Microsoft reboots war on sleep
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
It's not. It's an addiction. It's shovelling snow, it's a quest for feeling accomplishment without effort. It's more fuel for being constantly connected, for constantly thinking you're progressing and accomplishing by hitting that email archive button, or scrolling through reams of meaningless text, or fiddling with your spreadsheet layout. It's no better than scrolling through reddit, then closing it to scroll through twitter, then opening up reddit again.
It's really hard honestly, but these days I open up email and slack, clear them, then close them. Both my phone and my computer are permanently on DND, so no notifications bother me. When I'm done with the work day I make sure that nothing work related stays open and that no one can contact me unless it's an emergency. I'm considering splitting my one login on my laptop into two, a work and a personal, and hard-blocking HN etc on the work one, and hard blocking work on the personal. Or using Bootcamp and moving all my personal computer use to Windows.
My Dad always told me that you should have an hour a day and a day a week to yourself. When I was younger I laughed that off. These days I struggle to make it my minimum ideal.
Deep Work (an article by the author was recently on HN): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X47ZVXM/
Essentialism: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G1J1D28/
Meditation also helps to quiet the mind and reduce the mental clutter, but it's not quite enough.
Addiction, as you say. Lack of freedom (as any addiction is).
Plain stupid.
I've had friends from the USA eat the cost of a plane ticket because their supervisor told them they'd get time off for a visit to Germany, but then got dunked on two weeks before the flight by their supervisor's supervisor, precisely because they wouldn't have been able to react to emergencies in Germany, and this entirely due to technological policy restrictions.
Have you seen the latest movie of Michael Moore "Where to invade next?" http://wheretoinvadenext.com ? Hilarious and insightful regarding this and many other topics where Europe and USA differ.
Competition makes it so that anything that's possible than can give company a leg up soon becomes expected.
Precisely, yesterday I shared this article on Facebook and I wrote that it is not by chance that religions require, roughly, one hour a day and a day a week for prayer. This is for a reason and the reason is not God. The reason is health of the human soul.
There is no need to believe in god to learn from old religions.
Later when I upgraded to the first gen iPhones, I noticed that they didn't have the option to turn off ActiveSync at all. I thought it was odd, but I still didn't mind.
Nowadays, I often leave my phone on DND or Airplane mode for large chunks of the day. I am totally sick of the deluge of mail from what is now 6 separate email addresses. I note that iOS 10 still hasn't got the ability to turn off syncing between certain hours that I know of. On top of that, I have alerts constantly popping up from Twitter, Slack, HelpScout, Intercom et al.
I think the whole "Work can wait" movement is a good one that needs to be front and center at a lot of workplaces (and a lot of apps).
EDIT: Thanks to the responses below, I now realise that iOS 10 DOES indeed have the capability to turn on DND during certain hours only! Winning.
Seriously, companies have psychologists on staff analyzing the behavior of users, with their job being coming up with ways to keep you hooked. Why on earth would you receive notifications for people liking your stupid messages on Twitter or Facebook, if it weren't for our inflated ego craving for those notifications that's making us going back to these apps.
It's become much more difficult now that I work remotely and use a single place and computer for both work and personal.
You can set Do Not Disturb between certain hours on iOS.
Have all mail pre-filtered into categories with a bayesian (or similar) filter trained by the user themselves.
What this means in practice is that you have a bunch of categories for emails that are not urgent, like purchase receipts, ads, mailing lists, etc. and you teach inbox which of the mails you receive belong in there, just through the simple act of moving emails in and out.
Emails in those categories don't trigger notifications.
And for the kinds of emails you consider urgent, you move them out of the category they're in, let Inbox know "don't categorize this type of mail".
Only those trigger notifications.
The result of this is that your phone acts like a secretary on your emails. It sorts them into various inboxes for you so you can review them later on, or lets you know if something came in you might want to look at immediately. It's not perfect, sure, it's more akin to a 12 year old playing secretary. However it certainly stems the "tide" without forcing you to cut yourself off entirely, providing a nice medium you can use for normal work time, leaving DND mode for when you actually need exactly that.
However, it would be nice if the dings completely stopped of their own accord, say, after 6pm and didn't resume again until about 8am. (I know I can do this manually as other have suggested, but I would really like to 'baby' my phone less and have it figure out these things itself, or let me set it.)
After all, if the Google App can work out when I start my car and connect my phone to my car Bluetooth on a Wednesday evening, that I am going to my mom's place for dinner, and it tells me how long it will take to get there, surely it can extend itself to holding off all emails for the evening so I can enjoy a nice family dinner? :-)
But before that, iirc, people used automation/tasking apps. I.e. primitive scripting interfaces in which you could say "when beyond this time, set to DND" or "when near this GPS location, allow only phone calls". Maybe the itunes app store has such automation apps?
Also the shedule for later function is a life safer for busy or lazy days.
And that's exactly what workplace electronics is supposed to be about, really. We were promised a future where computers would lessen our workload and make human secretaries redundant. Well, human secretaries were made redundant but for the most part computers did not replace them.
I do not use the Mail app in iOS. Rather (ironically), I use Outlook my Microsoft. It has a "Focused" and "Other" Inbox of all your mails. It only notifies you mail coming to your "Focused" inbox which it learns over time. I'm pretty happy about it.
If there is a solution like Outlook's "focused" inbox for macOS I would love to hear about it...
I also have a 7" tablet so I can tether if I really need to.
Life is better.
I couldn't live without it.
Is anybody there, Microsoft? Are you endorsing burnout?! In case that you've missed, people want to have their work done before they go home. With your crappy office software it was never possible, now it should invade our spare time? Fuck you Microsoft, and get it done!
I get this is a great way to promote their brand, but it seems pretty close to your standard in-group clickbait marketing:
1) pick a big target everyone can hate on
2) blow something minor out of proportion so you can claim outrage / assert your values
3) profit
A big, capitalistic company's only goal is to satisfy their stakeholders, nothing more.
So it's our job to write articles like DHH wrote and make them as visible as possible. No company is able to foresee all the negative consequences they can cause (they should try, however, because it will and should hurt them).
It's up to the society to create strong negative signals that will counteract and negate positive economic signals coming from any activities harmful to the society.
I'll have taken about 8 weeks holiday this year. But for about half of it I'll do 30 min or even 2 hours work. Actually it's been less than half.
That's a pretty sweet deal. I've still got that ability to take a good few contiguous days off, completely relaxing so to speak. But I'm more relaxed after spending 5 min checking on progress in my absence, as I know when I come back to work full time, it won't be hell.
For a number of earlier jobs i had work could only be done in the office due to technological or security restrictions. Heck, even for a number of my clients i first had to work on-site, then figure out how to migrate things to a remote setup.
But now i work entirely from home and never even visit any offices. This has freed me up considerably. I still get the same amount of work done in practice, but the hours i bill are now half of what i spent previously just in the office. Even less if you consider that i have zero commute anymore.
And yes, i have worked in weird places and at weird times. Bathroom, bed, weekend, 2 am, at a conference in another country.
But the difference is, those things were me responding to emergencies. Emergencies that in all cases would have come up the same regardless of where and when i was. Having set up the technology i had meant the difference in practice for me was:
Instead of spending an hour to get to the office at 2 AM and back, i got up from the bed, walked to the computer, fixed the problem in ten minutes and went back to bed.
My life got considerably better.
It's part of the system. Anytime that you read about a company that does it differently you are seeing an aberration. Let them have some pressures applied and they will revert to the norm. Also, if you are reading about them it's because they are news not the norm.
Why exactly?
I agree he uses the strategies you mention, but he does it in this case to attack something real. Asserting values is not intrinsically a negative. His rhetoric is profane and aggressive which would not be my style, but it does appear to be effective these days.
Firstly, I don't by choice use any Microsoft products, so this is not a defence of that company.
Secondly, I also fully agree that work can wait and my employer should not be intruding on my personal time, outside of office hours.
However, I have a passion for something and I have a young family. Between my paid work commitments and the fabulous time I spend with my family, I have only a limited amount of time to dedicate to my passion. I would like to hope that one day, my passion can generate enough income that I can give up "work." (I know that's a whole other conversation about whether that is a good thing).
What I really want are tools which assist in enabling me to make as much progress with my passion, in the limited time available to me. If that means doing something while on holiday, from work, so be it. Does it make me one of the 47%?
There are of course lines which should be in place and a correct balance found, especially when it comes to family activities. However, I do want tools to keep me informed about the latest events regarding my passion and effective ways to react to that news while away from a desktop/laptop computer.
If it's that you can be walking in the countryside when you would previously have had to come into the office for a meeting, then that's great.
If, on the other hand, it's that you've now got no excuse for not working in times you would previously have been resting, then that's pretty bad.
I work in a company that offers pretty good flexibility. You aren't expected to be answering your emails when you're on holiday, but you are often able to work from home if that helps with your particular situation.
I've got my kid's school play in a few weeks, and I could not do a full day in the office and get back to watch it. But I can stay at home, work in the morning and the evening, and then go to the play in the afternoon. I could also choose to take the entire day off as holiday of course, but then I'd be losing a day's holiday. I appreciate this kind of flexibility.
Of course, there's plenty of companies who take the opposite tack - if you've got a work phone, you're now available to be working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The advert at the bottom is pretty poor, because it seems to be very much pushing that message.
But most of the original ones could be read either way.
"This embedded content is from a site that does not comply with the Do Not Track (DNT) setting now enabled on your browser.
Please note, if you click through and view it anyway, you may be tracked by the website hosting the embed."
Consider part of the reason work takes so long is the constant stream of updates. Updates have killed more than one conference presentation.
Yet, when companies are faced with evidence that people don't like updates, they force more, bigger, faster. Why don't they invest in fewer, more meaningful, careful updates?
Treasure the customer's device as you would their home.
The problem comes from a very narrow understanding of how 'capitalism/free market economy/society' should work. In the original theoretical framework that laid the ground for the modern economical system, David Hume (and Adam Smith) talked about 'spontaneous order' that comprised multiple social signals, not just prices! Society and economy are complex adaptive system with multiple inputs and any public indignation like this one are perfect examples of signals that should act like 'invisible hand'.
The more such signals we'll allow, the better the optimisation will be, not just in terms of economical efficiency, but also environmental friendliness, quality of life impact etc.
Unfortunately neoclassical economy (including some Nobel price winners) seem to be blissfully unaware of where they are coming from and they tend to ditch social 'messiness' so characteristic for any complex system in favour of simplified mathematical models.
For anyone interested, I really recommend the below:
1) This talk about the missing forgotten part of Adam Smith thought ("The Theory of Moral Sentiment"), that significantly changes the understanding of his perspective: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/04/vernon_smith_an.htm...
2) This article by Yannis Varoufakis on the idea of Spotaneous Order and how it got oversimplified over the last 3 centuries: https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/02/25/on-spontaneous-order-v...
Work is the process of mapping nature into products and (then) waste.
If nobody needs the 'fruits' of your work, there's always marketing and advertising which can make people want them.
This my friends is the reason our planet is fast becoming uninhabitable.
People doing too much work.
I think we've achieved a lot, now it's time to take a look around and take a look inside.
Is it possible to build a society which is not built around the concept of 'work'?
Are there any other human values which could replace it ?
> Is it possible to build a society which is not built around the concept of 'work'?
I hope so. I suppose it will happen, as more and more people realize there isn't much to be proud about working anymore. We're not making food for our community, we're not making sheets for someone else to make swords to protect our community. We're making pointless websites that are meant to trick people into buying some shit they don't need, all to make our boss richer.
Of course pop psychology is already on it, reminding us that what matters is that we're working - our professionalism, our dedication, our skill. But at some point I guess the society at large will get disillusioned about it and realize there's nothing honourable in working, because most work is no longer doing anything honourable. The pride of work is an outdated value.
Sure, but it could probably only happen in a post-scarcity society. As long as resources are scarce effort will need to be put forward to sustain life.
Several months ago I started leaving my laptop charger at work, so that the time I spend on the computer at home is limited to the battery life. As a result, I stopped staying up late (2am-), which has been a life-long habit until then.
Two weeks ago, I stopped bringing my laptop home. As a result, I've been reading a lot more, going to sleep early, waking up early, and being more productive at work despite spending less time working.
The article is shoehorning an agenda and viewpoint in to an ad that is essentially a profile of an unusual person.
I don't like the tone, I don't like the language, and I don't like the judgemental assumptions.
It is obviously written by someone who doesn't know many working creatives, and why some people approach work that way.
And it is assuming that the author knows what is best, and what makes everyone happy, as if there are no variations in people in this world. I I find it a shame a person could think they know better what someone else needs than they do. Condescending. Insulting.
1) The glorification of a lifestyle completely dominated by work.
2) Microsoft offering products that you can use from anywhere, at any time.
The article is mostly about 1). But I do think that 2) is to be applauded.
With all the current privacy discussion going on, it's kinda lame to work somewhere you're supposed to take corporate phones and so on back home - EDIT: considering the future might look like 1984 when it comes to surveillance.
(As a software engineer, I, of course, agree that this is terrible).
I've been working like that for the last couple of months the and it's really not healthy. It has been at the expense of every other part of my life, I had my own reasons but will be returning to a more balanced approach.
I also think the message of this particular advert doesn't justify the strength of this attack.
Yes, I am fighting hyperbole with hyperbole.
I don't work during off-hours because I have to or feel pressured to. I also don't do it excessively. I do it because I like my work and care about the uptime of my systems and sometimes I want to get ahead. This has paid off for me in tangible ways, and I still enjoy a stress-free home life.
If you want to work 9-5 and then be done, that's fine. But don't act like the alternative is morally wrong or that others can't exercise their own choice.
#SamIAm
DHH on that self-promotion game
Why not blame Android for making this possible with all the useful mobile devices. Or how about blaming the web for making access to information at all hours of the day possible.
That said, I do think mobile device usage outside of the office is more likely to supplement rather than replace time in the office.
i have trouble believing that.
But as I was not buying any, a separate action on which I had taken a clear stance for myself, I ended up not smoking unless in a group setting.
Over time I cut out on that too.