Sarah Green-Carmichael from the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast interviews Jason Fried about sanity at work, how over-collaboration and excessive real-time communication/chat are destroying our work days, and plenty more.

SARAH GREEN-CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green-Carmichael. How is it that you can come away from a full day of work with that unmistakable feeling that you somehow didn’t get any work done? You were super busy all day. And then you go home at night and you just think, what did I really accomplish today?

It happens to me. I think it happens to all of us. Somehow you start what seems like a full day, only to see it sliced and diced into small little pieces of work– meetings, emails, online chats, catching up with your manager, things you get done, tasks completed. And then somehow, it doesn’t really feel like it amounted to anything productive.

Jason Fried thinks that there’s a better way to work. One that’s so productive that a 40 hour week is more than enough. He’s the CEO of the successful software startup Basecamp. Jason, thank you so much for talking with HBR IdeaCast.