Modest Operations | Newsletter Volume 4

I spent the last week in between projects, which presented a good opportunity to take care of a lot of personal & professional errands (website updates! marketing outreach! health insurance! holiday shopping! meditation! reading for fun! haircut!) and clean up a lot of the digital detritus that had accumulated over the last few years. 

With a new short-term-ish full-time contract starting this week, the plan is for things to just get busier from here on out, so I'm soaking up every chance to tackle personal admin stuff that I can. 

This Week's Links A list of things I've been reading & thinking about. "Policies are part of the organizational code of a company. Not only should that code be open source, it should be tinkered with, improved, critiqued, forked, and refactored. Let’s do that." - All Basecamp policies are now on GitHub and licensed under creative commons via Instapaper (David Heinemeier Hansson for Signal vs. Noise) * "It’s very strange that a part of the country has elevated disrespect to a kind of virtue. And I think that is inseparable from the idea that the marginalized people who are demanding respect in our society…there’s a lot of people who feel like they shouldn’t have to respect them. They are resentful of the idea that they should respect them.” - Adam Serwer on white political correctness (Adam Serwer for the Ezra Klein Show) * "Regain your sanity with a minimal read-it-later app designed around minimalism, productivity, and digital wellbeing. Save your browser tabs, links, favorites, and pages you emailed yourself, that you plan to “read later” but usually never do, into an app where you can read them comfortably and efficiently, and that values your reading time."(Reading Queue) (Editor's note: I haven't tried this yet, but if I was half as good at actually reading my Instapaper articles as I am at saving them, I'd be a lot more well-read, so this seems like an interesting tool)*