Interruption is Not Collaboration
with Thomas Fritz, Dave Shepherd, Noah Lorang, and Bryan MilesHey, are you busy? Can you listen to this real quick? It’s an episode about interruptions in the workplace. You’ll hear from academic researchers, Basecamp’s head data wrangler, and the CEO of a remote company about how they’ve tackled not just the disruptions themselves, but also the workplace culture that allows those intrusions to flourish.
- ABB corporate website - 2:15
- Fast Company 2008 interview with Gloria Mark, a researcher who studies interruptions - 3:16
- FlowLight - 4:54
- “What’s happening?” (Office Space) - 8:45
- Noah Lorang on Twitter/Medium - 9:35
- Bryan Miles/Belay - 17:08
- EntreLeadership - 18:53
- FlowLight study ($) - 26:54
- Virual Culture by Bryan Miles - 27:02
Transcript
Thomas: (00:00:00) So I was always very interested in making software developers more productive. And in the beginning we were very interested in basically building tools that make them more efficient in the end. But then, eventually we noticed that there are other impediments to productivity or things that decrease the productivity of software developers a lot more than just the tools that we use. And we found out that one of the things that is the biggest impediment to developers’ productivity is the external interruptions that they experience from other coworkers.
Shaun: (00:00:27) Thomas Fritz is an associate professor at the University of Zurich where he focuses on software developer productivity. His fascination with interruptions goes back a long time. In 2007 he was a teaching assistant in the computer science department at the University of British Columbia where he worked with a post-doc named Dave Shepherd.
Dave: (00:00:45) We had desks right beside each other because we were working closely. I’d be trying to get something done. Something I’d consider a deeper task, like writing a paper or doing some coding and Thomas would be trying to ask me constantly about something related to the class. So every five minutes or something, he’d be asking very good, very helpful questions about making the exam better or making the assignment better. But nonetheless about every five minutes I was getting interrupted. So, at this time, we actually instituted a policy whenever he wanted to talk to me, he’d basically set a pen or pencil, whatever he had down between us. I could see that out of the corner of my eye, and then when I came to a stopping point, we could actually stop and have a good chat about it.
(00:01:30) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.
Shaun: (00:01:31) Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Shaun Hildner.
Wailin: (00:01:36) And I’m Wailin Wong.
Shaun: (00:01:38) And today we’re talking about interruptions—
Wailin: (00:01:38) Oh! Do you want to hear a joke.
Shaun: (00:01:40) Sure.
Wailin: (00:01:40) Knock knock.
Shaun: (00:01:42) Who’s there?
Wailin: (00:01:43) Interrupting cow.
Shaun: (00:01:44) Interrupting cow—
Wailin: (00:01:44) MOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
(00:01:46) Sound of crickets.
Shaun: (00:01:49) Exactly. Today we’re talking about interruptions. And we’re going to bring you three stories, the first of which, we’ll hear about how Thomas Fritz and Dave Shepherd teamed up on an invention to cut down on office interruptions.
Wailin: (00:02:00) We talked to someone at Basecamp about how he manages all the requests he gets during the work day.
Shaun: (00:02:06) And we’ll talk to a CEO who decided to tackle one very specific form of interruption. But first, back to Thomas and Dave. Dave became a researcher at a global engineering firm called ABB and Thomas became an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. They’d kept in touch over the years and eventually began working together on this problem of interruptions.
Thomas: (00:02:27) One of the things that we heard and we learned from people is that the biggest cost is almost if somebody comes by and interrupts them because at that point, you can’t really finish your task anymore. You can’t really hold on and finish the things that you’re currently working on before you switch to the person. In an email you can still sort of take a little bit of time, wrap up the things that you were doing and then answer the email. Whereas when somebody pops by, that’s very expensive because you have to answer immediately and that can range from something that’s very work related, to something that’s just about the soccer match or football match on the weekend. And obviously, depending on how closely related it is to your task, it might or might not be expensive to your work.
Dave: (00:03:09) The real cost of interruptions is after that time that they’ve interrupted you, the recovery time. So, it takes you about 23 minutes to get back into the flow of whatever you were doing after you were interrupted.
Thomas: (00:03:22) Also, there is the fact that interruptions can cause a lot of frustration on the person itself. So, studies have found that there’s a correlation between the number of interruptions that you have, or when the interruptions happen to the errors that you create or the defects that you create and errors that you make writing code or other kinds of tasks, as well.
Shaun: (00:03:44) As Dave and Thomas recorded these negative effects of being interrupted, they also looked at the lengths people would go to to be left alone.
Dave: (00:03:50) I’ve done the earphones approach or the even close the office door approach, where you just kind of physically indicate you’re busy. Of course, the drawback here is that you have to remember to do it and often, you know, I’d forget to put my headphones on and people would think I’m available. People have done things like actually set out physical cones like traffic-size cones to indicate this is the quiet time of the day that I don’t want to be interrupted.
Thomas: (00:04:14) People generally forget to set the status or don’t necessarily notice when they get into the state of being focused, and then once they notice, to set it, they have to get out of focus.
Dave: (00:04:26) Even worse, I’ll think I’m about to be busy. I’ll put up a cone to show that I’m busy, then three days later, I’ll realize that I’ve kept up this cone that tells people I’m busy for three days in a row, and what happens very quickly, is people start ignoring your signal, whatever that signal is because they realize it has no real bearing on what you’re actually doing.
Shaun: (00:04:46) All this research led to the creation of the FlowLight.
Dave: (00:04:49) It’s just a USB cord powering a very small LED light.
Thomas: (00:04:55) And we have software that tracks the interaction of the person on the computer, and then decides whether or not that person is available for an interruption or not. Also, taking into account your meeting schedule and your Skype status and then indicates it to people outside on the light. So, it changes the color of the light, but also it changes the status of the Skype.
Shaun: (00:05:16) The FlowLight, usually housed in a ping pong ball and clipped to the name-tag on a person’s cubicle changes color when it senses that you’re clicking your mouse, typing, or even when things are moving on your screen, removing the need to change your status yourself. In 2015, they began testing it at Dave’s engineering firm, ABB.
Dave: (00:05:33) We did a really long-term study for a year—for over a year, really. And, it involved 449 people in 12 different countries. I think it was about 14 different sites. We rolled it out in vastly different places from a small town in Vietnam to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Wisconsin.
Thomas: (00:05:53) When we started out, we had about 30 people that were software developers and then over time, more and more people were really interested in it and we changed the approach to be more general. To also apply for any sort of office worker, any sort of knowledge worker that works with a computer. And in the end, it was only 35% that were software developers out of the 450.
Dave: (00:06:14) What we would do is essentially a five-week study. The first week we roll out the software. The software does nothing except it allows the user to press a single button on their keyboard to log interruptions. So, the first week is all about getting a baseline.
(00:06:29) In week two, we actually give them the physical light. The light begins working. We don’t log any interruptions because they’re still getting used to using the light.
Thomas: (00:06:37) As soon as you have the light, people would actually come by and you would have more interruptions because people would ask, Oh! That’s a neat light, what is it for. And then you just have way more interruptions than you had before.
Dave: (00:06:47) Then, in the third week of the study, we get them to log interruptions in the same way that they did before they had the light. And that way, we can compare before and after.
Shaun: (00:06:56) The people in the research study continued to log interruptions like this for another couple of weeks and Dave and Thomas began to see some pretty incredible results.
Dave: (00:07:03) We saw a reduction in interruptions of about 46% and interestingly, that wasn’t the only effect. A lot of the effect was in people’s attitudes. People within a corporate culture went from not caring about interruptions, or not really thinking about interruptions to being very sensitive to when they were going to interrupt their colleagues, and trying to find the best times, and talking to people more at coffee breaks.
Thomas: (00:07:28) It’s sort of trying to understand that if sometimes I might need a break. But if I take this break, I have to be aware that if I interrupt somebody, it costs them something. So, really thinking about, is it necessary now?
Shaun: (00:07:40) Dave and Thomas want to license the FlowLight so other businesses and industries can use it. And they’re working on the technology to encompass more and varied states of focus.
Thomas: (00:07:51) We’re also pushing it further because one of the things we do capture at this point is all the computer interaction that somebody has. But that does not capture if somebody, for example, is very very focused when they’re right next to their computer. And quite a few people mentioned that they are particularly focused when they are sketching something on a piece of paper next to their computer but at that point, they’re not interacting with the computer so our algorithm doesn’t take that into account.
(00:08:13) We have been in the past and we are still, right now, looking at biometric sensors, so things that measure your heart rate variability, or your electrodermal activity and so-on that can basically tell us something about your cognitive states, to also capture aspects that are not just related to the computer work, so we can indicate to others whether or not you’re interruptible regardless of whether or not you’re interacting with a computer.
(00:08:39) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.
Wailin: (00:08:42) When I think of work place interruptions, I think of Gary Cole’s boss character in the movie Office Space, stopping people’s cubicles and saying, “Hey, whaaaat’s happening?” That’s where something like the FlowLight can be an effective deterrent. But, in a remote company like Basecamp where employees aren’t physically together, interruptions are virtual.
(00:09:02) I called one of my coworkers, Noah, to talk about how he handles all the requests he gets during the day.
(00:09:07) Hi, Noah! Guess what?
Noah: (00:09:10) What?
Wailin: (00:09:10) You’re live on the air with the REWORK podcast.
Noah: (00:09:15) Haha, very funny.
Wailin: (00:09:16) You are. Well, I mean, you’re not live, but we are recording. Can we interview you about office hours?
Noah: (00:09:23) Sure.
Wailin: (00:09:24) Okay. Great.
Noah: (00:09:32) My name is Noah Lorang. I run the data team at Basecamp. As a team we’re responsible for everything having to do with numbers at Basecamp. And so that ranges from the REWORK podcast to the marketing of Basecamp the product, to application performance and to support. But I do say that we spend 20% of our time… Nominally, if I think about the team data chart or whatever you call it, I would say we spend 20% of our time responding to requests. The reality is we spend 40-50% of our time in some way doing work that is request driven. So, someone has a question or problem that they want solved.
(00:10:08) So, it might be hey, we’re thinking about changing this feature can you help us understand how it’s used today, or we did just change this feature three weeks ago, can you help us understand what changed about it?
Wailin: (00:10:20) So, for that 40-50% of your time that is spent on people’s requests, how do those requests usually come in?
Noah: (00:10:30) The most common way is not an official way, but someone sends us a ping or an IM or text message and says, hey can you look at this, or do you know this? That’s the way that most requests actually come in, the nominal way that we hope requests come in is either people post a to-do on a special to-do list in our team data project. Or they come to office hours and they ask their question there.
Wailin: (00:10:54) How do you think this kind of protocol evolved where people would just ping you all day long?
Noah: (00:11:00) This interesting thing at Basecamp being in kind of a service team where we primarily exist to help other people do their work and to make Basecamp better. We don’t create things directly for customers to use so how can we make it easier for people to ask for help because that’s our mission, is to help people. And so for a long time we had no procedures in place by which we wanted people to ask for help. When you have no way of doing it, the default is what’s the easiest, and the easiest is well, I can go click on Noah’s name in my instant message client, or in the ping menu in Basecamp and ask a question. So, it’s only in the last year or so that we’ve tried to put some structure around how people ask for things.
Wailin: (00:11:38) Before you had these structures put in place what would be the way you would deal with those requests? Would you answer them right away? Would it depend on what you were doing at the time? How did you find yourself fielding all of those.
Noah: (00:11:52) I’d say, probably 80% of the time I would answer them right away. Particularly if it was something that took 10 minutes to do or less. And the rest of the time, I would say, hey, that’s a really good question, I will get you an answer when I can, and it might be later that day. It might be the next day. It might be a week or a month. But for the most part, I try to answer questions as quickly as I could, because I figured if someone’s asking me this, it must be somewhat urgent.
Wailin: (00:12:18) Did that usually prove to be the case?
Noah: (00:12:20) No, not at all. I think— people ask you questions when they think of them because that’s when they think of them. They don’t actually intend to say, this is a high priority because I’m asking this now. It’s, this is when I’m thinking of it so I’m going to ask you it right now.
Wailin: (00:12:34) Did you do this, then, at the cost of your own flow in terms of whatever you were working on at the time, you would just have to put it aside immediately and tackle whatever the question was?
Noah: (00:12:45) Yeah, there have been lots days, less so recently, because we’ve tried to be better about this, but in my past where I would say, here’s what I’m going to do today, and what I actually end up doing is answering eight questions for eight different people that weren’t on my radar at all at the start of the day.
(00:12:57) To some extent, though, like, I recognize that much of what I do is request-driven and so, it’s okay that the thing I was planning on doing isn’t the thing that I end up doing as long as the things that I ended up doing were actually things that were important and relevant and worth doing. I sometimes joke that I’m still on January of 2012’s to-do list. Because there are things that I’ve wanted to do since January of 2012 that I haven’t gotten to and that I would still like to do. But, I try to look at that not as, oh, I’ve failed at time management for the last six years, but I’ve done other things that are worth doing for the last six years, too.
Wailin: (00:13:35) Yeah, so then, what happened a year ago that prompted you to want to make a change?
Noah: (00:13:39) So, about a year ago, a couple things happened. So, one is Justin joined the team so it became a lot more important for us to think about who’s going to actually answer a question for someone. And so, that’s what led to doing the request list was to say, let’s get all the requests going into one place where we can prioritize it and assign them to each other. Office hours is a more recent thing for us, and the idea behind that was, you know, the request list worked for people who were willing to take the time to say, here’s what I’m trying to do and to write up a few sentences or a few paragraphs that would give us enough information to help them. With office hours, it’s you come at a specific time, don’t tell us what you want in advance, like you did today and we’ll help you to the best of our ability that we can during that time until the point where there’s nothing more we can do or it’s 5 o’clock.
(00:14:31) So, the idea was to give people kind of two ways of getting help. One in which you have to do the work up front, the other in which you don’t, but you do have to come at a specific time.
Wailin: (00:14:39) Yeah, so your office hours are every week and do you block out the entire workday for it?
Noah: (00:14:44) Justin and I have a standing call every Tuesday at 9 am, so we say starting at 10 am until there’s nobody else or we’re too exhausted, we’ll do office hours. That’s the commitment that we’re making, is that I will give up to the entirety of my day from 10am central on Tuesdays until I can’t do anymore. If you come on time ready to ask questions.
Wailin: (00:15:07) You know, I have to say I am really impressed and it does make sense now that you told me that you get back to most of your requests immediately. Because, any time I ping you about the most inane thing having to do with Meghan Markle or Queen Elizabeth, you always get back to me right away.
Noah: (00:15:24) Well, the truth is, I actually ignore everyone else’s messages except for yours about the royal family.
Wailin: (00:15:30) Oh my gosh, that’s so nice.
Noah: (00:15:32) No, I mean, I do try. And I probably do this too much. I try to be too responsive. And it is because, like, I do think of us as a service center and as being almost like help desk. Whenever someone is looking for data, for the most part it’s because they want to do something better or in a different way and I’m a fan of them doing that with data. So, I want to make it as easy as possible for people to do that within reason, because otherwise, if it’s too hard to get help, people will just say, well, I’m not going to look at whether this thing that I did had an impact on usage or anything else. I just don’t—it’s too hard to find out so I don’t care. And there are lots of reasons to say I’m not going to look at data relative to something that I do. I don’t want the reason that someone does that to be because it was too hard to get help. So, that’s why both, we have these scheduled things, like requests and office hours, but also why we recognize people will come as they are and if someone comes some other time and has a question and we can realistically answer it, we will.
(00:16:31) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.
Shaun: (00:16:31) I really love that Noah explains that implementing office hours doesn’t totally eliminate the interruptions of his day, but at least it helps a little bit.
Wailin: (00:16:41) Yeah, I think humans are naturally social creatures, so it’s hard not to interrupt your colleagues, whether it’s making small talk about the upcoming royal wedding, or wanting to discuss a work issue that’s just popped up. Our next conversation is with a CEO who took a closer look at when those naturally occurring discussions shade into something more disruptive.
Bryan: (00:16:41) Hello, my name is Bryan Miles. I am the co-founder and CEO of Belay. Belay is a virtual services organization. We work with clients all over the United States, providing them with virtual assistants, book keepers, webmasters, and writers. We have 60 people on our corporate team here in metro Atlanta that are employees and 550 contractors around the United States.
Wailin: (00:17:28) At Belay, Bryan’s worked to build a culture of transparency which he sees as pretty vital in a remote company where people don’t see each other face-to-face. That culture involves being honest with coworkers when they need alone time.
Bryan: (00:17:42) Because we create transparency, it’s like, do you know that you’re annoying me. Stop, I’ll get back to you in five minutes. You’re driving me up a wall, I’ll address this when I can. Somebody IMs me, I just ignore it if I’m on a call. And I’ll get to it when I can. But if I’m just checking email and something pops up, I’ll just address it right away. Text messaging, our leadership team, we text message. We have a group text that we do for head’s up, this is happening, and sometimes that can get a little annoying. But also, I have the ability to shut all that off, too.
(00:18:15) I know that some employees that they’ll batch their email and they’ll do stuff like that to protect their time or their focused time. Or if they’re in a meeting, they’ll shut off their email. They’ll turn off their notifications. But we leave that up to each employee to deal with that.
Wailin: (00:18:30) Part of this culture also involves eliminating what Bryan views as a particularly insidious form of interruption: gossip.
(00:18:37) Can you talk about how you decided to tackle gossip as a matter of corporate policy, especially as it related to interruptions or what you were seeing?
Bryan: (00:18:47) My wife and I, we were—she’s a co-founder as well. We were in Tucson, Arizona at a business event called EntreLeadership, and it was in 2012, and we were about two years, at that point, in. And we started to see that having an all-virtual company, we don’t have an office. So, as our company started to grow, we started to see evidence of something that we just didn’t know how to label it. Where people would be kind of talking about the company, but it wasn’t negative, but it was kind of trending in a direction where it could be. And, one of the speakers, his name was Dave Ramsey, talked about how gossip is really bad and you can’t tolerate it in an organization.
Wailin: (00:19:24) And how did he define gossip and how did you define gossip?
Bryan: (00:19:28) Gossip, we kind of took it from them. Gossip is really taking a problem to somebody that can do nothing about it. You know, it’s one thing to take a story to somebody. That’s no big deal, right? It’s really when that something trends toward a problem or a challenge or an issue that you know it’s not a good thing. And so, what we say in our organization is really simple. If you have a problem, you need to take it up. Meaning, you take it to your manager, you take it to HR. If you can’t take it to your manager, take it to somebody else that’s above you in the organization and we’ll help you solve it. When it breaks the policy inside our business is when they take it to a peer, or worse, to somebody that maybe reports to them.
(00:20:10) Here’s the problem with that. You’re taking a problem to somebody that can’t do anything about it and so you’re giving them something that they don’t even know how to handle. And then it makes them helpless because then they don’t know what to do.
Wailin: (00:20:22) Did you provide some examples of something that we would consider gossip. Here’s an example of something that would not meet our standard for gossip and would be fine to discuss?
Bryan: (00:20:33) Yeah, we did. There’s some things, like, when you’re collaborating and you’re dealing with a challenge in the business. It’s one thing to say something negative about an individual when you’re taking that up because it’s impacting the team’s performance, right? That’s okay. But, when you take that to somebody that can do nothing about it and they’re just like, well, I guess that person stinks now. There’s just nothing they can do about it. And another one too, in a startup, you’re kind of strapped for cash. We actually need more money to pull this off. And so, you think about that, and you have an employee that’s like, gosh, we need the money to go do this one thing and if they don’t have the money and they don’t have the ability to take the problem up. And maybe they were going to share that with a coworker, then the other coworker starts to think, well, what are we, broke?
(00:21:21) It’s all these nuanced things that it just kind of pushes away and quells when you give people an opportunity or a conduit to address their issues. Instead of taking it to somebody that can do nothing about it, they basically are taking it up and saying, look, I’ve got to share something with you that’s not tattling. It’s—I have an issue or a problem that they otherwise maybe would have stuffed down inside of them or they wouldn’t have shared. And we have a lot of transparency, I think, in our business because we said, look, you can have problems, just make sure you take them up. There’s nothing wrong with them. So, it’s created some courageous conversations where people have brought things up to say, you know, gosh, this doesn’t seem right. Or, we need to address this. Or, this person’s not performing right.
Wailin: (00:22:03) The no gossip policy at Belay has a lot of nuance to it that needs to be carefully navigated. Even the word gossip can be tricky. It has a negative connotation, especially in this context. But, sometimes that term gets applied in a pejorative sense to conversations that actually need to happen. I asked Bryan whether there is a use for gossip in the workplace.
(00:22:25) In light of all of these stories coming out about sexual harassment, I think it’s become clear at least to me that people, especially women can sometimes use gossip as a means of self protection. People talk about whisper networks, which is just groups of people, usually women, again, who are exchanging information about maybe that creep in the office or what they can do to make sure that they are safe in a workplace that is not always safe for them. That often gets labeled as gossip in a pejorative sense, but it’s actually very necessary just for workplace survival. Is there an upside to gossip or a use for gossip, and how do you account for that in your policy?
Bryan: (00:23:11) Most of our, especially our virtual assistants are female. And they work alongside clients and even if there’s like an insinuation or subtle form of that, even on a text or whatever. We won’t tolerate it. So, I got to thinking, like, we need to be more clear about this. And I had a conversation with our HR team, and I said, and I included our CFO, and I said, how do we protect our folks in an all-virtual environment, and so we just decided that we would be, especially in light of all the stuff that’s going on currently, is over communicate that we won’t tolerate this. That you have a safe harbor. You can come to HR. We also have, because we work with a lot of contractors, we have a contractor care department, and they know the people they can contact there if there’s an issue. Even if it’s gray, they can approach them with that. And that is not gossip. That is protecting yourself. That is protecting the organization. And, we’ve been known to fire clients before for other reasons, so, if something like that ever happened, we would definitely take the appropriate action. So, it was something that I guess is, frankly, as a guy, I didn’t think about. But it is something that I wanted to address with our organization. So, it starts with the leaders being receptive and being aware.
(00:24:31) There are times, that are rare in our company, but there are times when that person cannot go to their manager because it may be too personal or some weird thing. We’ve just tried to over-communicate to our employees that they have a different way of doing that without it contradicting or impacting the gossip policy. We just—we try and say, look. You can take this to HR. Consider them Switzerland. They’re your safe harbor for any type of conversation.
Wailin: (00:24:57) It seems interesting the role of HR, which I think is getting more scrutiny in light of everything that’s been going on because it seems like in startup type companies, or younger type companies there is no HR department and then once companies get really big it seems like the issue is that the HR department is too bureaucratic, or it’s there to protect the interests of management and the balance of power is always tipped against the employees. Is that something that you think about as you grow as well? Your company has been growing pretty fast, right?
Bryan: (00:25:30) Yeah, we’ve grown quite fast over seven years. I guess I’ve always looked at—and my wife, too, we’ve said this numerous times—we want to create a company that we always want to work for. And so, when I thought about HR and the great experiences I’ve had with HR before we ever started this, and I’d been an employee to organizations. It’s always felt like a safe harbor. Like, whether it’s just something about maternity or a benefit question or whatever, or some more serious things. Now, it’s our turn as owners of an organization to make sure that we create a safe environment. And we call it our safe harbor. People can kind of row inside that safe harbor and they’ll know that they’re protected and we’re going to wrap ourselves around them and make sure that they’re okay.
(00:26:11) Everybody should be in business to make a profit, to have a healthy bottom line, because that does fuel future growth of an organization. But, it shouldn’t come at the cost of an employee that’s just trying to come to you seeking out genuine help. If you want to create an organization that people really want to be part of, you can’t let people assume the way to communicate. You kind of have to demonstrate the path forward.
(00:26:37) Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.
Shaun: (00:26:40) REWORK is produced by Wailin Wong and me, Shaun Hildner. Our theme music is Broken By Design by Clip Art.
Wailin: (00:26:47) Thanks to Heather Amos, Lewis Wallace, Paige Atkins, and Miranda Hawkins. We’ll link to Thomas and Dave’s FlowLight study in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at rework.fm. We will also link to a book Bryan Miles of Belay wrote, called Virtual Culture.
Shaun: (00:27:03) I would be extremely excited if you wouldn’t mind giving us a rating and review on Apple Podcast, Google Play Music, Breaker, wherever you decide to get your podcasts. As always, we would love to hear from you. If you have any questions for Jason Fried or David Heinemeier Hansson, or anyone else at Basecamp, you can—
Wailin: (00:27:21) Noah!
Shaun: (00:27:21) Or Noah, for that matter. You can give us a call at (708) 628-7850. Or shoot us an email at hello@rework.fm.
[Broken By Design by Clip Art plays.]
Shaun: (00:27:52) Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Shaun Hildner.
Wailin: (00:27:56) And I’m Wailin Wong.
Shaun: (00:27:57) And today we’re talking about—
Wailin: (00:27:58) —Um, Shaun, I have a joke.
Shaun: (00:28:01) Okay. Tell me.
Wailin: (00:28:02) This is the only joke I know.
Shaun: (00:28:03) I can’t wait.
Wailin: (00:28:05) Okay. Knock knock.
Shaun: (00:28:06) Who’s there.
Wailin: (00:28:08) Interrupting cow.
Shaun: (00:28:08) Interrupting cow—
Wailin: (00:28:09) WHOOO… nope.