3 tips to help you be more skillful at work

🎸 Good morning to everyone still reeling (in awe) from Gojira’s headless Marie Antoinettes at the Olympic opening ceremony. They performed at La Conciergerie, the 14th-century royal palace where Antoinette was tried and sentenced.
Issue #129: when to speak up, OG blogger JD Vance, and the meaning behind the Brat memes
By Harris Sockel

Three doses of practical wisdom for your week:

• Before speaking up about something you disagree with at work, ask yourself: What will happen after I do? If you’re voicing concerns to help other people (coworkers, customers, direct reports) by all means sound off. But if you’re speaking up only to make yourself feel better, or to get something off your chest, reconsider, writes Kim Witten, PhD.
• If you have a full-time job, it’s easy for your day to become a vague mishmash of overlapping projects. Amanda Claypool recommends clocking in and out of tasks and tracking them on your calendar so you can measure how you spend your time (and then cross-checking that with your job description).
• Software engineer Tomáš Baránek created a free web app for doing exactly ^ that: It maps your day as a spiral and automatically bumps unfinished tasks forward if you need more time. The result is a calendar that adjusts to you.

We’re also reading: OG blogger JD Vance

Ash Jurberg close-reads JD Vance’s blog from 20 years ago, The Ruminations of JD Hamel. (His last name was Hamel at the time — one of three last names he’s had so far.) Vance, then Hamel, blogged his way through his deployment to Iraq in 2005, writing at one point that he couldn’t watch Garden State because the thought of returning home made him too nostalgic.

21-year-old Vance also cites Winston Churchill as one of his heroes: “Don’t know if I would say Churchill is the greatest man who ever lived (other than Christ), but he’s close, and his life is in many ways similar to my own…” Like Vance, Churchill was a writer before becoming a politician.

P.S. If you’re in the U.S., where were you when you heard Biden was dropping out? I was doing laundry. Then I logged into the platform formerly known as Twitter. Now, whenever I close my eyes I see lime green with skinny black sans-serif letters on top. Pop culture junkie Brooke Hammerling catalogs the Kamala Harris memes better than I ever could. TL,DR: Most are inspired by a 2023 speech Harris gave at the White House about making sure all kids get a good education.

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com