reflects a traditional from/to design ala most email clients rather than the previous checkbox-style list we had.
A proper to: field with pills just like most email apps.
We’ve introduced support for the Microsoft Edge browser. This will allow people to start accessing Basecamp 3 using MS Edge 13+, which is the default browser in Windows 10. There may still be a few nits here and there, but at least people on Edge aren’t blocked anymore.
You can now see which platform someone is responding from when they post a comment. At the bottom of every comment you’ll see a “via…” line. Desktop, iPhone, Android, iPad, etc.
“via desktop”… “via iPhone”… etc.
Automatic Check-ins and Schedules now show you who will receive a notification when you submit an answer or post a comment. Before it was anyone’s guess — now it’s clear! Sorry about that.
We noticed that people were mistakenly publishing drafts instead of saving a new version. Problem was that the publish button was the default button when you were editing a draft, so people were clicking that button when they really meant to hit save instead. So we changed the UI around and made “Save” the primary green button and then added a blue “Post” button separately. This should cut down on inadvertent publishing significantly.
Yay for fewer mistakes!
A top request has been answered! Now you can view your assignments sorted by date. You can also view any one else’s assignments on the “What’s on someone’s plate?” report by date as well. This way you can see what’s coming up soon for you (or someone else) rather than just seeing everything they have assigned to them.
NEW: “Just the ones with due dates” tab.
Major aut0-save improvements across the board. If you’re in the middle of writing (or editing) a message, a document, a to-do, or a comment, and for whatever reason you are pulled away or your browser quits, what you’ve written won’t be lost. When you return back to it you’ll see the text right there in its place so you can pick up where you left off.
…plus a whole bunch of under-the-hood updates to improve reliability, stability, and speed. There always a lot of stuff that people don’t see, but they feel.
More improvements on the way. The iOS and Android apps will be updated shortly with their own batches of improvements. Android has some great improvements around notifications that should hit any day now.
Stay tuned and thanks again for using Basecamp 3! And if you’re not using it, let’s change that! Sign up for Basecamp 3 — it’s completely free to try.
One of the biggest challenges of shipping a product is knowing when to put on the shipping goggles.
The shipping goggles make you less sensitive to little nits and scrapes and things that might be able to be a little bit better, but really don’t need to be right now. Stuff that we could tweak, but really shouldn’t be grabbing our attention given all the other high value bits we need to hit.
It’s sort of like squinting — you lose the detail, but you can still see the overall big picture shape, form, and function. Your peripheral vision shrinks, but the center is still bright. Knowing when to squint is a good thing to know.
It’s not that the details don’t matter. They do, but details aren’t fixed — they’re relative. And of course any time you talk about details mattering, you’re speaking in very broad generalizations. Some matter, some don’t. Some never matter, some matter later, but not now. And some really matter now and can’t wait for later. Like everything, there are varying degrees.
Part of training yourself to ship is to recognize what details are really worth nitpicking and when. There are no hard and fast rules here — it just takes judgement and experience. These are skills that build over time. Once you’ve been around it for a while you tend to improve your sensitivity to what’s worth doing before you ship and what can wait until later.
And BTW, nitpicking may be construed as a pejorative, but I don’t believe it is. Nitpicking is a valuable skill, as long you deploy it at the right time for the right reasons. One of the penalties of nitpicking at the wrong time is that nitpicking often attracts a crowd. Someone nitpicks this which is an invitation for someone else to nitpick that. And before you know it, half a dozen people are spending time discussing tiny details that really don’t demand that level of attention.
Again, there are no facts around when it’s worth nitpicking and what’s worth nitpicking — I’m only speaking to the awareness how situations unfold.
We can all get better at this. I’ve been shipping stuff for years, but I still have to get better at recognizing the right moments to bring up certain things. I definitely fall into the trap of spending time making changes to things in the 11th hour that are really perfectly fine and can be addressed later if necessary. I absolutely find myself regretting going down a rabbit hole that really didn’t need to be investigated. I still find myself distracting others with change requests or suggestions that really didn’t need to cloud their vision and sap their attention. It’s hard!!
We just shipped and entirely new version of Basecamp! If you’ve got work to do, and it involves other people too, then Basecamp’s for you. It’s an entirely unique way of working.
