Today I chat with Jason Fried, founder of the Chicago company 37 Signals, a company that produces applications to help simplify the lives of small businessmen and women. Their blog, Signal vs. Noise, is a thought-provoking site that explores "entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more." Currently, the company is promoting its self-published book Getting Real: which " is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view, and unconventional approaches to software design. This is not a technical book or a design tutorial, it's a book of ideas."

The comments section on your blog can get pretty vicious sometimes. Have you ever considered disabling comments? What do you get from them?
We did disable comments for a week or so, but turned them back on. As much as we get tired of the viciousness, our blog thrives on comments and many opinions. We couldn't keep them down. I do think the comments have gotten better after we demonstrated that we could take commenting away due to abuse. I think people are more respectful now.

Why did you skip the traditional publishing route with Getting Real?
We worked with a traditional publisher on our first book. The experience was decent, but we wanted a lot more control than they would give us. They wouldn't even allow us to choose the name we wanted for our own book. Further, you give up the rights to your work once you publish with a traditional publisher. We didn't like that. And finally, the traditional publishing world is not the place to be if you want to make money on the time you spent writing the book.

So we decided to go it on our own this time. To write the book we wanted to write. To call it what we wanted to call it. To publish it as a PDF or print or audio or whatever we wanted. And to actually make sure it was profitable. We need to make sure the time we put into things is profitable time. Writing a book takes a significant amount of time so we need to be compensated for that.

If you were a freelance writer, what would you find most helpful from the 37 web applications?Writeboard for sure. We actually wrote our entire book in Writeboard. It was incredibly helpful during the editing phase and for sections that were written by multiple authors. I think we would have exploded
if we had to use Word.

From your study of simplification at 37 Signals, what are some basic things most people who work for themselves can do to simplify?
Do less paperwork and focus less on abstractions. Do more *real* work. Instead of thinking about how you are going to do something, or planning how you are going to do something, just do something and make decisions along the way. You want to make decisions when you have the most information available to you -- and that's never at the beginning of a project.

What have been some of the applications, time savers or tools that have changed your life for the better of late?
A simpler cell phone, for one. I used to have to get the latest PDA
phone or high-tech "this can do anything" phone. I've since scaled
way back. Now my phone actually works. It doesn't crash. It's not
slow. And that's pretty great. I recommend everyone try a little less
phone next time around. More tech is rarely the answer.