JASON FRIED

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.

A fixed deadline and a flexible scope are the crucial combination.

Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.

That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.

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.

It's easy to forget, as a leader, that when employees don't get the wide view, not only does the point of their work escape them, but it can also lead to real frustration. It's hard to feel pride and ownership when you don't understand where things are going.

The reality is that companies are full of things that are left unspoken. And even when they are out in the open, the CEO is almost always the last to know.

In my mind, declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you're setting out to do.

Remind yourself that other people's jobs aren't so simple.

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.

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.

I like to think of myself as a leader whose door is always open. But I recently learned that an open door isn't enough.

When you can't see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away.

Respect the work that you've never done before.

As the number of people who work at Basecamp has grown, I've noticed places where we could use more features, like management, structure, and guidelines. I've also noticed places where we've overengineered ourselves and should pull back.

The owner of a company with supertight margins - say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods - would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.

It feels good to be productive.

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 you're short on sleep, you're short on patience. You're ruder to people, less tolerant, less understanding. It's harder to relate and to pay attention for sustained periods of time.

Even companies that do big business online struggle to be noticed by Google users. The Web, after all, is home to some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of indexed pages. But every company, big or small, can draw more Google traffic by using search-engine optimization - SEO, for short.

Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It's a mark of stupidity.

I've seen small businesses turn into terrible midsize or big ones because they let their desire to achieve some arbitrary metric get the best of them. Whatever is compromised as a result doesn't matter anymore, as long as the company is growing.

Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person.

A company gets better at the things it practices.

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.