rishirishi

Yeah, I was surprised how long it took me to realize the error in my breathing. In hindsight, my athletic life before 21 could have benefited greatly from breathing "right".

Breathing through your diaphragm is desirable all the time and not only during a conscious exercise. Many years ago, I would breathe through my chest which made for shallow breathing. Look at how babies breathe; through their diaphragm/stomach.

It took several months to shift my breath to the diaphragm. The exercises certainly help with lengthening the inhale and exhale, maximizing both oxygen intake and carbon dioxide excretion.

I found this opinion piece insightful: https://medium.com/@ummerr/youre-working-in-the-wrong-place-...

I believe a solution could be the combination of:

a) Open-office space with pods of desks that groups can flock to when collaboration is required. Noise is welcome.

b) Library space where conversations are prohibited. Complete silence.

c) Closed-door offices that are large enough to house a team and a whiteboard.

Designing and building desired office spaces does not come cheap. But, that should be weighed against the productivity upside.

I have been through waterfall, agile, scrum, "agile", "scrum", kanban, to-do lists. Yet, I cannot point to a single style of project management as a silver bullet. However, I have come to realize the following conditions improve the probability of success: small teams made up of scary-smart accountable people, given a well-articulated objective (not solution) and are left alone without distraction. Short of this, you almost always fall in the trap of micro-management.

You are right in that meetings are prone to being wasteful and unarchived. A few considerations that I find necessary for meetings: - Schedule in advance (if possible) - Set an agenda and provide reading material (if available) such that attendees can prepare - Be selective in who attends; those with relevant knowledge, interest or stakeholders - Record meeting notes (key decisions, unsettled conversations, differing opinions) - Appoint a chair to keep the meeting on track, as per the agenda. They can also help shut people up and give others a chance to speak. - Share the meeting notes with the team at large

Positioned as a tool for collaboration and productivity, how can Slack legitimately be that when it is designed for online, synchronous communication?

Is it really collaboration when members in a channel do not have a chance to prepare or struggle to participate at that pace?

What is productive about Slack? Perhaps you get questions answered through the tool, but you do not produce through Slack. I think of meetings as productive when progress is made on a problem or a decision is arrived at. How does Slack facilitate that better than scheduled meetings?

I have generally stopped using Slack. If a conversation takes longer than three minutes to conduct on Slack, in real/video/phone life please. There is an illusion that work is getting done faster on Slack; the opposite is true, work is slower and of poorer quality.

Depending on the type of work, setting (office, remote) and circumstances, tools like Slack become necessary. And when collectively used well with agreements, it becomes valuable. The tool is not the cause, I agree.

Getting off Slack was an experiment to surface its benefits and drawbacks. Although I am content with being offline that does not preclude a scenario where I check Slack once or twice a day, as I do with email. The onus is on the user to manage their tools.

> ... he's preparing to be left out of a lot of decisions ...

I struggle to see how substantive decisions can be made legitimately through group chat. How do you facilitate decision making such that it allows people to prepare and participate?

> How can days be purpose driven if you don't sync your own work with your colleague's work any more?

Work does get synced. It gets discussed at our desks, usually in the mornings. If the work presents blockers requiring a lengthy discussion then we hop into a meeting room. I find we get better participation and arrive at a solution with less friction.