6 ms·

I've been thinking a lot about this a related topic lately -- how much of our lives and the things we find ourselves doing are tasks that are imposed upon us by

by nlh 6y ago

I've been thinking a lot about this a related topic lately -- how much of our lives and the things we find ourselves doing are tasks that are imposed upon us by others. I'm trying to come up with strategies to minimize this, which I guess is related to "saying no" to a lot of things. But I'm not sure the ideal path. Let me give some (non-work) examples: I flew back from Europe on Wednesday, and the airline misplaced my luggage. To get it back, they've imposed a ton of steps on ME. "Here's your reference number. Call our customer support in 24 hours. Follow-up every day until you get it" is what I was told (and what I'll have to do). It seems unfair that an act that was 0% my fault results in at least several hours of tasks for me. I have to follow-up. I have to wait on hold. I have to spend time thinking and wondering if my luggage will ever show up. How do we avoid this? Getting angry doesn't work (trust me, they've been yelled at). Ignoring it doesn't work - no luggage will show up. So I guess the only real solution would be to have a personal assistant or otherwise hire someone to deal with situation like this for me? That seems out of reach for most people. All sorts of things are like that -- if someone sues you, they've imposed literally dozens of hours of work and thousands of dollars of expenses on you entirely without your say. You can delegate as much as you want to a lawyer, but you'll still need to gather documents, think about strategies, and of course pay your lawyer. So how does one really truly say "no" to things & delegate undesirable tasks unless one has enough money to afford such delegation? I'm not sure I have a good answer to this one yet. Thoughts?

msapaydin 6y ago
I guess there are things that are inevitable, the trick is not to try to completely eliminate them as that is impossible. However the optional ones could be eliminated if one has some practice of doing the trade-off analysis and perhaps deliberate poverty practice, and with some luck could become wealthy enough to be able to delegate even the most difficult to eliminate tasks to one's assistant.
antman 6y ago
I lost my luggage flying Lufthansa in Europe. I gave them an address at the airport, they found and sent it next day at the hotel.
alimw 6y ago
There is bound to be a certain amount of hassle involved in flying across continents. Seems like you've got extra this time but you can still trace it back to your decision to say yes to doing it.
mslate 6y ago
Chalk this one up to several lessons learned: - avoid flying - avoid checking bags - avoid putting items in checked bags that you care about These are all subtle ways of saying “no”. Clothing is so cheap now that if you’re taking a 2-week trip you’d be better off buying clothing at your destination and throwing it out at the end instead of paying for checked luggage on your flights.
- Jommi 6y ago
  Donating it
- thebean11 6y ago
  > buying clothing at your destination Buying a wardrobe of clothes at my destination would take much more time than dealing with lost luggage (which only rarely happens)
loosetypes 6y ago
Yeah, there's something really discouraging about any sort of inversion of work that businesses push onto customers. Self checkout lines. Dealing with interactive voice menus. Waiting on hold. Whatever. It's like any time support doesn't fall neatly into one of several predefined buckets the burden of dealing with any ambiguity falls onto the consumer. Maybe it increases their profits. Maybe it decreases our quantifiable costs. But it's exhausting. It's not directly analogous but software folks often talk about the merit in using external libraries for anything that's not a core business concern. But I'm curious what grocery stores or airlines would consider their primary business. Are they in the service industry or are they trying to just be food or airplane logistics players who lament their current requirement for a customer-facing physical presence.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I love self-checkout lines. I love self-service being available on my terms. This shouldn't be the only option; "self-service or no service" is not my goal, but I appreciate the fact that 8 self-service lanes can allow a lot of customers to check out without waiting and in an affordable fashion. (Customers are paying for all the labor in any enduring company.) The checkout-free store (like Amazon Go) is of course even better than a self-checkout in terms of customer experience.
  - christkv 6y ago
    I love self service in European grocery stores because I hate the stress of the cashier basically expecting me to put away groceries at the speed they are scanning them.
    - ensiferum 6y ago
      Here in southern Germany the checkouts are always very slow and crowded and always understaffed. Basically a normal situation is to have 20ppl wait for a single checkout. Then they begrudgingly open another, take 5 customers and close it again only to have the same thing repeat. I'd be happy to even pay extra just to have access to a speedier checkout self serviced or not and not have to waste half of my day waiting for this world's worst service.
mobiledev2014 6y ago
100% relate to this and I have joked to my wife that I need an assistant. My wife is an essential worker whose job stayed in-person and got busier with COVID. I’m the software engineer sitting at home. Within a month I’ve had car problems, appliance problems, mortgage problems, student loan problems, health insurance problems etc etc etc to the point I can’t even remember them all. Most of them not by my choosing. It feels like calling banks and contractors is my full time job and I check my work Slack as a hobby. It shows that the American way of life is pretty shitty even for the upper middle class. You either earn 7 figures or you struggle to some degree.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  Come to Europe, the weather is fine! (don't come for the weather)
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  How is this an American problem? Seems like that’s just life to me. And having lived in Germany, I’m certain there are worse bureaucracies out there.
  - NewOrderNow 6y ago
    My German AirBnB host was a city employee who was able to take a two week vacation abroad. This was a job that required no experience. Meanwhile, I went to college to better my life and ended up a slave
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      Germans with a more cynical outlook might tell you that the German bureaucracy is gobbling up staggering amounts of taxpayer money for doing barely any job at all, and basically leech off value creating jobs to fund their generous benefits. That is, if you want your job to be actually impactful in some way, you'll end up a "slave" funding some civil servant's lengthy yearly vacation as well. I'm not quite there yet though.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway287391 6y ago
> I have to wait on hold. [...] How do we avoid this? Hold really is awful. And it's gotten so much worse during covid. Re how do we avoid this: for starters, there should be laws against companies putting people on hold without providing a callback option. As far as I can tell there's no reason not to offer a callback option except to screw over your customers who aren't willing to wait on the phone and listen to their awful hold music for an hour straight to save some money on customer support and prevent your unwilling customers from cancelling. (BTW while we're at it, there should also be laws allowing anyone to cancel a subscription service online. California partially does this by requiring an online cancellation option when the subscription was started online.)
- saghm 6y ago
  This isn't by any means a solution, but I've found I can reduce the annoyance of being on hold by hooking up my phone to a bluetooth speaker and then just going about my work like I normally would (sans listening to music) until I hear someone pick up. This might not work if you have other people around making noise, but it reduces the hassle a decent amount if you're alone or in a separate room.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    I do similar but using wireless headphones, to get on with other tasks without being so affected, or affecting other people. Even then, I find myself semi-paralysed by the anticipation. It's hard to focus on something else, in case I don't notice the pick up and then they hang up. A callback would be much better.
vb6sp6 6y ago
You don't "are you available for coffee?" "no, i need to call the airline about my luggage" And now to have an extra hour or two in your day
sporkland 6y ago
Google has a new feature on their android phones that will wait on hold for you and connect you when the agent finally picks up. Having waited 40+ minutes for zipcar twice in the last few months I'm somewhat excited about it. It seems like a gimmick, but also seems like a good form of automation that works in a lowest common denominator situation like telephone lines. Wondering if this and things like it will help you address the automated assistant issue one problem at a time.
amelius 6y ago
More power to consumer organizations.
squidlogic 6y ago
When you said “yes” to flying on that airline, with checked baggage, you said yes to a chain of other sub-yeses that could result in a given situation. Learning the consequences of your “yes” for various things and what you’re willing to accept is how you can manage this in the future.
- nlh 6y ago
  This is a great perspective. Thanks. And in fact this happens a lot with a lot of situations - people forget (including me!) that very little “happens to us” without our input. (Obviously some things are totally out of our control, but I’d argue less than we might think.) This reminds me of a kid I met years ago. He always seemed to be in some bad situation or another - a personal injury lawsuit, a fight with a client, a fight with a boss, etc. He always framed it as bad luck - lots of bad things just happened to him and he was pretty melancholy about his lot in life. It wasn’t until I spent a week with him on a group trip that I got some more perspective - he made a lot of bad decisions. If someone called him a name, he wouldn’t walk away - he went in and started yelling (made the personal injury lawsuit make more sense). If one of his clients had a request, he didn’t just adjust - he fought back and argued. The whole thing was eye opening for me. It wasn’t that bad things happened to him - it was that he regularly made choices that put him on a path to bad things happening. He just never quite realized that and, of course, never reported those parts of the story.
m463 6y ago
Be one of those travelers that tows a manageable-sized wheelie cart behind them and puts in in the overhead bin. You know, like the flight crew you see walking in the airport.
jonahbenton 6y ago
This question, with respect, has nothing to do with the article. The piece about Buffet applies to all the people on here who have a zillion side projects. What Buffet means by saying no is- same thing Jobs meant- don't do those things. Have a strategy and use the slow brain (Thinking Fast And Slow) to make decisions that are about going deep, not broad. Similar in part to Deep Work. For annoyances, or things imposed on you, as described above, various Zen practices come to mind. Life is full of suffering, and obligation, and the most at peace simply acknowledge and fulfill them. The koan of the novice experiencing anger after the master disrupted a practice with a seemingly trivial action- with the master pointing out that he left it behind, it was the novice who carried it around, etc. Practice not thinking/worrying about whether you will get your luggage back. Make the calls, wait on hold, but don't worry. It will either happen or it won't. Objects are so commodified now, if you truly need a lost object, you can just buy another. The psychic angst is not worth it. Cheers.
- pas 6y ago
  How do you know which project to focus on? It seems Buffet, Jobs, Gates and anyone who got lucky early can say whatever they want, but they are also trapped in their own success, just like Google. Nothing else they do seems like "success" compared to their one big hit (Berkshire Hathaway, Macbook + iPhone, Windows, and of course the search-ad engine). Sure, having a strategy is great, but usually for most people that should be try a few things, see what sticks, fail early, fail often, get into groups where network effects will carry your project/startup.
lolsal 6y ago
I think you are dismissing another avenue you could take (even if I doubt it would be successful): bill them or send them an invoice. - bill for your time at a reasonable (previously established), rate. This is if you want to get your stuff back. - send an invoice for the missing luggage (itemized even). This is for the case where you don’t care about the stuff and just want to be compensated. If I screwed over a company, they wouldn’t hesitate to bill me. I wish we as consumers would do the same instead of freely spending our time.
loftyal 6y ago
Obviously my advice doesn't pertain to your main point, but as a person who's been to 80+ countries, and very experienced with this, my advice is only use carry on, it's not worth the risk. Buy the biggest bag you can that's allowable as a carry on and use that. I've had only a carry on whilst travelling for 7 months straight, and it worked out fine for me, pack light and wash your clothes at your hotel/airbnb.
tomjen3 6y ago
You are a software engineer, so you can reasonably price your work at 200 usd/hr. Collect evidence for the exact amount of time you spent on this issue, then have a lawyer write a lawyer letter. If they don't pay, sue them. Companies don't care about their minons getting yelled at. They care about getting sued.

by nlh 6y ago

msapaydin 6y ago

I guess there are things that are inevitable, the trick is not to try to completely eliminate them as that is impossible. However the optional ones could be eliminated if one has some practice of doing the trade-off analysis and perhaps deliberate poverty practice, and with some luck could become wealthy enough to be able to delegate even the most difficult to eliminate tasks to one's assistant.

antman 6y ago

I lost my luggage flying Lufthansa in Europe. I gave them an address at the airport, they found and sent it next day at the hotel.

alimw 6y ago

There is bound to be a certain amount of hassle involved in flying across continents. Seems like you've got extra this time but you can still trace it back to your decision to say yes to doing it.

mslate 6y ago

Chalk this one up to several lessons learned: - avoid flying - avoid checking bags - avoid putting items in checked bags that you care about These are all subtle ways of saying “no”. Clothing is so cheap now that if you’re taking a 2-week trip you’d be better off buying clothing at your destination and throwing it out at the end instead of paying for checked luggage on your flights.

Jommi 6y ago
Donating it
thebean11 6y ago
> buying clothing at your destination Buying a wardrobe of clothes at my destination would take much more time than dealing with lost luggage (which only rarely happens)

loosetypes 6y ago

Yeah, there's something really discouraging about any sort of inversion of work that businesses push onto customers. Self checkout lines. Dealing with interactive voice menus. Waiting on hold. Whatever. It's like any time support doesn't fall neatly into one of several predefined buckets the burden of dealing with any ambiguity falls onto the consumer. Maybe it increases their profits. Maybe it decreases our quantifiable costs. But it's exhausting. It's not directly analogous but software folks often talk about the merit in using external libraries for anything that's not a core business concern. But I'm curious what grocery stores or airlines would consider their primary business. Are they in the service industry or are they trying to just be food or airplane logistics players who lament their current requirement for a customer-facing physical presence.

sokoloff 6y ago
I love self-checkout lines. I love self-service being available on my terms. This shouldn't be the only option; "self-service or no service" is not my goal, but I appreciate the fact that 8 self-service lanes can allow a lot of customers to check out without waiting and in an affordable fashion. (Customers are paying for all the labor in any enduring company.) The checkout-free store (like Amazon Go) is of course even better than a self-checkout in terms of customer experience.
- christkv 6y ago
  I love self service in European grocery stores because I hate the stress of the cashier basically expecting me to put away groceries at the speed they are scanning them.
  - ensiferum 6y ago
    Here in southern Germany the checkouts are always very slow and crowded and always understaffed. Basically a normal situation is to have 20ppl wait for a single checkout. Then they begrudgingly open another, take 5 customers and close it again only to have the same thing repeat. I'd be happy to even pay extra just to have access to a speedier checkout self serviced or not and not have to waste half of my day waiting for this world's worst service.

mobiledev2014 6y ago

100% relate to this and I have joked to my wife that I need an assistant. My wife is an essential worker whose job stayed in-person and got busier with COVID. I’m the software engineer sitting at home. Within a month I’ve had car problems, appliance problems, mortgage problems, student loan problems, health insurance problems etc etc etc to the point I can’t even remember them all. Most of them not by my choosing. It feels like calling banks and contractors is my full time job and I check my work Slack as a hobby. It shows that the American way of life is pretty shitty even for the upper middle class. You either earn 7 figures or you struggle to some degree.

dr_dshiv 6y ago
Come to Europe, the weather is fine! (don't come for the weather)
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
How is this an American problem? Seems like that’s just life to me. And having lived in Germany, I’m certain there are worse bureaucracies out there.
- NewOrderNow 6y ago
  My German AirBnB host was a city employee who was able to take a two week vacation abroad. This was a job that required no experience. Meanwhile, I went to college to better my life and ended up a slave
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Germans with a more cynical outlook might tell you that the German bureaucracy is gobbling up staggering amounts of taxpayer money for doing barely any job at all, and basically leech off value creating jobs to fund their generous benefits. That is, if you want your job to be actually impactful in some way, you'll end up a "slave" funding some civil servant's lengthy yearly vacation as well. I'm not quite there yet though.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwaway287391 6y ago

> I have to wait on hold. [...] How do we avoid this? Hold really is awful. And it's gotten so much worse during covid. Re how do we avoid this: for starters, there should be laws against companies putting people on hold without providing a callback option. As far as I can tell there's no reason not to offer a callback option except to screw over your customers who aren't willing to wait on the phone and listen to their awful hold music for an hour straight to save some money on customer support and prevent your unwilling customers from cancelling. (BTW while we're at it, there should also be laws allowing anyone to cancel a subscription service online. California partially does this by requiring an online cancellation option when the subscription was started online.)

saghm 6y ago
This isn't by any means a solution, but I've found I can reduce the annoyance of being on hold by hooking up my phone to a bluetooth speaker and then just going about my work like I normally would (sans listening to music) until I hear someone pick up. This might not work if you have other people around making noise, but it reduces the hassle a decent amount if you're alone or in a separate room.
- jlokier 6y ago
  I do similar but using wireless headphones, to get on with other tasks without being so affected, or affecting other people. Even then, I find myself semi-paralysed by the anticipation. It's hard to focus on something else, in case I don't notice the pick up and then they hang up. A callback would be much better.

vb6sp6 6y ago

You don't "are you available for coffee?" "no, i need to call the airline about my luggage" And now to have an extra hour or two in your day

sporkland 6y ago

Google has a new feature on their android phones that will wait on hold for you and connect you when the agent finally picks up. Having waited 40+ minutes for zipcar twice in the last few months I'm somewhat excited about it. It seems like a gimmick, but also seems like a good form of automation that works in a lowest common denominator situation like telephone lines. Wondering if this and things like it will help you address the automated assistant issue one problem at a time.

amelius 6y ago

More power to consumer organizations.

squidlogic 6y ago

When you said “yes” to flying on that airline, with checked baggage, you said yes to a chain of other sub-yeses that could result in a given situation. Learning the consequences of your “yes” for various things and what you’re willing to accept is how you can manage this in the future.

nlh 6y ago
This is a great perspective. Thanks. And in fact this happens a lot with a lot of situations - people forget (including me!) that very little “happens to us” without our input. (Obviously some things are totally out of our control, but I’d argue less than we might think.) This reminds me of a kid I met years ago. He always seemed to be in some bad situation or another - a personal injury lawsuit, a fight with a client, a fight with a boss, etc. He always framed it as bad luck - lots of bad things just happened to him and he was pretty melancholy about his lot in life. It wasn’t until I spent a week with him on a group trip that I got some more perspective - he made a lot of bad decisions. If someone called him a name, he wouldn’t walk away - he went in and started yelling (made the personal injury lawsuit make more sense). If one of his clients had a request, he didn’t just adjust - he fought back and argued. The whole thing was eye opening for me. It wasn’t that bad things happened to him - it was that he regularly made choices that put him on a path to bad things happening. He just never quite realized that and, of course, never reported those parts of the story.

m463 6y ago

Be one of those travelers that tows a manageable-sized wheelie cart behind them and puts in in the overhead bin. You know, like the flight crew you see walking in the airport.

jonahbenton 6y ago

This question, with respect, has nothing to do with the article. The piece about Buffet applies to all the people on here who have a zillion side projects. What Buffet means by saying no is- same thing Jobs meant- don't do those things. Have a strategy and use the slow brain (Thinking Fast And Slow) to make decisions that are about going deep, not broad. Similar in part to Deep Work. For annoyances, or things imposed on you, as described above, various Zen practices come to mind. Life is full of suffering, and obligation, and the most at peace simply acknowledge and fulfill them. The koan of the novice experiencing anger after the master disrupted a practice with a seemingly trivial action- with the master pointing out that he left it behind, it was the novice who carried it around, etc. Practice not thinking/worrying about whether you will get your luggage back. Make the calls, wait on hold, but don't worry. It will either happen or it won't. Objects are so commodified now, if you truly need a lost object, you can just buy another. The psychic angst is not worth it. Cheers.

pas 6y ago
How do you know which project to focus on? It seems Buffet, Jobs, Gates and anyone who got lucky early can say whatever they want, but they are also trapped in their own success, just like Google. Nothing else they do seems like "success" compared to their one big hit (Berkshire Hathaway, Macbook + iPhone, Windows, and of course the search-ad engine). Sure, having a strategy is great, but usually for most people that should be try a few things, see what sticks, fail early, fail often, get into groups where network effects will carry your project/startup.

lolsal 6y ago

I think you are dismissing another avenue you could take (even if I doubt it would be successful): bill them or send them an invoice. - bill for your time at a reasonable (previously established), rate. This is if you want to get your stuff back. - send an invoice for the missing luggage (itemized even). This is for the case where you don’t care about the stuff and just want to be compensated. If I screwed over a company, they wouldn’t hesitate to bill me. I wish we as consumers would do the same instead of freely spending our time.

loftyal 6y ago

Obviously my advice doesn't pertain to your main point, but as a person who's been to 80+ countries, and very experienced with this, my advice is only use carry on, it's not worth the risk. Buy the biggest bag you can that's allowable as a carry on and use that. I've had only a carry on whilst travelling for 7 months straight, and it worked out fine for me, pack light and wash your clothes at your hotel/airbnb.

tomjen3 6y ago

You are a software engineer, so you can reasonably price your work at 200 usd/hr. Collect evidence for the exact amount of time you spent on this issue, then have a lawyer write a lawyer letter. If they don't pay, sue them. Companies don't care about their minons getting yelled at. They care about getting sued.