Joans

A few months ago, I met a new friend at a Creative Mornings talk. She is going to take some time off at the beginning of 2018 to work through the AltMBA reading list before diving into job searching. I thought this was a great idea and it got me wondering about the kind of reading material Basecamp would suggest for people who want to build a business like ours. Of course, there’s our previous books and the upcoming Calm Company. But with minds like the ones we have, I guessed we can could up with a really fantastic set of material that SvN readers would eat up. With that in mind, I asked my colleagues:

Given your role at Basecamp, what one or two books/resources would you suggest to help someone prepare for the kind of work you do?

Before I share the list, I wanted to add some of my own thoughts here, as someone who can get a bit obsessed with collecting information and knowledge: Like a lot of people in today’s modern society, I often have a direct correlation between knowledge gathering and not applying that information to my actions in a meaningful way. Too often, the more I think I know, the less I’m actually doing. So yes, these materials are rich with good advice and ideas on how to start your business or manage people, but they’re no substitute for the real work and experience.

Buying (and hopefully reading) all of these books won’t automatically mean you can create a business like Basecamp. Only doing the work with care, thoughtfulness and sincere effort can do that. (Harmful interpretations of “hustle” not required.)

I’m pleased to present two versions of our list, one sorted by subject and one by who recommended it the books, if you’re into that sort of thing. In lieu of Amazon (for this post), the links are to OCLC catalog listings, which will show you a list of libraries near you that have the item. I highly recommend checking out your local public library to borrow these materials. Your library could very well have these in convenient audiobook or e-book formats. If you don’t see the item in your local library, ask your local librarian about the power of Inter-Library Loans.

The second recommendation I would make would be to purchase these at a local bookstore. If you’d prefer to buy the books online, please use an Amazon Smile link to support a charity or use a referral link from your favorite podcast to support them. Happy reading!

By Subject

Business
Berkshire Hathaway letters to shareholders 1965–2012
Maverick! : the success story behind the world’s most unusual workshop
The Effective Executive
The Secrets of Consulting
Turn Your Ship Around & Turn the Ship Around
Poor Charles Almanack: The wit and wisom of Charles T. Munger
Blue Ocean Strategy
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Starting from Scratch
Killing The Sale
Lessons in Service from Charlie Trotter
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
How Full is Your Bucket: Positive Strategies for Work and Life
The Encore Effect
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Crucial Conversations
The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less
The Innovators Solution
The first year of Back to Work, with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin. 
Disney War
Must Reads: On Managing Yourself
The Last Days of Target by Joe Castaldo in Canadian Business
Big Med by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker
Famous Names by John Colapinto in The New Yorker
The Cobra by Tad Friend in The New Yorker

Customer Service and Communication:
Badass: Making Users Awesome
Radical Candor
Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers
The Amazement Revolution: Seven Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer and Employee Experience
The Nordstrom Way to Customer Experience Excellence
Delivering Happiness
Thinking Fast and Slow
Elements of Style
Metaphors We Live By
On Writing Well
Wit: a play
Emotional Intelligence: Mindfulness
Susan David: Emotional Agility

Accessibility
Accessibility for Everyone 
a11ycasts with Rob Dodson (From the Google accessibility team)
The a11yproject

Design
The Design of Everyday Things
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Interaction of Color
Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things
Elements of Typographic Style
Sketching User Experiences
Understanding Comics
Nature of Order

Programming
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
Smalltalk: Best Practice Patterns
Learn to Program
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery blog

Fiction
Invisible Cities
Mezzanine: A Novel
Then We Came to the End: A Novel
Startup: A Novel

Other
Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of Black Hawks over Northern Iraq
Essential Manners for Men

By Person

Jason Fried, CEO
Business
Berkshire Hathaway letters to shareholders 1965–2012
Maverick! : the success story behind the world’s most unusual workshop
The Effective Executive
The Secrets of Consulting
Turn Your Ship Around & Turn the Ship Around
Poor Charles Almanack: The wit and wisom of Charles T. Munger
Blue Ocean Strategy
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

DHH, CTO
Programming
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
Smalltalk: Best Practice Patterns

Tara Mann, iOS Designer
Design
The Design of Everyday Things
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Interaction of Color
Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things
Elements of Typographic Style
Sketching User Experiences
Understanding Comics
Nature of Order

Fiction
Invisible Cities

Taylor Weibley, Ops
Business
Starting from Scratch
Killing The Sale
Lessons in Service from Charlie Trotter
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
How Full is Your Bucket: Positive Strategies for Work and Life
The Encore Effect
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Crucial Conversations
The Effective Executive
Turn the Ship Around
The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less

Other
Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of Black Hawks over Northern Iraq
Essential Manners for Men

Ryan Singer, Product Strategy
Business: The Innovators Solution
Design: Nature of Order
Implementation: Domain-driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

Wailin Wong, Rework Podcast
Writing and Storytelling 
Good Prose: The Art of Non-fiction
Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio
On the inner workings of companies:
Disney War
The Last Days of Target by Joe Castaldo in Canadian Business
Big Med by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker

On branding and marketing:
Famous Names by John Colapinto in The New Yorker 
The Cobra by Tad Friend in The New Yorker

Fiction
Mezzanine: A Novel
Then We Came to the End: A Novel
Startup: A Novel

Chase Clemons, Support
Customer Service and Communication:
Badass: Making Users Awesome
Radical Candor
Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers
The Amazement Revolution: Seven Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer and Employee Experience

Dylan Ginsberg, iOS Programmer
“I recommend reading Ben Thompson’s Stratechery blog. It’s well worth paying for the daily updates, though there is also a lot of good free content in the weekly articles. A good place to start are his end of year summaries.”

Flora Saramago, Programmer
Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer

Joan Stewart, Ghost Support
The first year of Back to Work, with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin. 
On Writing Well
Wit: a play
ASPCA’s Pet Adoption Tips

Kristin Aardsma, Support
Customer Service and Communication:
The Nordstrom Way to Customer Experience Excellence
Radical Candor
Delivering Happiness
Thinking Fast and Slow
Elements of Style
Metaphors We Live By

Michael Berger, QA
Accessibility for Everyone 
a11ycasts with Rob Dodson (From the Google accessibility team)
The a11yproject

James Glazebrook, Support
Emotional Intelligence: Mindfulness
Must Reads: On Managing Yourself
Susan David: Emotional Agility

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve told you about what we’ve been working on in Basecamp 3. The entire team has been plugging away at making it the best it can be. Here’s the latest features available for all Basecamp 3 accounts:

Search

Before, searching in Basecamp was a bit like making your bed with a cat around. Yes, the job will get done, but it probably could have been faster and your assistant wasn’t as helpful as it thought it was. Today, we announce the new search feature in Basecamp 3, faster and better than ever! This is a huge update to our search feature, brought to you by designer Conor and programmer Pratik.

Now you don’t have to go to a separate page to search. Click ‘Find’ in your toolbar and you’ll see our new search tool, right in place. You can filter by type of item, who posted it and the project or team it’s in. Basecamp will start displaying your results right away. You can also filter away Pings and Campfires, making it much easier to find what you’re looking for.

You can see the new searching feature in action below. Sometimes support has to share whitelisting information with customers who have tighter security at their company. In this example, I just searched for whitelist and filtered by Documents and our support’s project.

Applause for To-do Completions

Applause is a lovely feature that was previously only available for individual items like comments, messages, and documents. Basecamp designer Kris and programmers Jeffrey and Flora have now brought Applause to to-do completions. Now, when someone completes a to-do, you can let them know you appreciate their hard work by giving them applause.

That applause will also appear in their Applause Report, every morning around 9am.

Filter Messages By Category

By popular demand, Kris and Flora also brought us filtering messages by category. Now when you’re viewing messages in your teams or projects, you can narrow them down by category.

Until next time!

That’s it for now. The whole team is working on great ideas as always, and we’d love to hear what you think about the new features. You can contact us on Twitter or share your thoughts via our Support form.

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If you haven’t tried the latest version of Basecamp yet, sign up today for a free 30 day trial. Our team can show you the Basecamp Way or you can ask support a question to get a quick answer, 24/7.

Summer brings 4 day work weeks at Basecamp, but that doesn’t mean the Android team takes a break. They just launched a new version of Basecamp 3 for Android, with an updated file browser to make attaching files to your Basecamp faster and easier.

With the new file browser, you can attach an image directly from the camera (Android 5 and above), or file from Dropbox or Google Drive:

Check out the new camera and file picking features in action:

Get it Today!

Basecamp 3 for Android 3.5.4 with the new file browsing and uploading is available today in the Google Play Store. The new file browsing feature is available in Android 4.4 and above (the camera option is in Android 5.0 and above only). Try it out and leave Jay, Dan and Jamie a review in the Play Store.

If you don’t have a Basecamp 3 account yet, now is the perfect time to get one. Your first 30 days are free!

You know that with the Android app getting updated so recently, that an update to the iOS app was not far behind. In fact, the iOS team (Jason Z, Tara, Dylan and Zach) launched the latest version last week! It’s got a sweet set of new features I’m excited to share with you.

Hey! Who Moved My Pings?

In previous versions of the app, Pings were a little harder to find and challenging to start. Now Pings are smartly located in the Hey section, right at the top. You’ll see a row of avatars for your most recent pings. You can quickly start a new one or swipe through previous Pings.

You can also quick swipe on items in the Hey menu to mark them as read:

Docs and Files List View

The team also added a list view for Docs & Files, with new file icons, smoother re-ordering, tap to preview images, and swipe to move and archive.

These updates, along with a batch of the usual speed enhancement fixes, have made the iOS app better than ever! You can get the latest version of Basecamp for iPhone and iPad on the App store. If you like it, please leave a review! If you don’t have Basecamp 3 yet, get started with a 30 day free trial now.

When you’ve been away from your Basecamp 3 account for a stretch of time and need to get current, it can be tough to know where to start. On top of that, opening each Hey! item individually can take a while.

That’s why the Android team (Jay, Jamie, and Dan) developed the new Catch Up feature, available in the latest update to the Android app.

How it works

When you have two or more unread Hey! items in your Inbox, you’ll see a “Catch Up” button.

Tap that button, you’ll go to Catch Up mode, where you can swipe through your unread items one by one. The unread count will appear at the top and your items are optimized for easy reading.

My favorite part is using “Mark as Unread” to keep items in the Hey! inbox. This is perfect for when you want to quickly browse through everything, but give a second look important things later.

Here’s what Catch Up looks like in the app, start to finish:

Available now!

Basecamp 3 for Android 3.5 is available from the Google Play Store. It’s got the new Catch Up feature (Android 5.0 and above only) along with the usual group of bug fixes and overall polish. Try it out and leave us a review in the Play Store.

Don’t have Basecamp yet? Sign up today, the first 30 days are free.

The change from Winter to Spring can provide a lot of inspiration for our team. We take time to listen to the rain, the wind, the flowers until they whisper the secrets to the way forward. Frequently, this growing season plants in us the ideas for the future of Basecamp.

OK, OK, the truth of our new List view feature has a lot less to do with communing with nature and a lot more to do with listening to customers, but it’s still exciting! While a lot of customers like the card view, projects with longer titles are truncated and sometimes look strange. With a large number of teams and projects, the card view can be overwhelming.

Designer Scott and programmer Pratik heard the call! They teamed up to create a new feature which available to all Basecamp 3 users today. Now, you can see your teams in projects in a new List view, which groups projects alphabetically for quick scanning:

Changing your View

To change your Team or Project, click the ••• menu at the top right of the section.

Jump to your projects and pin them

The Jump menu still works the same with the Card or List view.

Pinning is available from the ••• button at the right of a project or team:

New Project Flow

With the addition of the list view, we adjusted the flow for creating a new project or team. There’s a cleaner New button, where you can create a new project from scratch or a template and manage your templates.

Faster, List View, Load, Load!

Previously, Basecamp 3 would load full menus for pinning and renaming for each project. By loading those menus asynchronously, we reduced HTML on the Home page by 45%. In addition to being just a bit more helpful, this redesign makes loading the whole home page faster.

Try it today!

List view for Teams and Projects act independently of each other. Basecamp 3 will also remember your preference no matter if you’re using the desktop apps or a browser. (List view for mobile apps will come in future updates to those apps.)

A list view was one of our most popular customer requests and we’re very happy to add it in Basecamp 3. If you don’t have a Basecamp 3 account yet, sign up today, the first 30 days are free.

The last update for their app was only a month ago, but Team Android at Basecamp has kept a steady pace to release a new version of the app, chock full of slick new screens and updates to features you already love. Here’s what you’ll find in the latest version, available today:

New Hey! Menu

The new Hey! menu brings all your new @mentions, Messages, Comments, To-dos, Events, and Campfire chats into one place. If it’s new in your account, it’s in your Hey! menu.

Improved Pings

Pings are a great way to reach out to someone on your account without creating noise for your other colleagues in a Team or Project Campfire. This update makes them even easier to use on Android. Now, each Ping with an individual user gets its own color with a profile picture:

Group pings are now clearer. Tap the colored toolbar to see who is participating in the Ping. You can also tap a participant’s profile picture to see that person’s time zone and other information:

You can also send a Ping from any screen in the app. Here’s how it works:

Fixes and Fine Tuning

In addition to those great features above, the team added a little polish all over like swiping right to go back to the previous screen and displaying to-do list descriptions. They also made some adjustments to make drafting and saving messages and comments smoother.

Get it today!

Basecamp 3 for Android 3.4 is available now from the Google Play Store. If you don’t have a Basecamp 3 account yet, sign up today, the first 30 days are free.

Try it out and let us know what you think in a comment below — Jay, Jamie, and Dan would love to hear from you. And if you have a chance, please do leave us a Play Store review too. Thanks!

I keep the Basecamp 3 desktop app open all day. I used to keep Basecamp open in the browser, but would sometimes accidentally close that tab and would miss a Ping or @ mention. The support team depends on communication, so now Basecamp 3 is my most used app after my web browser. Our account is really active throughout the day but notification settings help make sure my attention goes where I want it to be. Having the app available makes it easy to catch up when I need to.

We just released a new version of our desktop app for Mac and Windows, including new navigation buttons to let you go back and forth in your account. (Jazz personality, G mentality helpful, but not required.)

Since we added the back/forward buttons to the navigation bar, we moved your list of accounts to the new Account menu. If you’re on multiple accounts, you can switch between them quickly from the Account menu.

If you want to see the pages you’ve recently viewed or copy the address of your current page to share with others, you can do that from the new Page menu.

Navigation buttons were one of the top requests of our desktop app users, and we’re really excited to have them in the latest release. If you haven’t got the desktop app yet, download it today, on your Mac or Windows (64-bit) machine.

The automatic check-in is one of my favorite features to introduce to new Basecamp users. It’s such a simple idea: Ask everyone a question each day, week or month. See all the answers together. Knowing what everyone’s done that day, or what they plan to do that week, cuts down on uncertainty and saves everyone from excess meetings, but my favorite outcome would be the deeper understanding and appreciation I have when my colleagues answer a question that isn’t necessarily work-related.

I feel like I know my coworkers a little more each time I find out what’s inspired them this week or even what they’re cooking. Reading their answers reminds me every week how funny, thoughtful and creative they are.

Our customers love check-ins as well and one of the most frequent requests we’ve gotten is to further customize the day and time the reminders are sent. When they were launched, Check-ins were limited to every day, or Monday/Friday. You could only ask them at the start or end of the day, which happened to be 9am or 5pm in each user’s time zone.

As a remote company, we know that not everyone has the same schedule. Monday and Friday might not be your starting and ending days. Now, you can pick any day and time to send a check-in to your team in Basecamp 3.

When you set up a new check-in or edit an existing one, you can choose the specific days to send the check-in:

And choose a specific time:

We also adjusted the end of the day to 4:30pm so that Basecamp won’t send the reminder as you’re heading out the door.

We hope you love this update. Check-ins are one of our favorite features and there are so many uses for it. Try one today: Replace one status meeting with a Check-in this month or ask your team something fun each week. Ask them—they won’t say no, why would they?

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If you aren’t using Basecamp yet, let me ask you to sign up today for a free 30 day trial. Our team can show you the Basecamp Way or you can ask support a question to get a quick answer, 24/7.

These are the Android app updates you’re looking for.

Basecamp to-dos are now faster and more fluid in the Android app.

In previous versions, creating and re-ordering your to-dos was a little more clunky. Our Android team put in some hard work to make them easier to use and they did an incredible job.

In addition to those smooth to-dos, if you’re using Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and up, you can now add video comments to messages or your Check-ins! See it in action here:

We’re really excited for you to see the latest updates. If you try it out, why not give us a review on the Google Play Store? We’d really appreciate it.

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Like what you see, but haven’t tried Basecamp yet? What are you waiting for? Sign up today for a free 30 day trial. If you need some help, we can show you the Basecamp Way or you can ask us a question to get a quick answer from our fantastic support team, 24/7.