6 ms·

On the site, under '3. Slow Computing': "Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the "Attenti

by pmlnr 9y ago

On the site, under '3. Slow Computing': "Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the "Attention Economy". In just trying to watch one youtube video, a typical user is confronted with dozens of other appeals to focus somewhere else: comments, ratings, related videos, advertisements, video responses, etc. Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else. When we remove the screen (and by necessity, simplify the interface) we introduce a new form of temporality, where the speed of interaction might more accurately reflect our ability to percieve and understand information." I think this is the important part of the whole idea. On the other hand, and, in my opinion, you can achieve a similar experience as: 1. use a laptop and/or desktop 2. disable your notification system on your desktop 3. browse the web with an extremely simple browser, like w3m 4. one display 5. full-screen mode 6. don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown I found this the best way to focus on content and work, however, most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications.

emodendroket 9y ago
The rise of Slack and friends is a definite detriment to actually hunkering down and getting work done.
- publicfig 9y ago
  Removing the "Slack and" from that sentence is a very bleak and dystopian message.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    "Slack and friends" was meant to mean "Slack, Hipchat, Lync, and other similar office instant messaging applications," if you somehow thought I was blaming the recent development of human friendship for our woes.
    - publicfig 9y ago
      Oh, right, I understood that! I just thought it was more humorous than anything
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    And yet there's a subculture that promotes just that, work hard and get rich. It's what's slowly destroying Japan for example.
- dpark 9y ago
  Before Slack, the same stuff happened in IM. Slack hasn't added any significant noise in my day-to-day (with the exception of my phone, where I never installed IM clients but have chosen to install Slack).
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Have we totally lost the ability to imagine a workplace without an instant messaging system everyone has to participate in?
    - dpark 9y ago
      Yes, in the same way that we have lost the ability to imagine a workplace without email or phones. Once you give people an efficient means of communication, it doesn't really go away. Skype for Business and its predecessors have been around for 10 years. I know Yahoo used IM internally for much longer than that and I'm sure many other companies did as well. I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is.
      - pmlnr 9y ago
        > I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is. Yep. No problems with dedicated phone number, dedicated im address, dedicated email, etc. Group chats, group discussions, mailing lists, git commit messages, wiki edits, etc - those are the ones that can be very hard to follow, especially if you're involved in many.
      - ams6110 9y ago
        At my workplace I have no phone and no IM. I can be contacted in person or by email (which I check about 3x/day). Works pretty well.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        IM has to be proactively set up by the organization so it would indeed "go away" if you just didn't have it. And it's less than clear to me that the ease of interrupting someone to send them a message should have such a high priority.
d4nt 9y ago
> most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications. This. IM conversations take longer than in person ones (or video chats), have a higher rate of misunderstandings, cannot be flagged for follow up or bookmarked for reference, and the red blobs contribute to higher stress levels. It adds nothing to productivity, IMO. Yet being ‘present’ on slack is the new being at your desk before the boss.
- optimuspaul 9y ago
  My experience has been different. Things like slack have actually increased my ability to focus and get things done. My SLA for responding to slack is 2 hours, I can't focus on any one task for longer than that. Every two hours of so I check messages and respond then. It's great, it's far more relevant and filtered than email is and it isn't people showing up at my desk every 5 minutes.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    > it's far more relevant and filtered than email Huh? More filtered than email? Where in most cases you used to have sieve level server side filters and any kind of filter on the client side (in the real, desktop email clients era)? The capabilities of email filtering have been diminishing for many years, so I may even believe this is becoming true these days, but it certainly is shocking.
    - pwinnski 9y ago
      Not the person to whom you're responding, but my work email includes many messages from people who don't work for my company, while my Slack client doesn't. Not all of the Slack messages are relevant, but they are all more relevant than messages from outsiders.
      - detaro 9y ago
        Sort all email not from your company in a different folder or inbox, problem solved thanks to the filtering ability the GP talks about?
m_mueller 9y ago
CPPGrey did it for a while with an iPad Pro setup with no apps except work and with no internet in a lone office. I rhink that could work for some types of tasks.
grp 9y ago
It is possible to do this with cwm (calm window manager) from OpenBSD; there is a linux port. It's awesome, the first times in a long time that I have the feeling of "job done" when I shut down the computer. I was previously using a tilling window manager (xmonad), but you can always collect garbage on another workplace. With cwm, the possibility to really hide a window or to group them is unbelievable.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I find it hard to focus on just one thing, or do just one thing (like write without also listening to music, or having a long phonecall without fiddling or driving); not sure if that's something I should work on or accept as being part of my personality by now. It doesn't seem to have any major problems.
- zeta0134 9y ago
  I'm quite the opposite, I struggle to truly multitask, but some of my co-workers seem to focus better when they have a YouTube video off to one side. Each person is different, and it doesn't matter all that much as long as the work gets done.
fokinsean 9y ago
Disabling slack notifications other than direct messages is such a game changer. The constant notifications due to slack on some of my coworker's screens seem so distracting I don't know how they get anything done. I also have mostly all notifications on my iphone turned off.
keithpeter 9y ago
While upgrading my Slackware current installation on an old recycled laptop, I decided to install Alien Bob's KDE5 package set for lutz (works well on a humble core-duo with 2Gb RAM). The readme advises installing outside of X, so I was sitting at a console for 45 mins while the packages downloaded and installed. Bored, I found myself hitting Ctrl-Alt-2 and Ctrl-Alt-3 to run w3m and mpg123 in different virtual ttys. Reading and Music. Around 60% of my normal laptop use cases covered there and then. Posting this on Debian command line with the evilwm and Firefox. No notifications, quiet, minimal.
saagarjha 9y ago
> don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown Am I just spoiled by smooth scrolling on all my devices, or is this hard to do for anyone else? For whatever reason, any "jerky" scrolling (e.g. using the arrow keys, page up/page down, "two finger scrolling" on laptops with bad drivers) just messes with my reading. I think the issue is that I don't like the feeling of text disappearing and reappearing somewhere else–I want my actions to control where the text is going fully so I don't have to re-track it with my eyes.
- tomcooks 9y ago
  I thought the same until i was stuck working on the CLI for some time. Give yourself an afternoon, i quickly adapted and now peruse the web mouseless fulltime; once your eyes know where to jump it becomes a lot easier to read and to focus, your eyes don't have to readjust as often and reading web pages becomes more book-like. More than Pgup/Pgdown i find Spacebar and Home to be my most common choices for scrolling.

by pmlnr 9y ago

emodendroket 9y ago

The rise of Slack and friends is a definite detriment to actually hunkering down and getting work done.

publicfig 9y ago
Removing the "Slack and" from that sentence is a very bleak and dystopian message.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  "Slack and friends" was meant to mean "Slack, Hipchat, Lync, and other similar office instant messaging applications," if you somehow thought I was blaming the recent development of human friendship for our woes.
  - publicfig 9y ago
    Oh, right, I understood that! I just thought it was more humorous than anything
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  And yet there's a subculture that promotes just that, work hard and get rich. It's what's slowly destroying Japan for example.
dpark 9y ago
Before Slack, the same stuff happened in IM. Slack hasn't added any significant noise in my day-to-day (with the exception of my phone, where I never installed IM clients but have chosen to install Slack).
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Have we totally lost the ability to imagine a workplace without an instant messaging system everyone has to participate in?
  - dpark 9y ago
    Yes, in the same way that we have lost the ability to imagine a workplace without email or phones. Once you give people an efficient means of communication, it doesn't really go away. Skype for Business and its predecessors have been around for 10 years. I know Yahoo used IM internally for much longer than that and I'm sure many other companies did as well. I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is.
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      > I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is. Yep. No problems with dedicated phone number, dedicated im address, dedicated email, etc. Group chats, group discussions, mailing lists, git commit messages, wiki edits, etc - those are the ones that can be very hard to follow, especially if you're involved in many.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      At my workplace I have no phone and no IM. I can be contacted in person or by email (which I check about 3x/day). Works pretty well.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      IM has to be proactively set up by the organization so it would indeed "go away" if you just didn't have it. And it's less than clear to me that the ease of interrupting someone to send them a message should have such a high priority.

d4nt 9y ago

> most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications. This. IM conversations take longer than in person ones (or video chats), have a higher rate of misunderstandings, cannot be flagged for follow up or bookmarked for reference, and the red blobs contribute to higher stress levels. It adds nothing to productivity, IMO. Yet being ‘present’ on slack is the new being at your desk before the boss.

optimuspaul 9y ago
My experience has been different. Things like slack have actually increased my ability to focus and get things done. My SLA for responding to slack is 2 hours, I can't focus on any one task for longer than that. Every two hours of so I check messages and respond then. It's great, it's far more relevant and filtered than email is and it isn't people showing up at my desk every 5 minutes.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  > it's far more relevant and filtered than email Huh? More filtered than email? Where in most cases you used to have sieve level server side filters and any kind of filter on the client side (in the real, desktop email clients era)? The capabilities of email filtering have been diminishing for many years, so I may even believe this is becoming true these days, but it certainly is shocking.
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    Not the person to whom you're responding, but my work email includes many messages from people who don't work for my company, while my Slack client doesn't. Not all of the Slack messages are relevant, but they are all more relevant than messages from outsiders.
    - detaro 9y ago
      Sort all email not from your company in a different folder or inbox, problem solved thanks to the filtering ability the GP talks about?

m_mueller 9y ago

CPPGrey did it for a while with an iPad Pro setup with no apps except work and with no internet in a lone office. I rhink that could work for some types of tasks.

grp 9y ago

It is possible to do this with cwm (calm window manager) from OpenBSD; there is a linux port. It's awesome, the first times in a long time that I have the feeling of "job done" when I shut down the computer. I was previously using a tilling window manager (xmonad), but you can always collect garbage on another workplace. With cwm, the possibility to really hide a window or to group them is unbelievable.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

I find it hard to focus on just one thing, or do just one thing (like write without also listening to music, or having a long phonecall without fiddling or driving); not sure if that's something I should work on or accept as being part of my personality by now. It doesn't seem to have any major problems.

zeta0134 9y ago
I'm quite the opposite, I struggle to truly multitask, but some of my co-workers seem to focus better when they have a YouTube video off to one side. Each person is different, and it doesn't matter all that much as long as the work gets done.

fokinsean 9y ago

Disabling slack notifications other than direct messages is such a game changer. The constant notifications due to slack on some of my coworker's screens seem so distracting I don't know how they get anything done. I also have mostly all notifications on my iphone turned off.

keithpeter 9y ago

While upgrading my Slackware current installation on an old recycled laptop, I decided to install Alien Bob's KDE5 package set for lutz (works well on a humble core-duo with 2Gb RAM). The readme advises installing outside of X, so I was sitting at a console for 45 mins while the packages downloaded and installed. Bored, I found myself hitting Ctrl-Alt-2 and Ctrl-Alt-3 to run w3m and mpg123 in different virtual ttys. Reading and Music. Around 60% of my normal laptop use cases covered there and then. Posting this on Debian command line with the evilwm and Firefox. No notifications, quiet, minimal.

saagarjha 9y ago

> don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown Am I just spoiled by smooth scrolling on all my devices, or is this hard to do for anyone else? For whatever reason, any "jerky" scrolling (e.g. using the arrow keys, page up/page down, "two finger scrolling" on laptops with bad drivers) just messes with my reading. I think the issue is that I don't like the feeling of text disappearing and reappearing somewhere else–I want my actions to control where the text is going fully so I don't have to re-track it with my eyes.

tomcooks 9y ago
I thought the same until i was stuck working on the CLI for some time. Give yourself an afternoon, i quickly adapted and now peruse the web mouseless fulltime; once your eyes know where to jump it becomes a lot easier to read and to focus, your eyes don't have to readjust as often and reading web pages becomes more book-like. More than Pgup/Pgdown i find Spacebar and Home to be my most common choices for scrolling.