The Slackification of the American Home
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree. Some things just need to be tried out to see if it enriches your life.
Yes there will be regrets but there is always a risk for potential worthwhile pursuits.
Not everything can be predicted.
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!
You can take the baby out of the bathwater.
This is interesting... The author may have overlooked the fact that Atlassian also owns Trello.
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.
Please don't generalize your experiences so recklessly.
It's still true though, and the existence of some people who do use it doesn't nearly mean that all people use it.
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?
But seriously, how many kids have more than a surface level knowledge of what various occupations do, or even what occupations were available? How many have practical dreams like becoming an accountant? There were adults in my programming class that became disillusioned with the career path when they discovered it wasn't all about manipulating green scrolling text like the matrix. My 13 year old nephew went through this stuff but has had a change of heart after discovering Architecture was a math intensive profession.
They simply don't have the depth and breadth of understanding to be specializing at that age.
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.
That is only one job in one niche industry. I'm trying to figure out how to expose my children to a volume of careers that extend beyond programmer, fireman, astronaut, etc.
For some reason (probably upbringing and local environment), some people start to think about their careers very late. And I don't feel like thinking about it much earlier is productive. When you're 15, or 9, you don't really have enough information (or arguably sapience), to make a reasoned choice.
I feel the "compound interest everything" thinking is infecting our lives too much. I've heard arguments that Soviet times were bad because it was government that told you where to go to work, and free societies let people choose for themselves. But if kids are forced to think about their career at 9 and make decisions that become binding because of sunk costs, that's essentially market choosing for you. You're not free either way, it's just a different optimization system optimizing you.
In some ways that must be quite freeing, assuming that the selection is reasonably correlated with your abilities and temperament.
People change a lot since that age ;)
She is definitely a loving mother and cares the worlds for her kids, but I feel incredibly uneasy if this becomes the new norm for kids to succeed in our society.
This is not objective but my brother in law's extended family lives in the suburbs far from a much smaller metro area, spend their time primarily outdoors lightly supervised, and to me are far more confident, articulate, and fun kids.
The context is obvious: Parents get less house time, do more house-irrelevant things during said time, and most importantly - the outside is more hostile, so more and more kids life is organized and initiated by parents.
Aren't our cities, generally speaking, safer now than they were at most times in the past?
This family could use some help. If you're an experienced parent, and have some extra time, please contact us.
oh god..
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.
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?
But if I find my self asking my kid “so... what went well?” or “I’m not sure that’s a 5 pointer” before they are working age I’ll book an appointment with a professional pronto!
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.
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.
We did this with our kid, no smart devices in the back seat. We didn't make sure she had something to do at all times. Most of her toys were (and still are) stuff that need some creativity and imagination (just wooden blocks, Legos etc.)
Now she can sit in the back seat for an hour, just staring out the window thinking about stuff. She seems to be able to play with just about anything, any object can be a source of play and games for her.
Creativity and independence in thinking comes second.
That's probably the worst you can do to a child. It's setting them up for unhappiness.
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.
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.
Honestly, if you're going to be so overly organized (which some people are) this at least sounds like a better way to do it. Might as well have your calendar online and your messages in one place so everyone knows what's going on.
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.
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
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.
Lot’s of things are obvious in retrospect.
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.