Vox

Leitura de 31 min

How We Work: Fewer Meetings, More Check-Ins

Summary

In this episode of REWORK, host Kimberly Rhodes is joined by 37signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson to discuss their company’s approach to remote work transparency through automatic check-ins. They explain how these asynchronous updates have replaced traditional status meetings and created a more efficient way to track work across their globally distributed team.

The system revolves around two key automated questions: “What do you plan on working on this week?” (sent Monday mornings) and “What did you work on today?” (sent at the end of each day). These check-ins provide direct, unfiltered information from each employee without the need for synchronous meetings that require schedule alignment. The founders emphasize how this approach eliminates the “grinding of gears” associated with traditional status meetings and daily stand-ups.

Beyond work tracking, the check-ins serve multiple purposes: they enable serendipitous cross-team collaboration (functioning as a digital water cooler), create a searchable history of individual contributions, and allow executives to share cultural narratives. The system also includes optional social questions like “What did you do this weekend?” to help remote team members connect on a personal level.

The episode explores how automatic check-ins scale with company growth, with 37signals having evolved from a single company-wide check-in to department-specific questions as they grew to around 70 employees. The founders acknowledge that while not everyone loves writing these updates, the practice is now part of company expectations and provides valuable social pressure that helps maintain productivity and accountability in a remote environment.

Recommendations

Practices

  • Automatic check-ins — The core practice discussed: automated questions sent to all employees asking “What do you plan on working on this week?” and “What did you work on today?” to replace status meetings.
  • All-access projects — A Basecamp feature that automatically grants access to projects when users click links from check-ins, eliminating access request friction.

Tools

  • Basecamp — The project management tool where 37signals implements their automatic check-in system, featuring linking capabilities and all-access projects.
  • Know Your Company — An earlier product from 37signals that inspired the automatic check-in feature, designed for smaller companies to gather weekly updates via email.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to automatic check-ins at 37signals — Kimberly Rhodes introduces the episode topic: how 37signals uses automatic check-ins to track work across their fully remote company. She explains that the company receives many questions about their remote work practices, and automatic check-ins are the core solution. Jason Fried is asked about what they did before implementing this system.
  • 00:00:40 — The evolution from informal updates to systematic check-ins — Jason Fried describes how before automatic check-ins, updates were informal and irregular - people would occasionally write “heartbeats” or “kickoffs” but there was no regular cadence. He explains that as the company grew, informal knowledge sharing became insufficient. The fundamental insight was that “if you want answers, you have to ask questions” - people won’t automatically volunteer updates without a system.
  • 00:02:58 — How check-ins eliminate synchronous status meetings — David Heinemeier Hansson explains why automatic check-ins are superior to traditional status meetings or daily stand-ups. He emphasizes that synchronous meetings require “grinding of gears” - aligning schedules across time zones - which is incompatible with remote work. He contrasts this with check-ins that can be scanned quickly: “I can scan 40 check-ins in less than five minutes. If I had to sit in on the status meetings of 40 people, that’d be the entire day.”
  • 00:05:41 — Serendipitous collaboration through check-ins — The hosts discuss how check-ins enable unexpected cross-team collaboration. Jason explains that when someone mentions working on a problem, people from entirely different teams might see it and jump into the conversation. David compares this to the ideal of the “water cooler” serendipity that office advocates romanticize, noting that this actually happens regularly through check-ins while the physical office version often doesn’t.
  • 00:07:01 — Avoiding information distortion through management layers — David explains how traditional status reporting creates information distortion through multiple management layers. In larger organizations, information gets aggregated upward through a “game of telephone,” becoming less accurate at each hop. With check-ins, executives get information directly from the source: “When I’m reading a check-in from a programmer… I’m getting the original source. I’m not getting it two layers removed, four weeks apart, filtered through some manager’s filter.”
  • 00:08:50 — Linking to deeper context and all-access projects — Kimberly notes that check-ins in Basecamp allow linking to other projects or documentation. Jason explains how this led to developing “all-access projects” - when people wanted to see linked content but didn’t have access, they created a feature that automatically grants access when clicking links. This demonstrates how using their own product helps identify and solve friction points that benefit all customers.
  • 00:12:29 — Scaling check-ins from company-wide to departmental — Kimberly asks about how check-ins have evolved as the company grew. Jason explains they started with one company-wide check-in but eventually created department-specific questions (design team, programmers, executives) as the single log became too long. He notes that users can filter by department or click on individual names to see someone’s complete check-in history, which is valuable for performance reviews and one-on-ones.
  • 00:14:55 — Why human-written summaries beat AI automation — Addressing potential objections about automation, Jason explains why human-written summaries are superior to AI-generated ones. He emphasizes that people describe what’s important to them in their own words, revealing their priorities and excitement. This personal narration captures nuance that automated summaries of task completions would miss, since “all work is not tracked on to-dos” - some work is conversational or happens outside formal systems.
  • 00:16:00 — The necessary friction and social pressure of check-ins — David acknowledges that not everyone loves writing check-ins, comparing it to “eating your vegetables.” He explains that the slight discomfort of summarizing your work is actually valuable - if someone consistently struggles to describe meaningful work, that’s a flag for them and their manager. The system creates consistent, evenly applied social pressure that helps maintain accountability in remote work.
  • 00:19:08 — Executives leading by example and cultural narration — Kimberly notes that executives also complete check-ins, which is unusual in most companies. Jason explains he uses his check-ins like a “public diary” to make broader points or share cultural narratives. David adds the importance of leading by example: “If you want employees at your company to do something that they are not always going to love all the time… you got to be there or it’s going to ring really hollow.”

Episode Info

  • Podcast: REWORK
  • Author: 37signals
  • Category: Business Business Management
  • Published: 2024-01-03T09:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:21:49

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your

[00:00:03] business.

[00:00:04] I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I’m joined by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason

[00:00:08] Freed and David Heinemeyer Hansen.

[00:00:10] We get a lot of questions about how we work at 37signals being a fully remote company

[00:00:15] with employees all over the world, how we keep track of what everyone is working on.

[00:00:19] The short answer is automatic check-ins.

[00:00:21] I thought we’d spend some time this week talking about what they are and how we use

[00:00:25] them to make sure we know what’s going on across the company.

[00:00:29] But first, Jason, let me ask you this.

[00:00:31] Automatic check-ins were something that was built into Basecamp 3.

[00:00:34] What were you guys doing before then?

[00:00:36] How did you know what people were working on at the company?

[00:00:40] You could say they were not automatic check-ins.

[00:00:43] So it was more like, hey, what’s going on?

[00:00:45] Hey, what’s going on?

[00:00:46] You know, people would write up these sort of heartbeats occasionally and kickoffs occasionally,

[00:00:52] but we didn’t have this regular cadence of daily updates or semi-weekly updates about

[00:00:58] what people were doing.

[00:00:59] What people were planning on doing, what people were working on.

[00:01:01] So it was kind of a scale thing, too.

[00:01:03] We sort of didn’t really need to, and we were much, much smaller.

[00:01:05] Everyone was a little bit more involved in everything, and you kind of had things rubbing

[00:01:08] off on you, so you just sort of knew.

[00:01:10] Once you get to a certain size, you don’t know all that’s happening, nor should you

[00:01:14] have to go seek out all that’s happening, because that’s a lot of work or a lot of meetings

[00:01:17] or a lot of status meetings or status reports.

[00:01:20] So we introduced this idea of, you know, the fundamental idea behind this was that if you

[00:01:24] want answers, you have to ask questions.

[00:01:26] The idea that people are just simply going to volunteer.

[00:01:29] What they’re working on all the time in an automatic way, it’s just probably not going

[00:01:33] to happen unless it sort of becomes policy.

[00:01:35] But even policy doesn’t quite do it, because things can always get in the way and you don’t

[00:01:40] get it done.

[00:01:40] So by having a system automatically prompt everybody in the company, and everyone has

[00:01:44] to play by the same rules, essentially, it’s just a simple question.

[00:01:48] It’s two once a week, or one once a week and once every day.

[00:01:51] The one once a week is, what do you plan on working on this week?

[00:01:55] Just a broad summary of kind of what you think you’re going to be doing, and then what you’d

[00:01:59] do today at the end of every day that’s asked.

[00:02:01] And people typically answer that a couple times a week, but that’s enough.

[00:02:05] And it’s so much better than having to fish around for what’s happening or to try to absorb

[00:02:09] through osmosis what’s happening.

[00:02:11] It’s a lot more explicit, and it’s a much better system.

[00:02:14] Let me just say it again, what those two check-ins are, Jason, that you mentioned.

[00:02:18] What are you going to be working on this week?

[00:02:20] And that gets sent out every Monday morning across the country, across the company.

[00:02:24] Across the world.

[00:02:25] Across the world.

[00:02:26] And what did you work on today?

[00:02:28] Are the two?

[00:02:29] The two that get frequently sent out.

[00:02:31] Yes.

[00:02:32] And we have a few others.

[00:02:33] There’s some social ones that people, you know, like, what would you do this weekend,

[00:02:36] which is totally optional.

[00:02:38] It’s a way for people to share, like, hey, I went on this trip, or I saw my grandmother,

[00:02:41] or I took the kids biking, or whatever it might have been, which is a nice way for people

[00:02:45] who don’t see each other very often because we’re remote to get to know each other on

[00:02:48] a different level.

[00:02:49] So we use them for that as well.

[00:02:50] So they’re social, and they’re for, you know, more specific updates on work itself.

[00:02:56] I think one of the great things about automatic check-ins

[00:02:58] is that it is so compatible with remote work.

[00:03:02] Automatic check-ins answer or ask the individual on their time zone at the end of the day,

[00:03:09] for example, of what you work on today or at the beginning of their day on Mondays of

[00:03:13] what are you going to work on this week in a way that does not require the grinding of

[00:03:17] gears, as we like to say.

[00:03:18] It does not require a schedule to line up for a status meeting that involves five, seven,

[00:03:23] ten different people.

[00:03:25] When Jason said we didn’t use to do something else, lots of other companies…

[00:03:28] Other companies do do something else, and what they mainly do is they do different forms

[00:03:32] of status meetings.

[00:03:33] Maybe a boring company calls it a status meeting, and a hip company calls it the daily stand-up.

[00:03:38] But it’s the same thing.

[00:03:39] It’s still a status meeting where you sign up in synchronous time to be in the same either

[00:03:46] physical room or Zoom room at the same time and go around the table one by one.

[00:03:50] What are you working on today?

[00:03:51] What are you working on?

[00:03:52] What are you working on?

[00:03:53] That requires the grinding of gears.

[00:03:55] It requires schedules to line up, which is just not…

[00:03:58] It’s not compatible with remote working.

[00:04:00] It’s also just an incredibly time-consuming way to digest information.

[00:04:06] There is basically nothing worse than wasting your time in a meeting just waiting for someone

[00:04:12] to finish talking about something that is perhaps tangentially interesting to you or

[00:04:18] relevant to you when you could have scanned that block of information, what’s in that

[00:04:23] nugget, in about two seconds.

[00:04:25] I think that’s what’s so powerful about automatic check-ins.

[00:04:28] Especially for someone who’s trying to keep a tap on multiple individuals in the organization,

[00:04:33] multiple teams in the organization.

[00:04:35] I can scan 40 check-ins in less than five minutes.

[00:04:40] If I had to sit in on the status meetings of 40 people, that’d be the entire day.

[00:04:46] Nothing else would be done except for that.

[00:04:49] So there’s both this sense that automatic check-ins allows greater flexibility in your

[00:04:53] schedule, and it’s also just a vastly, perhaps the most meaningful…

[00:04:58] jump in productivity of relaying information. These status updates, they’re common. Oftentimes,

[00:05:06] they’re not even that exciting. It’s not like some great revelation is going to be put into

[00:05:10] these answers. It’s just like, okay, I feel like I’m in the loop. I feel like I know what’s going

[00:05:16] on. That works really well for someone’s manager, but it also works really well for someone’s peers

[00:05:21] and peers and other teams. The problem with something like a daily standup is that it

[00:05:26] generally works for the five to eight people block. That’s a team. They’ll know what they’re

[00:05:32] all working on. The other team, they’re not going to know. They’re not going to have a sense of

[00:05:36] what’s going on. We have so many serendipitously interactions that come from these posts.

[00:05:41] Someone will relay what they’re going to work on and what they had working. They say,

[00:05:45] like, I’m working on this problem. Someone from an entirely different team will just squint,

[00:05:49] see that, jump into the common thread. These automatic check-ins have their own page,

[00:05:53] and you start a conversation. It’s funny because

[00:05:56] to me, that is basically the ideal of the water cooler. So many companies who don’t like remote,

[00:06:03] they talk about the serendipity of the water cooler or just bumping into each other in the

[00:06:08] office. You know what? It’s a romantic notion most of the time that doesn’t actually happen

[00:06:12] to reality. This totally happens all the time in reality that people do bump into each other,

[00:06:18] what they’re working on, and automatic check-ins makes that possible.

[00:06:22] What’s cool, by the way, because I can imagine someone going, well, God, that sounds annoying.

[00:06:26] This team is talking about this thing, and these people are jumping in. It’s not annoying,

[00:06:30] first of all. It doesn’t happen that much. When it happens, it’s usually a short conversation

[00:06:34] or an interesting one. You don’t have to participate if you don’t want. It’s one of

[00:06:40] these things that’s a subtle way to keep tabs on a lot of things, dive deep when you need to

[00:06:46] without getting too wet, jumping right out of the water really quick. I can’t imagine another way to

[00:06:51] do it rather than, like David said, sitting in on everything. Then when are you going to do anything?

[00:06:56] And what often happens at other companies is you have then this chain of aggregation,

[00:07:01] because you cannot sit in on a status meeting of 50 people. That’s not relevant or realistic.

[00:07:07] So what you have is you have these pods, you have these teams, they may do a daily stand-up,

[00:07:11] they may do a weekly summary, then you have some layer of middle management, and then you have

[00:07:15] another layer of management, depending on how large you are, and the information sort of gets

[00:07:18] aggregated up. And every step, every hop that information has to travel, it’s a game of

[00:07:24] telephone.

[00:07:26] The update is actually lost. Sometimes it’s misstated. Sometimes it’s something totally

[00:07:30] different. This is one of the reasons why the larger organizations typically get the less

[00:07:35] accurate information that people at the top have, because it has to travel through all these hops.

[00:07:41] When I’m reading a check-in from a programmer who’s on the SIP team or on the web team,

[00:07:45] I’m getting the original source. I’m not getting it two layers removed,

[00:07:50] four weeks apart, filtered through some manager’s filter.

[00:07:55] And I think there’s just…

[00:07:56] There’s just such a clarity of information in that. And most of the time, it’s not like you’re

[00:08:03] luxurianting in this. You’re just like, oh, let me just take it all. You’re just skimming it.

[00:08:07] You’re skimming it. And you can skim so much information and narrow in on what’s actually

[00:08:12] relevant and where you need to dive in or perhaps have an opinion on something.

[00:08:16] And you can just choose to focus on there while only spending five minutes a day on catching up

[00:08:22] on everyone. What other piece of technology would…

[00:08:26] Allow this to happen. That to me is just… It’s such a marvel. And I’d actually go as far to say

[00:08:31] these two questions are probably the most important part of what makes 37 Signals with around 70

[00:08:38] people work as a remote organization without drowning in all these asynchronous meetings

[00:08:45] all the time. I will also say, I think one of the things that’s great about automatic check-ins in

[00:08:50] Basecamp is that you can link to other things. So a lot of times you’ll see people who will

[00:08:54] write what they’ve been working on.

[00:08:56] And they’re linking it back to another project or to an on-call card or some other place of

[00:09:01] documentation where if you had that meeting in person, you can just be like, oh, I’ll send it

[00:09:05] to you later. Or I’ll follow up after this meeting and send you the information where it’s all in one

[00:09:10] place to your point of just being able to scan quickly.

[00:09:13] You know, what’s interesting about that too is I would like this part of product development where

[00:09:17] one feature leads to another. So people would do what you say, Kimberly. They link up things,

[00:09:22] but then people wouldn’t have access to these other things because they wouldn’t be on these

[00:09:25] other projects.

[00:09:26] Frustrating because you’d see, oh, I want to see what that’s about. So then because of that,

[00:09:30] primarily because of that, we added this new feature called all access projects where you

[00:09:33] can turn a project into an all access project without having to invite everybody. They’re

[00:09:37] automatically invited if they basically click a link and they get to have access to the project.

[00:09:41] So that feeling, this is like how we think about building new features. This is a bit of a tangent,

[00:09:47] but we had this pain point. We had this point of friction and it was annoying to have to ask

[00:09:53] someone for access to something that everyone should be able to see anyway. So that,

[00:09:56] that led to something else, which is one of the wonderful things about using your own product is

[00:10:00] that you, you find these spots and you, and you make these things work for yourself. And then it

[00:10:04] happens to work for, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of other customers.

[00:10:07] I think that specific feature of, of linking to more information is also what really is so

[00:10:12] powerful about this. Anyone’s individual check-in is usually one paragraph, two paragraphs. There’s

[00:10:17] not actually that much depth in it, but in those links, there’s usually an incredible amount of

[00:10:22] depth. So I do this all the time. I will scan 20 people’s stuff.

[00:10:26] And there’s like one person who’s like, oh, they’re working on this. Let me dive in more.

[00:10:30] It may be a link to another Basecamp project, usually all access as Jason says,

[00:10:34] or it may be a link to a GitHub repo. And I can dive all the way down to the actual work itself.

[00:10:41] And I think that’s what’s so crucial about this way of working remotely, where you don’t have

[00:10:46] heavy-handed managerial processes that are run manually with all the status meetings and so

[00:10:51] forth. You do need something else. You do need a way to,

[00:10:56] to get the confidence that the things are moving in the right direction and we’re working on the

[00:11:00] right things. It’s at the right pace and all these other things, but being able to dive into

[00:11:05] that information just when you need it and don’t waste your time on it. When you don’t, it’s just

[00:11:10] such a 10 Xer. It’s such a 10 Xer when it comes to the managerial focus of Jason or I, this is

[00:11:16] one of the reasons I’d actually say, as far as all the tools that we have in our managerial toolbox,

[00:11:21] this is the key one that allows us to spend far,

[00:11:25] far less time on.

[00:11:26] Management and more of the time on product decisions, uh, engaging directly with the

[00:11:31] product, working with a team rather than doing all this process work because the process work

[00:11:36] is automatable. That’s to me is, is whenever you talk about a process,

[00:11:41] to me, the high point of that is that means it’s automatable. If we do repeatable steps

[00:11:46] to get expected outcomes and it just have to run, that’s a process. And if we can take that process

[00:11:52] and we could put it into a computer system, that’s what computers are really good at.

[00:11:55] And they’re not nearly as annoying. This is the other thing. If you don’t have something like this,

[00:12:00] you might have a manager who pops into your pink. So where are we with X, Y, or C? I always find

[00:12:07] that to be such an awkward conversation because when someone is asking you, where are we with X?

[00:12:11] What they’re really saying is I don’t know where we are, dude. I don’t have any visibility

[00:12:15] into this. What is actually going on? I would just know that like that question wouldn’t even come up

[00:12:21] the vast majority of the time when we lean on these questions and the answers in them.

[00:12:25] Okay. So let me ask you this because Jason, you brought up scale that if 37 Signals was much

[00:12:29] smaller, you know, five people, 10 people, we might not need something like this. Now,

[00:12:33] 70 or so people, it is helpful. But I think before I came, it was one giant check-in. Like

[00:12:39] everyone was asked at the same time. We’ve now broken that up by department. Kind of talk me

[00:12:44] through that and those decisions. Yeah. And by the way, I do think this can be useful if you’re

[00:12:48] smaller. This feature actually came out of another product we built years ago called Know Your

[00:12:54] Company, which had this idea that if you’re smaller, you’re going to be able to do a lot of

[00:12:55] a weekly. I think it was like, I think we did it once a week. It was an email that was sent out to

[00:13:00] everybody. What are you basically working on? What have you been working on? So we were much

[00:13:03] smaller than it was. It was helpful and it still is helpful to small scale. It just feels a little

[00:13:07] bit less necessary, but I still think it’s actually a good thing to consider. The other thing is that

[00:13:11] when you get your habits right early, you just keep building on those. And that’s why it’s

[00:13:16] important to do the right thing early and not wait till you get to the point where you’re really in

[00:13:19] pain. And then you got to scramble to figure something out. We used to do, so when we were

[00:13:24] smaller, we had, you know, just every week, we had to do a little bit of a little bit of a

[00:13:25] the same question and all the answers were coming back into a single log. And that log got very long

[00:13:33] as we got more people. Basically, this is saved to what you’d consider to be a journal. If you’re

[00:13:38] unfamiliar with Basecamp, it’s sort of like a journal, a log, the answers come back. It’s one

[00:13:42] long scrollable page. And that was fine for a while. And then eventually we still ask everyone

[00:13:47] the same question, but we broke the, we created more questions. So one’s like design team,

[00:13:52] what are you working on? Programmers, what are you working on? Executive,

[00:13:55] what are you working on? And then we had to figure out how to do it. And then we had to

[00:13:55] and this way you can go into a specific department essentially, or a group of people and just see

[00:14:01] the responses for that group. So if you just want to see what designers are working on,

[00:14:04] you can go into the designer question, which is the same question as the other departments,

[00:14:08] but it’s, it’s grouped and filtered in a sense. And you can also click on somebody’s name

[00:14:13] specifically and see all their answers throughout history. So if I want to see what Kimberly’s been

[00:14:18] working on for the past six months, I just find your name anywhere, click your name,

[00:14:23] and then it filters that down just to you, which is also another

[00:14:25] way to get really specific if you need to, which is great for, you know, if you’re gonna do a one-on-one

[00:14:30] check-in with somebody or a, or a performance review or sort of a year summary, it’s like an

[00:14:35] incredible automatic way to be able to look back at someone’s body of work over a long period of

[00:14:41] time without having to do any work to, to find it and then have it all summarized by them in their

[00:14:47] own words, their own way, which is the other thing I think is important here.

[00:14:51] Some people listening might be thinking, this sounds like a lot of work. Like why doesn’t the

[00:14:55] system just summarize? Can’t AI do this now? Like summarize, summarize everything for you.

[00:14:59] The point is, is that summarization is fine, but it misses a lot of the nuance.

[00:15:04] And I want to hear people describe their work in their own way, because you can see what’s

[00:15:09] important to them, what they’re excited about, what they think is important to pull out and share.

[00:15:13] That’s a personal thing to me. This is a personal story. It’s not, it’s not a summarization from a

[00:15:18] system. And that’s explicitly why we built it this way. This is not summarizing to-dos that

[00:15:22] were checked off because all work is not tracked on to-dos.

[00:15:25] It’s not summarizing card table movements of cards. Not all work is tracked that way.

[00:15:30] Some work is conversational. Some work happens off base camp, a podcast interview,

[00:15:34] some, some other thing that you ran into or discussion you had with somebody.

[00:15:38] Write it up in your own words. Does it take time? It can take some time. Some people spend a lot of

[00:15:42] time. Like I’d say a lot, maybe 10, 15 minutes. You can see some people spend three minutes or

[00:15:47] two minutes or a minute or 30 seconds. Whatever they want to do is fine. It’s all about communicating

[00:15:52] the way you want to communicate.

[00:15:53] I will say though, that this is one of those processes at our company that is a little bit

[00:16:00] like eat your vegetables or brush your teeth three times a day.

[00:16:03] Three times a day.

[00:16:04] Well, maybe not three times a day, but it kind of thing where you’re, you’re looking at the

[00:16:09] long-term benefits. This is why you’re doing it, but not everyone loves summarizing their work in

[00:16:14] this way. So I think it is fair to say that there is, there needs to be a certain expectation,

[00:16:20] but this is what we do. The system can, of course,

[00:16:23] ask you to do it. But it’s not summarizing. It’s not summarizing. It’s not summarizing. It’s not

[00:16:23] everyone and it does. That doesn’t mean people will automatically choose to answer it. So one of

[00:16:28] the ways we’ve dealt with that is we’ve made it part of the official expectations. It’s in the

[00:16:34] employee handbook. Hey, we expect someone to answer the, what are you going to work on

[00:16:38] this week, every week? And what have you worked on today, twice a week?

[00:16:43] And I think some level of that is required because again, not everyone loves to do the

[00:16:49] summarization. It can feel like a hassle, even if it’s not actually that much time.

[00:16:53] And in that, it’s also some of the magic, in my opinion, that this is an automated way of

[00:16:59] encouraging people to think about how they spent their time. Because do you know what? Yeah,

[00:17:04] sometimes it does feel a little shit to write a, what did you work on today? If nothing really

[00:17:09] happened, right? Like eight hours was spent at work. And now you go to summarize the important,

[00:17:15] impactful points and you go like, huh, actually, what would I write today? Right? Now you do that

[00:17:20] once, you do that twice, who cares? If, on the other hand, you do that once, you do that twice,

[00:17:23] a weekly basis, you’re having a difficult time summarizing your work in this way, that is a

[00:17:30] flag of some kind, both to yourself, but also to your manager or your peers, right?

[00:17:35] Are people actually making progress on these things? And I think that social pressure is

[00:17:41] part of the magic of having a system like this, that a lot of folks looking at remote work fear

[00:17:48] that they won’t have. They fear that if someone is not in the office, do you know what, we’re

[00:17:53] all, are they even really going to be working? If you have something like this, it just deals with

[00:17:59] a lot of it. Because do you know what? Anyone can bullshit an update or two or five. You can’t

[00:18:05] bullshit three months worth of updates. And this comes back to Jason’s, a high level out of that

[00:18:10] feature. I can click on a single name. I can click on Jason. I can click on anyone in the company

[00:18:13] who’s answering these questions. And I can quite quickly scroll through like three months worth of

[00:18:18] work. And you can get a sense, a high level sense. Do you know, is there some blockage here?

[00:18:23] Are people operating at the level that they’re at this company at or whatever? And I think that

[00:18:28] that pressure sometimes is like just slightly uncomfortable to some people in some situations

[00:18:33] at some times. And that discomfort is good. It’s part of the feature. It’s part of the function.

[00:18:38] And the fact that it is a system doing it, asking you every day, actually makes it easier to apply

[00:18:44] that pressure evenly and consistently rather than a manager sort of cherry picking out. Oh, I wonder

[00:18:53] has worked on it, right? Really drilling into that. So I think there’s just, it’s worth recognizing

[00:18:57] not everyone’s going to love it right off the gate. Not everyone’s going to love it five years

[00:19:01] in, but part of that friction is the feature. And last point I want to make about this before

[00:19:08] we wrap up, David, you mentioned that it’s like part of our employee manual. And I think it’s

[00:19:12] also interesting that the two of you also do it. And Elaine also does it. I think very few

[00:19:18] people can say like, I know exactly what the CEO has worked on this week.

[00:19:22] Like, yes.

[00:19:23] Yes. At a high level, you know, like there’s plans and things are moving forward, but I could tell

[00:19:27] you like, what did you guys work on last week? Or what are you planning on working on? Which I think

[00:19:31] is a little out of the ordinary for most companies. I really like that as a, as a public

[00:19:37] diary, actually. Oftentimes I use my check-ins to make like a broader point. Maybe in the olden

[00:19:43] days, 1982, you’d send out a memo or something. I use these things like here’s a paragraph of

[00:19:49] something I think is important. I’ve been working on it, or I’ve been

[00:19:53] observing it. So like, it goes part of my transcript. And I know like a fair number of

[00:19:58] folks in the company will catch that. And that’s a way to sort of spread actually culture. This is

[00:20:03] a question we often get with remote work. How do you create culture? Well, this is one of the ways

[00:20:08] you narrate how you see the company. You narrate the processes and the projects and the failures

[00:20:14] or the ups or the downs. And through that narration, as owners of the companies, as executives,

[00:20:20] you get to set a certain tone.

[00:20:23] Like what are the expectations? Whatever. And it’s all just like, they’re, they’re strays. Like

[00:20:27] they’re an anecdote here, a narrative here. It’s not like all inclusive, all comprehensive.

[00:20:32] It doesn’t need to be because you’re telling a story over a long period of time. I also think,

[00:20:38] at least to myself, this sense that if you’re going to ask someone to do something you kind

[00:20:43] of don’t really want to do, I’ll give you an example. So it’s not always my kids love to eat

[00:20:48] their vegetables. Some vegetables they really like, other vegetables they don’t like so much.

[00:20:53] Not eating them. How the hell am I going to tell them? Do you know what? You should eat your

[00:20:56] vegetables. And they’re like, but dad, your plate doesn’t have any on it. I’m like, geez, yeah,

[00:21:00] you’re right. Like I’m a hypocrite. So there’s some sense that if you want employees at your

[00:21:05] company to do something that they are not always going to love all the time, and you may not love

[00:21:09] all the time, you got to be there. You got to be there or it’s going to ring really hollow.

[00:21:15] Okay. Well, with that, we’re going to wrap it up. Rework is a production of 37 Signals. You can

[00:21:19] find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com.

[00:21:23] Full video episodes are also on YouTube and Twitter. And if you have a question for Jason

[00:21:27] or David about a better way to work and run your business, automatic check-ins, or any of the other

[00:21:32] ways that we work at 37 Signals, send us a voicemail at 708-628-7850. You can also text

[00:21:39] that number or send us an email to rework at 37signals.com. And we just might answer it on

[00:21:44] an upcoming show.

Visão de gráfico