David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Ruby on Rails software framework, co-founder of Basecamp, investor in multiple tech startups, racing driver, and family man. He’s a modern-day polymath.
But his work calendar isn’t full of appointments or meetings. He hates managing employees or attending meetings. He says his schedule is a maker’s schedule, and much of his downtime is spent solving problems he cares about.
In a recent conversation, his second In 16 yearsHeinemeier Hansson spoke about the rise of Rails, Basecamp, and of course time management.
The full audio is embedded below. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Please let me know your opinion.
David Heinemeier Hanson: I am a co-owner of 37signals. We make software products. Our original tools are Base Campis a project management tool that I’ve been using for over 20 years, Hey.com is an email service I started a few years ago that’s an alternative to Gmail, and I often write together with my business partner Jason Fried.
We’ve written four books about starting, running, and thinking about a business: “Rework,” published in 2010, has sold 1 million copies worldwide, “Remote: Office Not Required,” “It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work,” and “Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.”
As part of building Basecamp in 2003, I created Ruby on Rails, the web framework that powers Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, the original Twitter platform, and nearly a million other popular websites and applications around the world.
I’m still working on it. We’re putting the finishing touches on Rails 8, which is a big upgrade for a framework that’s been around for 20 years and powers 10% of e-commerce in the world. That’s Shopify’s responsibility. When you add in the other things that run in the e-commerce world, On RailsIt’s probably a lot bigger. Shopify is the biggest Rails application. It has 5 million lines of code. Large portion Of all e-commerce transactions worldwide.
In my spare time I like to drive racing cars. I’ve been driving racing cars for about 15 years, mainly endurance races. The 24 Hours of Le Mans was a big moment for me.
Bandholz: How do you prioritize your day?
Heinemeyer Hansson: From the beginning, Jason and I were on the same page about developing good habits early on. We’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs try to switch modes and fail. They work 80 or 100 hour weeks in the early days and get used to or addicted to that style of work.
We designed our business from the beginning to work 40 hours a week, 8 hours a day, and that’s enough. Anything more than that, and you get so focused on work that you forget about everything else, and often bad things happen. The right perspective About things. And you think it’s all about the input, but it’s not. It’s all about the output.
I have a chunk of time in the morning after I drop my three kids off at school, so I make good use of it. I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs take pride in bragging about how much they work, which usually means sitting in front of a computer for hours, but what are the results of that time?
The way I utilize that time is through long periods of uninterrupted time. I try to be on a maker schedule most days of the week. It’s not a luxury I can have every day or every week, but it’s surprisingly easy to structure your business so that your days aren’t filled with meetings.
When you look at your schedule, it’s often empty. It’s filled with long, beautiful, uninterrupted periods of time that you could be spending solving problems you care deeply about. To do that requires more than 20 minutes of thinking here, 40 minutes there, or whatever fraction of a second you have left. We designed 37signals to not require that level of constant attention and intervention.
We don’t have status meetings where we sit in a circle and tell each other what we’ve done. We use Basecamp’s automated questions. On Monday morning, I ask everyone, “What will you be working on this week?” They record that and let everyone know, not just their manager, not just me, not just Jason.
So all of our staff know what’s going on in the business. At the end of each day, the system asks: “What did you do today?” This clock frequency allows me to check the business and build trust that the people I employ are doing the job we expect them to do and are moving in the right direction without my constant supervision.
If you work 40 hours a week, uninterrupted, you have an incredible amount of time. 40 hours is a luxury to make progress, but most people don’t think of it that way because they squander it. They break their time into chunks and then on Friday afternoon they think, “Oh, this week was busy. What did I get done?”
Because we don’t work that way, we have room for kids, races, hobbies, vacations, and time off while still moving forward with Basecamp and Hey. We’re working on two new products at the same time. I’m working on Rails 8 and writing a lot. I can clear the decks and get work done.
Bandholz: How much insight do you want to gain? Your team What do you think about daily updates?
Heinemeyer Hansson: We expect stories. They help you focus on what you want to highlight. That’s one of the reasons we collect this information in an open text field. It doesn’t come from a to-do you checked off or a file you uploaded. It’s not automated. This is your opportunity to reflect on something important you did today, something you want to share with others. Sometimes the answers can be very mundane: “I worked on the same project too. Here’s a quick anecdote about the problems I ran into and why it was difficult and why it took up so much of my time.”
Often these anecdotes become conversation starters in the comment thread of that update. Sometimes I’ll chime in and say, “I’ve never seen that problem before, and I haven’t seen anyone else do it, but here’s how I solved it, and maybe you can do it too.” Or someone in another part of the company might say, “Actually, a customer asked me about that.” Basecamp updates are public to everyone in the company. If you work in an office, you might have the occasional conversation in the hallway or at the water cooler, but that’s usually kept within your team. When you do it on Basecamp, everyone can see everything. We’re 60 people and it works really well.
Bandholz: You’re not going to read all 60 books, are you?
Heinemeyer Hansson: No, I skim through them. I usually scroll through most of these check-ins daily or weekly. If something catches my eye, I scroll back up. I can process 60 status updates in about 5 minutes.
We don’t have any full-time managers – all 60 of us, including Jason and I, treat management roles as side jobs that we do only when needed.
Bandholz: Where can we follow you?
Heinemeyer Hansson: Denmark This is my website. I’m also on X. Uh huh?.
