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Comment by rhencke | Hacker News Reader

This was on HN once before - when it was, I signed up, because I struggle with prioritizing things that I need to do in my personal life over my professional life. (Hair cut, clean car, dentist, what have you.) I figured I didn't have anything to lose, really.

Manasvini, who emails me regularly from the service, has been nothing but wonderful. Every email I've gotten has been encouraging and positive, and it honestly helps keep me accountable.

I really can't thank Manasvini enough for that. Never once has there been any scolding, nagging, or negativity - just gracious reminders and a good attitude.

(Manasvini, if you're reading this - thanks for putting up with me, and always being helpful getting me back on track, even when I manage to completely derail myself.)

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So this service the same as life coaching, but remotely through emails?

Yes

Is your difficulty simply following through on tasks?

Do you also have difficulty finding enough time, and prioritizing your backlog of todo items? How does the service help in this case?

(I'm a customer of B.A.A.S.)

It helps with the follow through, because you'll let someone besides yourself down if you don't. Besides that, they help you plan and keep things sustainable. When you send goals that are poorly defined, they help you convert them into actionable ones.

Ultimately, you decide priority on these matters, but it helps to have that second mind that actively thinks with you.

> baas

Unironically, the origin of the word 'boss'.

Do you think you are acomplishing more because of this service?

I think they should start with a lower fee and charge x more every time the user fails to complete a task, on time. People need incentive to finish something. Not sure if someone emailing you is enough

Unfortunately that also sounds like an even stronger incentive to cancel the service. But I guess everyone is motivated differently.

Sounds like good motivation to do shit work just to get it done on time.

Inversely, offering rewards can be just as counterproductive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/sunday/science-re...

If it helps you maintain intrinsic motivation then it may be of benefit. Maybe depending on the person a gentle reminder or a wakeup call works best, but the motivation shouldn't be focussed on getting a pat on the back or to avoid someone yelling at you.

> Sounds like good motivation to do shit work just to get it done on time.

You say this like it's obviously a bad idea. Why?

The more work you do, the better it will be, even if you're not trying for any particular quality level. Most people have much more of a problem with the amount of the work they do than with the quality.

I read of an experiment conducted on a college pottery class. Half of the class was told they would be graded on the quality of the pots they produced. The other half was told their grade would be determined by gathering all the pots they turned in, smashing them, and weighing the pile of shards. The heavier the pile, the better the grade.

The grade-by-weight group turned in higher-quality pots.

> You say this like it's obviously a bad idea. Why? I think the article he cites answers this question.

As far as I can tell the article basically says: If you reward people for doing something, they will stop liking to do it and quality will suffer.

BAAS helps people to do something they set out to do, but can't get themselves to actually do it.

It seems to me it doesn't really matter if you start to like it less, since you already don't like it enough to get started. And the quality point is moot, since it's better to have something shitty (that you can then improve), than have nothing at all.

Don't forget that actually getting started is the most important part of doing something. An effective way to finally clean up the kitchen is not to plan 2 hours for it, but to just take 2 minutes to wipe the countertop. Before you know it, while wiping the countertop you move stuff back to their proper place and two hours later the kitchen is done. And if not, then at least the countertop is clean again, which was better than leaving it dirty.

I remember hearing of this before - I think it tells us a huge amount about how best to achieve our goals, or to coach others in that regard.

For example: ask a team to build a software project with excellent design and best practices and they may hit "analysis paralysis".

Ask them to build perhaps 5 distinct - but cheap and disposable - implementations and you might find they get a much better idea of how to do things "right" very quickly.

Note to self: remember this for future use!

> excellent design and best practices

Sounds like a sure fire way to spend all the time on premature optimisation.

Scott Guthrie at Microsoft used to talk about rapid prototyping, and to always throw away the prototype code and redo from scratch. Never keep the prototype, and especially don't just push it straight into production.

Exactly my point! That's an excellent technique in fact, tell a team upfront this will not be allowed to evolve into production and, freed from unease about future plans, they'll explore and experiment much more openly.

This appears to be an example of Facebook's "move fast, break things" axiom, or an example of "make it work, then make it good.

I'm not sure where the latter comes from, but I've read several startup case studies that began with founders who did everything by hand at the beginning (just to see if their process worked).

This does disalign goals of the user (get stuff done) and service provider (more money if someone fails as long as he is successful enough not to churn) though

Do you feel that adding tasks and managing bossasaservice.life becomes more of a distraction and effort than not having it though?

Not really - keep in mind interacting with Boss as a Service is a normal human conversation. In that way, it's very fluid and natural. You tell them what you want to work on, they help keep you accountable via reaching out, you report back when you finish it. If you needed to re-prioritize anything, it'd be as simple as saying, 'Hey, I'd like to work on A instead of B' or 'I'm going on vacation for a week' or whatever else you might need to say.

This isn't really a web task/todo list service - think of it more like someone helping keep you accountable to tasks where you'd find it helpful for someone to do so, if that makes sense.

so you email manasvini every meanial task like hair cut, car wash, etc and he emails you a reminder if you miss the regular intervals? sounds much more work than a task list...

I imagine they focus on the tasks that they typically procrastinate.

In their website's footer, there is a link to Manasvini Krishna's Twitter handle - https://twitter.com/Manasvinik who is a woman.

not really relevant. just said the name because the comment I was commenting on start with it. Still unsure how the commenter sees getting call about hair cut schedule help him with task overhead.

The comment make it look like that person is their mother, who knows everything about their life and can comment on. When in reality we know they only know what you email them about. And after a while emailing people is as much (if not more) of a chore than using a simple list.

Never realised that my wife is also providing this service for me ...

My girlfriend says she feels like my mother, careful with that

"We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need." - Tyler Durden

At the risk of sounding a bit picky, I've got to say that's a weird quote, though. Which generation of men has not been raised by women?

The book (and film) is specifically talking about absent fathers. The next line is "Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?"

It's pretty much the theme of the film: Masculinity as a desperate absence and conversely a desperate danger, in all it's facets from the comedic ("In death a member of Project Mayhem has a name") to the bathetic ("remaining men together") to the deeply sinister and violent. In a time when it is culturally deracinated and absent from so many men's childhoods.

The ones with fathers.

My father was raised by his dad and mom. I was raised by my dad and mom. My grandfather's were raised by their fathers and mothers. So that's three generations of men not raised only by their mothers.

Civilization is built upon the inclusion of men in childrearing, so ultimately all civilizations include men raised by both men and women (at least the successful ones).

I'm totally doing that for my girlfriend for years. Never thought about it this neutral though.

Now that you’re aware of it, have you talked to her about that? That’s a very common form of “emotional labor” that women find themselves responsible for, and it can be exhausting.

Relevant comic: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

Why is specific to women..?

It doesn’t have to be. It’s just something that most often falls to women due to our current culture.

The link explains in more detail.

The comic is basically "women have harder lives when they have low standards for the man they let knock them up."

I can't imagine walking into a kitchen then blaming my wife because of a pot of spaghetti overflowed, especially when she was busy dealing with two kids AND had her friends over. Or expect her to make dinner for me, the kids, and her friends all by herself.

I also can't imagine any of the men I know would do that...which the comic describes as a 'common scenario for many parents'.

That sounds like a low quality partner issue, not a gender role issue.

What strikes me about the comic is that the guest is talking to the husband, while she's there for the wife. It would make a lot more sense in this situation if the husband took care of the kids while the wife took care of her guest.

This is a fascinating comic, thank you for sharing.

The mental load sounds like it could be largely resolved by GTD, since eliminating mental load is the reason GTD was invented.

And if it's a shared system (eg whiteboard in kitchen) then the man/breadwinner can see at a glance what needs done and pick up tasks without having to ask.

Of course, there's a much more elegant solution, but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader :)

The comic is eye opening but kind of one sided. My partner never wondered how the car (that she rides in every day) gets cleaned or the oil gets changed, how the tires seamlessly switch between seasons, how the filter on the dishwasher or washing machine get cleaned, how ours is the only shower drain in the world that doesn't get clogged with long hairs, how every hernia inducing item just moves to the right spot by itself, how computers get updated, and dozens of minor annoyances get fixed around the house, etc.

The difference is I don't ask her to do it, and I don't broadcast what I'm doing to end up on a list. It needs to be done so I do it. If you keep tally you will not have a good time either way.

On the other hand stuff I don't need or want moved (my work stuff in my closed home office) always gets "ordered" according to her standards so I have my doubts about whether much of that behavior is society's fault or some people's innate wish to see some things done a certain way or in a certain order. It has to be done based on an internal list of needs or ideals, not because society says my stuff has to be ordered by her standards.

When you're substantially better at something just do it. Your partner will do the stuff they're better at. The rest gets split or shared with a simple prior arrangement. If the result is what matters don't get stuck on the how. And if something doesn't need to be done, don't do it. You'll expend mental and physical energy for no good reason.

Great, I came here to type out a similar response. You forgot big things like managing finances including investments, saving for kids, home refinancing, insurance payments, etc.

The difference in my household is that I, the husband, not only do all the things that you're talking about but also provide "Boss as a service" for my wife. It puts a ridiculous amount of load on me and burns me out. The difference as you correctly pointed out is men tend to "man up" and just do it.

I agree about it being one sided.

At one point an ex-partner of mine felt like she did way more than half the household workload. I felt under-appreciated because I was basically the only one to "fix" things if something needed to be done in the house.

We decided to set up a simple task manager for ad-hoc tasks, with some alternating recurring tasks like doing the washing. This worked quite well, as it gave some objective facts to balance our feelings and allowed us both to easily pick up our half of the work whenever we had some time.

Yep. We all want them doing this service. They are truly obligated both on a local, personal level, and then in a wider sense by society.

Everyone is happy that they are providing this, and we all agree that they are definitely experiencing this real need, and not projecting something into the world that's actually just going on in their heads.

In hindsight its amazing how stupid and unaware people are as young new parents (myself included). Now, at my riper age, that sort of help is like an automatic reflex.

If you are basing this on the PSID report they are only counting household chores typically done by women, so their numbers can't be trusted [1] and are heavily politicised by people seeking to further a particular ideology through using statistics that intentionally misrepresent the world:

"Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework."

Also, in addition to the chores that are not counted men tend to sacrifice at a higher rate in other ways to provide for the family. They have longer commutes and more frequently work away from home [2], and on average work longer hours when working fulltime [3]. Women also more frequently work part-time with a man supporting the family doing the sacrifices mentioned here [4].

We are happy to do all of this, but the deal is that one partner don't get to discount what the other do and then talk bad about how we all contribute to the whole based upon this misrepresentation.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111458 [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20150... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/06/30/new-repo... [4] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/on-pay-gap-millenn...

Emotional labor is not referring to the completion of material tasks / chores, nor is it referring to the amount of hours completed at a workplace. So I'm not sure what it is that you're trying to communicate by responding to a comment that was specifically about emotional labor with this comment - emotional labor has nothing to do with "talking bad" about relative degrees of contribution in a relationship.

edit: now I see - it's related to the comic in the GP comment. That comment implies that the comic is explaining emotional labor, but it isn't (the comic pretty much states this in the final panel). So that GP comment confused the thread. I'll respond directly to that comment.

The concept of emotional labor is not much different. Emotional labor in itself is a description of a carefully selected subset of actions we do when we mutually care for people we are close with and that most people gain meaning through doing, and it is associating the word labor with these meaningful actions due to how labor to many has a negative connotation. People that further emotional labor as a grievance intentionally misrepresent the world in order to further a specific political ideology, and it is typically the same groups that create the misrepresentations in the PSID report. This is Grievance Studies 101.

Emotional labor as a concept is manipulative, and it makes it harder for us all to appreciate the part each of us play in making a whole in exactly the same way as the PSID misrepresentations and make it harder for us to gain the meaning we normally do through mutually caring relationships.

The sad thing about both the PSID and the emotional labor concept is that it discourages the ones with few healthy relationships from mimicking the actions that will most likely help build them.

Thanks for explaining your viewpoint - sounds like we have incredibly different definitions of the concept of "emotional labor". I have never experienced it as being manipulative, nor in support of a specific political ideology, and based on my understanding of this concept, these traits are completely orthogonal to the core message.

While I'm highly skeptical of the notion that this concept is inherently manipulative, I certainly understand that select people will use whatever tools they have at their disposal to affect manipulation. I'm fascinated that you have had this experience and I'd like to hear more about what brought you here.

I would like to learn why we have such different viewpoints. Do you see emotional labor as a concept as something else than a grievance? What do you think is a good definition of the term? It is reasonable that we have different definitions since it seems to be used without a clear or consistent definition.

This is where I come from: The claims I can find about emotional labor mostly seem to refer to the PSID report, and it currently seems like there is an effort at claiming the conclusions of the PSID report support a similar claim about how the genders relate in the workplace. Emotional labor seem to be interchangeable be used for both contexts without a clear definition, and as a generalization of the PSID report. However, I can't find any data supporting that this is how the genders relate in the workplace and as I showed earlier the PSID report is also not a good representation of how people relate at home due to its misrepresentations.

While it tangentially touches on it, this comic is not talking specifically about emotional labor - the final panel even says "In a future comic I'll talk about emotional work, which also gets heaped onto women."

For anyone interested, here are some resources on emotional labor:

- https://www.fastcompany.com/90268277/men-emotional-labor-is-...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/melodywilding/2018/06/06/dont-b...

- https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/7-ways-men-must-l...

That's an interesting comic. Though I think it's very one-sided especially in the last parts and written from the point of a women, who had bad luck with her partner. Staying with these stereotypes there are other mental tasks that a man would have on his mind like keeping the car running: changing tires, changing oil, etc.

Anecdotally: I did a big junk of the organizational stuff for my girlfriend during her five years of university (we basically met a month before she started) including pushing her through her bachelor and master thesis. Basically I kept a mental todo list for her and kept nagging her "like a boss". I also organized us moving different places, getting insurances, setting up contracts (like for tv and internet), shopping for tech, getting her car fixed and planning our holidays. I also organized and execute all the household related fixing. That's mostly stuff that happens on occasion and takes a lot of time and mental capacity then, but is not a daily load.

On the other hand she does a lot of the daily load stuff like washing, shopping and cleaning (basically because I'm fine cleaning once every 2 weeks when I can actually see the dust lying around, but she gets furious at this point). I probably do not appreciate this enough from a mental load / organizational point of view.

I'm sure though that I will be the one keeping track of doctor appointments and nannies, when we have kids, while she will keeping track of feeding, grocery shopping and changing diapers. I hopefully will remember this post and appreciate the small, but frequent and steady organizational load she takes and not only think about the rarer, bigger ones I take care off.

> That's an interesting comic. Though I think it's very one-sided

Of course. It provides a perspective, not all perspectives. But it's an important perspective. Not every household is this skewed in responsibilities, but many are. And just paying a bit of attention to what's going on and taking on some of these responsibilities, can alleviate a lot of stress.

It's certainly something I need to do more.

This comic addresses a very real issue, but I feel it is more universal than the feminist angle would imply. This same drama unfolds anytime you have people cohabitating who have different tolerances / thresholds / standards for how and how often they expect cleanliness and tidyness issues to be handled. If those thresholds don’t match, and especially if one person is more conflict-averse than the other, typically one person will volunteer to suffer in silence, take most of the burden for themselves, bottle up resentment, and then explode in a “I always / you never” fight. Every male I know who has male roommates during college has their own version of this story.

This was a good reminder, habits are hard to break. As others have pointed out, the comic is a bit one sided, but it's trying to make a point, so whatever.

However, the comic does fail to recognize that the priorities of the woman (in this case) are also societal constructs. In the same way that women are taught to be the cleaners and boys are taught to go off to "save the world," women are also taught to value things like a tidy home. There's no inherent value in not keeping my jeans on the floor of the bedroom. That's something that women writ large have been taught to value.

If the men are being encouraged to think about what society has taught them to do, and change it based on this comic, I think it's only fair that the women also take a minute and consider the same.

Not sure if supposed to feel bad about this or not, but ...

10 years ago, when my wife and I had been married less than a month, there was an occasion when the dishes piled up in the sink, and my wife got upset, and asked why had hadn't I noticed them, and why hadn't it bother me enough to clean them up without her having to ask me.

The reality was, I'm not sure I had noticed it, sometimes I get lost in my own world, I have a different perception of what parts of the world need my attention than my wife does, not that my perception is better (its often worse),

anyway, we had a discussion where I stated that if she would like my help with something, a polite "hey, would you mind [cleaning the dishes, some other X, etc]" will almost always elicit a "sure", then me doing it, unless there is an extremely specific reason I'm unable to help her at that exact moment, I'm not going to refuse a request for help

I'm happy we had that talk, I think it significantly improved the communication in our marriage

I don't want her strewing over me not doing something that I'm oblivious to, (and sometimes I am oblivious to stuff)

after a few requests for the same type of help, I do get in the habit of anticipating that a particular help is needed, and try to do it before that help is formally requested (the sink rarely fills up with dishes these days)

So it sounds like I can use this as mom-as-a-service, yes?

I have an Idea. Maas (Mom as a service)

I don't think it's legal in most places for me to rent your mom.

What about MomAI?

So like daycare ? :D

Just use a project management software! Like Redmine, it has tickets, Gantt charts and even a calendar feed I think. Works like a charm for exactly that stuff. I mean managing this is so trivial with that kind of software.

Personally I think Redmine is a bit too much for managing personal life. For capturing and managing tasks I use OmniFocus. But I think the problem is not the capturing but the doing. With BaaS a real person helps you to achieve your tasks.

We send ourselves an email with a todo list, when an action is added, it's "reply all" and add it to the bottom. When one is done it's removed.

I mean just from a standpoint of free will and society, not so much from technological: seriously, this is the opposite of what a person should want. When you look at the historical development people got increasingly self-determined over the centuries. This completely makes no sense at all, this is reverse and you even pay for this.

I mean this BaaS probably "manages" 100s of people and is doing nothing else than clicking through a similar software for you.

Keeping track of and prioritizing the things you need to do is a very different challenge from motivating yourself to actually get off your ass and do them.

Ain't that the truth! I've got an easy list of all the projects and stuff I want/need to do, and can easily prioritize and reprioritize that (and often procrastinate by doing just that). But when it comes to actually sitting down and doing it...well, that's where I struggle.

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