Six-week cycles came from Basecamp, and specifically from Jason Fried. I was one of about twenty people at a presentation in their Chicago office on how Basecamp uses Basecamp to build Basecamp. He talked about breathing room in a working environment, and how his team had tried several methods before settling on one: take two weeks to plan the next six weeks of work.
My reaction, more or less word for word: what the hell, you can do that?
If I plan out everything I am going to work on for six weeks, I can take it easy for two?
Why it landed the way it did
Basecamp launched in 2004, also out of Chicago, as a purposefully simple project management tool. As it grew so did Jason Fried's profile, and his talk about why work does not happen at work had already put some ideas in my head. His books kept pushing at the same thing: that the standard way of running a company is a choice rather than a law.
So when he described the six-and-two rhythm, I did the thing where you start daydreaming the moment you hear an idea. If I did this, then this could happen, and then I could do this. I nearly walked out of the room mid-presentation.
I was running a creative agency with seven people at the time. I have always taken the view that if I want something for myself, the rest of my team should have it too. So if I wanted to work this way, the whole team was going to work this way.
We started in April 2016. By 2018 we had brought cycles to a twenty-plus person team with employees in four different countries.
What Shape Up is, and how it relates
Shape Up, written later by Ryan Singer, is the formal write-up of how Basecamp runs this. If you search for six-week cycles it is almost certainly what you will find first, and it is very good.
It is also written for a specific reader: a product team. Work arrives as pitches, leadership bets on which pitches get a cycle, and teams get room to work out the how. If you run a software product with designers and engineers, read Shape Up before you read me.
What it does not cover is everything else a company does. Client work. Sales calls. Hiring. Bookkeeping. The fact that your developer's daughter has a doctor's appointment on Thursday.
That is the gap I ended up filling, not because I set out to improve on anything, but because I did not run a software company and had to make the rhythm work anyway. The full comparison against Shape Up, sprints and quarters is worth reading if you are choosing between them.
The one thing Jason was firm about
Cycles are not a sprint. Do not call them sprints.
It is not about everybody going 110 percent for six weeks. It is a controlled pace.
That distinction turned out to be the load-bearing one. A team told they are sprinting braces for pressure, because they have all been through a sprint. A team told they are running a cycle hears a different promise: a known amount of work, at a pace with room in it, ending in a real break.
What I changed
All I had was the six-on, two-off shape. Everything under it I built by trial, error and a fair amount of outright failure.
- The cycle sheet. A spreadsheet rather than a calendar, because tasks move too much and a calendar collapses like a waterfall when one thing shifts.
- The two meetings. A Monday check-in and a Friday check-out, on-cycle only. The check-out became my team's favourite meeting, which I did not see coming.
- Six hours in an eight hour day. Counting communication honestly, which is where the forty-hour week turns out to be about fifteen.
- Naming. Basecamp named their cycles after wars. I used US presidents for a year, then cities, and have not gone back.
- The break as the point. In Shape Up the cooldown is for bugs and planning the next bet. In my version the two weeks are the reason the whole thing exists.
I also folded in ideas from well outside software. Robert Cialdini and Charles Duhigg on habit and reward. Parkinson's Law on why work expands. Covey's matrix on what is actually urgent. A decade of conversion-rate work, client management, and building a digital product company.
The credit, plainly
Thank you to Jason Fried. If he had not spent years questioning how the corporate world works and experimenting on his own company, plenty of us would never have realized things could be different.
I have seen enough frameworks get quietly rebranded by whoever wrote the second book about them. That is not what this is. The idea is his. What is mine is a decade of running it in a business that looks nothing like Basecamp, and everything that decade taught me about the parts he never had to solve.
Things do not have to be the way they have always been. That was the whole message, and it is still the whole message.
The version I ended up with is in the guide to running your work in six-week cycles.