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The Slackification of the American Home
- kibibyte 7y agoThis reminded me Atlassian's 2013 April Fools joke, JIRA Jr. (https://www.atlassian.com/jirajr https://www.atlassian.com/jirajr). Funny how life imitates art.
- narnianal 7y agoThey really did some cool stuff. For instance they also made an Angry Birds clone: https://www.atlassian.com/angrynerds https://www.atlassian.com/angrynerds
- basch 7y agoAlthough that joke is funny, and this article is a little odd, personally I think everyone is taking away the wrong message. Personal life absolutely could benefit from management and intelligence layers. For banking, instead of logging into each bank, I can use mint/personal capital. But when it comes to so much of the rest of life nothing plays nicely. It would be awesome to have a shopping, construction, restaurant, recipe, health care aggregation for making decisions and projects. My family calendar should integrate right into "we need to pick a flooring contractor by xx" and when one of marks the one we want in on the platform, that info should trickle up into the management interface. If both of us mark ourselves as in the mood for Mexican, it can filter results down to restaurants we marked or might be relevant and show them to both of us. Comparing reviews between yelp, foursquare, facebook and google is agonizingly manual. Why cant this be as simple as metacritic? Right now collaborating is a painful mix of handing phones back and forth or sending links and screenshots. It's too real time. The same goes for shopping, comparison shopping together is just as disorganized as any collaborative task. Its very hard to break down the task into discrete components that can happen simultaneously. First you pick what you want, then you price shop, rinse repeat. Even simple stuff, like while planning an event, knowing who called an uber and getting an alert. And then there is the educational aspect. Publishing and sharing a family budget, spending, net cash flow etc would absolutely benefit kids. They could see and learn how expensive things are, see what spending categories the trinkets they want chip into, where the family can reduce spending elsewhere, and what costs are fixed. F, why not gamify chores. If you give out allowance for chores, why not have a list of available chores, and let the market handle itself? One kid wants to do all the work, they reap all the reward. Maybe its less of a Slack/Trellofication and more what I want is a PowerBI/Tableau. I know things like buildshop.com and getcatalant.com sort of fill that hybrid project management and reviews category, for their own verticals. A collaborative family calendar, with goal planning, and brainstorming space isnt a bad idea. Hey you want to save for a purchase, heres a budgeting tool. Hey you need a ride to a thing at a certain time, this person is available. Building consensus over whats for dinner can be something people contribute to when they have time over the day, instead of requiring everyone to be on the same page at the same time? Oh we picked a recipe that the inventory knows we are out of an ingredient, add picking that ingredient up to the task list and assign it, before people start driving home for the day. This comment became a very unfocused vomit of a rant quickly, and I dont feel like circling back around to edit it. Sorry.
- jwhitlark 7y agoCheck out google data studio. Feels a better fit to me that tableau.
- kibibyte 7y agoYou know, when you put it that way, that does raise a lot of good points. There are legitimate non-obvious problems in this area ("family resource management" might be a catchy name here) and not a lot of solutions. And the solutions that exist are so heavyweight and industry-tailored that when you hear about parents using JIRA, it just sounds absurd (and rightly so). Probably the reason there aren't many such solutions is that it's not a sexy or obviously lucrative field, and that it's probably pretty hard to come up with a well-designed product that handles all the complexity of a family. I mean, come to think of it, most software startup founders are young and have few commitments (e.g. children); I can't imagine them being able to empathize well enough until they're at a later stage of their lives. But, perhaps someone's working on this as a very extensive side project.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoI really think Trello in particular can be a great “life tool”. I have coworkers who have begun to use it for planning meals, dates, etc.
- Causality1 7y agoThere's ample evidence this makes you more organized. I haven't seen any yet that it makes you happier.
- unsatchmo 7y agoI’ll go a step farther and point out that it’s troubling that we feel like we need these sorts of tools to survive at home today. It seems to be a symptom of an ever increasing level of complexity in every facet of modern life.
- winkeyless 7y agoThis is an area that should have been discussed or mentioned in the article.
- jonas21 7y agoWhy is it troubling? When I was a kid my family used post-it notes on the refrigerator to organize and communicate, and a big paper calendar for scheduling. This just seems like a more convenient way to do the same.
- ubercow 7y agoTrello along with Airtable are invaluable to keeping my life organized.
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoYeah, I'm a big fan of using work productivity tools for personal stuff too. I personally use Notion and Monday.com lately.
- mistermann 7y agoHow do you use airtable? I keep coming across it in comments but would like to hear some personal use cases.
- austhrow743 7y agoI don't use it any more, I liked but I was using it as a CRM in a role I'm no longer in. At the time there was a consultant running an airtable youtube channel that I found helpful. He has videos titled things like "planning a party using airtable" and also has personal use case examples in some videos with names that don't make that clear eg. the "Using Views in Airtable to Improve Workflows" video is about a system he and his partner use to plan meals and then make shopping lists for them. I recommend poking around his stuff for ideas. https://www.youtube.com/user/GarethPronovost/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/GarethPronovost/videos
- mistermann 7y agoBrilliant, thanks so much for that link!
- ubercow 7y agoA couple of big ones I have are: Video games, movies, books, tv shows I've watched/played or want to watch/play, what platform they are on, if I've bought them already Brands and blends of tea I've tried, want to try, tasting notes, preferences for brewing amounts and times Some are just super fancy spreadsheets like serial numbers for expensive electronics I own and when I purchased them.
- sittingnut 7y ago"american home"? even in terms of content of article, it is clear this is confined to a very small section of society. even that is purely based on anecdotal claims. almost no valid evidence, but broad nation wide conclusion.
- asdfman123 7y agoThe America that they know is almost entirely upper upper middle class and coastal.
- paxys 7y agoIf you are looking for a "standard" American home you aren't going to find it. It is a large country, and there is a ton of diversity. People mentioned in the article are as American as anyone else.
- kthejoker2 7y agoWelcome to The Atlantic? Or lifestyle journalism? The idea is to generate a sort of "car crash" style gawking response. A classic technique is implying a nationwide phenomenon from 1 or 2 samples.
- tempsy 7y agoSomething I’m trying to get better at is to be more intentional about everything e.g. I think I’ve come to the realization that I’ve wasted a lot of time and spent time doing things I shouldn’t be doing because I allowed myself to “drift” in ways that don’t help me at all. I do not have a family or kids, but anything that helps families be more intentional with how they spend time with each other is a really good thing. I know growing up that was far from the case for me.
- coderintherye 7y agoTools are helpful for being intentional, but so is instruction. Regular meditation and listening to buddhist instructors can help you along this path. If your intention is to get better at being more intentional, then you are already halfway there!
- garmaine 7y agoWe shouldn’t need religion for this.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y agoMeditation isn't religious. Zen-style mindfulness is proven to be beneficial for stress, anxiety, and even some indicators of physical health. It just so happens that most of the best meditation instructors are Buddhist (to some degree).
- darkpuma 7y agoThis is certainly not what Dobbs had in mind.
- drewcoo 7y agoAh, but he said to Hubbard "They are pink but there money is green."
- AlphaWeaver 7y ago>"We think of Trello as a tool you can use across work and life," says Stella Garber, [Trello's] head of marketing. [...] (Slack declined to share any information about how people use its software, and Atlassian, which owns Jira, did not respond to a similar request.) This is interesting... The author may have overlooked the fact that Atlassian also owns Trello.
- mistermann 7y agoWhen did this happen? And how much $$$?
- msolujic 7y agohttps://www.google.rs/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/amp/ https://www.google.rs/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlass...
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoA bit over two and a half years ago [0] it looks like. [0]: https://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian https://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian
- seltzered_ 7y agoIn 2001, the article "The organization kid" was a popular framing of early millenials - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-organization-kid/302164/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-org... . 18 years later...the organization household.
- asdfman123 7y ago> As per our earlier conversation, we have decided that the children will be enrolled in tennis camp over the summer. Please let me know if you want to follow up on this. I cannot even imagine what it would be like being a teenager under that. Your two choices are either do everything you can to win your parents' approval, or run away at 16.
- Simon_says 7y agoOr just rebel and be a little monster like everyone else at that age.
- theelous3 7y agoThat is beyond disturbing. It's one thing for education to be hyperfocused on results and training for the workforce, it's another for the home to restructure in that direction too. Extremely regimented people may excel in extremely regimented environments, but frankly they are often deeply uninteresting people to socialise with. (Also, any workplace I've been in hasn't actually been that regimented, and was better off for it. The less flexible people were good but often struggled with being more fluid when required.) I much prefer the other extreme. Those junkyard diy playground kids and that whole movement away from hyperstructured and linear play. Not that you can't trello a trip to one of those in to the schedule, but I'm guessing that the crossover between the slackified group and the junkyard group isn't huge.
- awadheshv 7y ago>Julie Berkun Fajgenbaum, a mom of three children ages 8 to 12, uses Google Calendar to manage her children’s time and Jira to keep track of home projects. oh god..
- btown 7y agoGives velocity and burndown a whole new meaning...
- around_here 7y agoSorry, can't afford the scope creep on having Timmy over for dinner tomorrow night. Don't want to damage the metrics.
- quickthrower2 7y agoWhy oh god? Sounds reasonable. Firstly a calendar can be very useful for knowing which activities kids are doing, what playdates etc. Schools sometimes throw one off things into the mix. Most parents would use a regular calendar anyway. For JIRA - well that seems a bit heavy handed when trello would do but really it's a good idea. It's a todo list... so is the default todo app on your phone bad? Pen & paper bad? It's the same sort of thing.
- awadheshv 7y agojira is same as pen and paper.. I feel so outdated now.
- etripe 7y agoIt sounds reasonable if you value chores and compliance above everything. Why should children be "productive"? Is there any time left for play, discovery, spontaneity? As to your final paragraph, I'm wondering what effects using "productivity" tools like Trello have on a child's memory development. Do they remember chores better or worse independently? Do you remember typing a ticket as well as writing it down physically?
- Balgair 7y ago
- radicalriddler 7y agoI've thought about creating a family management platform before, but it seemed too weird and farfetched that people would actually use it for a long period of time and not chuck it out.
- dorfsmay 7y agoSimple translates to longevity (resilient to environment rot). I think a family wiki strikes the right balance of simple and useful. I find in families we quickly specialise and when somebody is away, we struggle to do tasks that could have been captured in a few bullet points
- paxys 7y agoEvery family in the world uses IM, and Slack isn't very different from any of the hundred other options out there for group messaging. So not too surprising that families are using it. Similarly all the other software mentioned can be used for simple calendaring, TODO lists, reminders etc., all of which most people here undoubtedly use in some form to manage their life. It's just the association of these brands with "work" that has people going WTF.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fwip 7y agoA lot of families don't even have texting, let alone IM each other regularly on their personal computing devices. Please don't generalize your experiences so recklessly.
- dependsontheq 7y agoThat’s not realistic, messengers are much more ubiquitous than any other kind of software and are mostly used in a family/friends network. We had our local digital festival last week an we had school classes teaching seniors WhatsApp.
- fwip 7y agoI'm sorry that you don't think it's realistic that not every family uses IM to stay in touch. It's still true though, and the existence of some people who do use it doesn't nearly mean that all people use it.
- Balgair 7y agoI've no idea what the GP commentor is talking about. I don't know of many families that use messaging apps. Yeah, texts, a bit, but most of the families around me don't do this. Heck, most of the kids don't have cell phones until they get into HS, and event then, the phones are banned during the school day.
- stackzero 7y agoThe next step is to open source your family as a project on Github
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- avip 7y ago### Call for maintainers This family could use some help. If you're an experienced parent, and have some extra time, please contact us.
- vmurthy 7y agoI'm saving this comment :-) In the future, I'll cite you as a visionary when this unfortunately comes to pass!
- lukey_q 7y agoI'm imagining the classic scene from movies where a teen boy comes to ask the dad if he can take the daughter to prom, except he just opens a pull request
- majewsky 7y ago"Will you marry me?" - "Merge request closed without comments."
- rusteh1 7y agoWhat does it say about us as a society in which a pre-high school child needs to use a productivity suite to manage their lives? The answer here is not to provide more software to allow 11 year olds to eek out a few extra percentage points of productivity. The answer is to expect less of 11 year olds.
- djaychela 7y agoMy kids' school has just been taken over (in the UK) by an academy group whose other local schools were telling 8 and 9 year old that they needed to know what career they were going to have so they could study the right subjects... I'm 47 and I still don't really know what I want to do with my life. How the hell does an 8 year old?
- megabl8 7y agoIs it a bad thing to get kids thinking about this? I mean, this is what they have to do when they select what subjects they want to do. This has happened all over the world for at least 30 years.
- seszett 7y agoKids at 9 are absolutely not able to choose what career they will actually want to do when they are old enough to work. They just don't know enough of the world to make this choice. What they have to do at this age is discover as much of the world as possible in order to be able to make a better choice later on.
- close04 7y agoIt always puzzled me that the same kids who are expected to think that far and be able to take "career" decisions are not allowed to watch any movie they want or drink alcohol. There's a bit of a dissonance there.
- dvdbloc 7y agoI think it’s also interesting how a lot of very successful people in the field of engineering identified that they want to be engineers when they were very young and just started pursuing it.
- m_mueller 7y agoPeople, please, think about what you want your children to become. Do you want easily employed drones that just as easily can get outsourced or replaced by AI, or do you want independent and creative thinkers? Creativity needs space and time. Extend both increasingly, with age. It's sad to me that American life requires you to manage their time - elsewhere they can just independently go to school, first on foot then on bycicle. Stop living in these hellscapes that makes that impossible, I consider it essential.
- j7ake 7y agoI think parents want their children to be able to have a career that will allow their children to have the economic resources to navigate modern society (pay for university, home, provide for family). Creativity and independence in thinking comes second.
- _pmf_ 7y ago> do you want independent and creative thinkers That's probably the worst you can do to a child. It's setting them up for unhappiness.
- m_mueller 7y agoJust give em space and see what happens, don't create a damn curriculum from school out to sleep.
- _pmf_ 7y ago> Just give em space and see what happens, don't create a damn curriculum from school out to sleep. It's typically parents who nominally want their children to become " independent and creative thinkers" who setup a curriculum with music school, dance lessons and foreign language courses.
- m_mueller 7y agoYes, I understand that. I just want people to relax on this more.
- purplezooey 7y agoTrello pisses me off. Stacking some colored cards with notes. A four year old could come up with the idea. Yet acquired for $425M. The world is not fair.
- TylerE 7y agoWhy didn’t a four year d think of it first then? Lot’s of things are obvious in retrospect. We put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage.
- majewsky 7y ago> We put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage. This claim was so outlandish that I had to fact-check it. Wikipedia says: > Luggage carriers [...] date at least to the 1930s [...] However, the wheels were external to the suitcases. [...] The first commercially successful rolling suitcase was invented in 1970. It appears you're technically correct. The best kind of correct.
- TylerE 7y agoIt's even whackier that it took them another 17 years to figure out the optimal design - the first two-wheeler with an extending handle didn't hit the market until 1987.
- INTPenis 7y agoMe and my mom were ahead of our time. Back in 2000 I used to message her on ICQ and ask if dinner was ready. And she'd say yes so I could come out of my teenage computer cave. :)
- rollthehard6 7y agoBiggest stand out in this article is the stats about declining free time for play - as has been said quite a few times on HN, humans need to be bored and to play in order to be creative. Stagnation awaits otherwise I fear.
- licebmi__at__ 7y agoWell, it just seems a brand friendly way to say "Hey, this families use technology to track activities like we use to do with pen and paper". And I personally use org-mode to track my kid's activities (and my own), but I believe a plain white board is better to track the shared goals and messages.
- maddy1512 7y agoJust a fancy parenting gimmick! Why can't they just use whatsapp or any IM tool to communicate? Imagine that child's life who has to close that annoying JIRA ticket every time he cleans up his room.