The Slackification of the American Home

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/families-slack-asana/593584/

by laurex • 7 years ago

70 104 7 years ago

I really think Trello in particular can be a great “life tool”. I have coworkers who have begun to use it for planning meals, dates, etc.

Causality1• 7 years ago

There's ample evidence this makes you more organized. I haven't seen any yet that it makes you happier.

unsatchmo• 7 years ago

I’ll go a step farther and point out that it’s troubling that we feel like we need these sorts of tools to survive at home today. It seems to be a symptom of an ever increasing level of complexity in every facet of modern life.

winkeyless• 7 years ago

This is an area that should have been discussed or mentioned in the article.

jonas21• 7 years ago

Why is it troubling?

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.

ubercow2• 7 years ago

Trello along with Airtable are invaluable to keeping my life organized.

AlphaWeaver3• 7 years ago

Yeah, I'm a big fan of using work productivity tools for personal stuff too. I personally use Notion and Monday.com lately.

mistermann3• 7 years ago

How do you use airtable? I keep coming across it in comments but would like to hear some personal use cases.

austhrow743• 7 years ago

I don't use it any more, I liked but I was using it as a CRM in a role I'm no longer in. At the time there was a consultant running an airtable youtube channel that I found helpful. He has videos titled things like "planning a party using airtable" and also has personal use case examples in some videos with names that don't make that clear eg. the "Using Views in Airtable to Improve Workflows" video is about a system he and his partner use to plan meals and then make shopping lists for them. I recommend poking around his stuff for ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/user/GarethPronovost/videos

ubercow2• 7 years ago

A couple of big ones I have are:

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.

asdfman1233• 7 years ago

The "tiger mom" phenomenon was every bit as much in force, as far as I know, during my time in high school during the early to mid aughts.

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.

sittingnut• 7 years ago

"american home"? even in terms of content of article, it is clear this is confined to a very small section of society. even that is purely based on anecdotal claims. almost no valid evidence, but broad nation wide conclusion.

asdfman1233• 7 years ago

The America that they know is almost entirely upper upper middle class and coastal.

paxys3• 7 years ago

If you are looking for a "standard" American home you aren't going to find it. It is a large country, and there is a ton of diversity. People mentioned in the article are as American as anyone else.

kthejoker2• 7 years ago

Welcome to The Atlantic? Or lifestyle journalism?

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.

tempsy• 7 years ago

Something I’m trying to get better at is to be more intentional about everything e.g. I think I’ve come to the realization that I’ve wasted a lot of time and spent time doing things I shouldn’t be doing because I allowed myself to “drift” in ways that don’t help me at all.

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.

coderintherye• 7 years ago

Tools are helpful for being intentional, but so is instruction.

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!

garmaine2• 7 years ago

We shouldn’t need religion for this.

arvinsim2• 7 years ago

Something I’m trying to get better at is to be more intentional about everything e.g. I think I’ve come to the realization that I’ve wasted a lot of time and spent time doing things I shouldn’t be doing because I allowed myself to “drift” in ways that don’t help me at all.

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.

kibibyte2• 7 years ago

This reminded me Atlassian's 2013 April Fools joke, JIRA Jr. (https://www.atlassian.com/jirajr). Funny how life imitates art.

narnianal• 7 years ago

They really did some cool stuff. For instance they also made an Angry Birds clone: https://www.atlassian.com/angrynerds

basch• 7 years ago

Although that joke is funny, and this article is a little odd, personally I think everyone is taking away the wrong message.

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.

jwhitlark• 7 years ago

Check out google data studio. Feels a better fit to me that tableau.

kibibyte2• 7 years ago

You know, when you put it that way, that does raise a lot of good points. There are legitimate non-obvious problems in this area ("family resource management" might be a catchy name here) and not a lot of solutions. And the solutions that exist are so heavyweight and industry-tailored that when you hear about parents using JIRA, it just sounds absurd (and rightly so).

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.

darkpuma• 7 years ago

This is certainly not what Dobbs had in mind.

drewcoo• 7 years ago

Ah, but he said to Hubbard "They are pink but there money is green."

AlphaWeaver3• 7 years ago

"We think of Trello as a tool you can use across work and life," says Stella Garber, [Trello's] head of marketing. [...] (Slack declined to share any information about how people use its software, and Atlassian, which owns Jira, did not respond to a similar request.)

This is interesting... The author may have overlooked the fact that Atlassian also owns Trello.

mistermann3• 7 years ago

When did this happen? And how much $$$?

msolujic• 7 years ago

https://www.google.rs/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlass...

AlphaWeaver3• 7 years ago

A bit over two and a half years ago [0] it looks like.

[0] https://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian

seltzered_• 7 years ago

In 2001, the article "The organization kid" was a popular framing of early millenials - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-org... . 18 years later...the organization household.

asdfman1233• 7 years ago

As per our earlier conversation, we have decided that the children will be enrolled in tennis camp over the summer. Please let me know if you want to follow up on this.

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.

Simon_says• 7 years ago

Or just rebel and be a little monster like everyone else at that age.

theelous3• 7 years ago

That is beyond disturbing.

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.

awadheshv2• 7 years ago

Julie Berkun Fajgenbaum, a mom of three children ages 8 to 12, uses Google Calendar to manage her children’s time and Jira to keep track of home projects.

oh god..

btown• 7 years ago

Gives velocity and burndown a whole new meaning...

around_here• 7 years ago

Sorry, can't afford the scope creep on having Timmy over for dinner tomorrow night. Don't want to damage the metrics.

quickthrower22• 7 years ago

Why oh god? Sounds reasonable.

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.

awadheshv2• 7 years ago

jira is same as pen and paper.. I feel so outdated now.

etripe• 7 years ago

It sounds reasonable if you value chores and compliance above everything. Why should children be "productive"? Is there any time left for play, discovery, spontaneity?

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?

Balgair2• 7 years ago

Like, for a lot of people, if you need to use these tools for your family at all, it's a big sign that you need to do less things. If tracking your family and it's velocity is something that you feel that you need to do, then you need to re-evaluate what it is that you are doing with your family as such activity is glaringly unhealthy. Not saying that I am part of this (tools are ethics-neutral to me, use whatever works, kids are stressful enough), but to a lot of people, family is not something to 'get done' or 'crush it'.

radicalriddler• 7 years ago

I've thought about creating a family management platform before, but it seemed too weird and farfetched that people would actually use it for a long period of time and not chuck it out.

dorfsmay• 7 years ago

Simple translates to longevity (resilient to environment rot).

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

paxys3• 7 years ago

Every family in the world uses IM, and Slack isn't very different from any of the hundred other options out there for group messaging. So not too surprising that families are using it.

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.

fwip2• 7 years ago

A lot of families don't even have texting, let alone IM each other regularly on their personal computing devices.

Please don't generalize your experiences so recklessly.

dependsontheq• 7 years ago

That’s not realistic, messengers are much more ubiquitous than any other kind of software and are mostly used in a family/friends network. We had our local digital festival last week an we had school classes teaching seniors WhatsApp.

whenchamenia• 7 years ago

Very few families use IM. Are you in california by chance? I doubt its even a majority with affluent families there.

paxys3• 7 years ago

Do you use SMS? iMessage? WhatsApp? These are all forms of IM. I'm from India BTW, and about half the country is active on WhatsApp.

stackzero• 7 years ago

The next step is to open source your family as a project on Github

avip4• 7 years ago

### Call for maintainers

This family could use some help. If you're an experienced parent, and have some extra time, please contact us.

vmurthy• 7 years ago

I'm saving this comment :-) In the future, I'll cite you as a visionary when this unfortunately comes to pass!

lukey_q• 7 years ago

I'm imagining the classic scene from movies where a teen boy comes to ask the dad if he can take the daughter to prom, except he just opens a pull request

majewsky2• 7 years ago

"Will you marry me?" - "Merge request closed without comments."

rusteh1• 7 years ago

What does it say about us as a society in which a pre-high school child needs to use a productivity suite to manage their lives? The answer here is not to provide more software to allow 11 year olds to eek out a few extra percentage points of productivity. The answer is to expect less of 11 year olds.

djaychela• 7 years ago

My kids' school has just been taken over (in the UK) by an academy group whose other local schools were telling 8 and 9 year old that they needed to know what career they were going to have so they could study the right subjects...

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?

megabl8• 7 years ago

Is it a bad thing to get kids thinking about this? I mean, this is what they have to do when they select what subjects they want to do. This has happened all over the world for at least 30 years.

flukus2• 7 years ago

I'd imagine the most common careers they want were firefighter, youtube streamer and race car drivers.

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.

avip4• 7 years ago

Expect different, not necessarily less.

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.

TheSpiceIsLife• 7 years ago

Where is the evidence that suggests outside is more hostile?

Aren't our cities, generally speaking, safer now than they were at most times in the past?

jMyles• 7 years ago

I don't disagree, but I also think that 11 year olds are incredibly capable beings and it's exciting to see tooling emerge that helps us stop thinking of everyone under the age of 18 as being incapable of living a full and rich life.

travbrack• 7 years ago

They needed paper planners 50 years ago. This is the same thing only digital.

whymauri• 7 years ago

Yup. Many of us had chores magnetically attached to the family fridge with a red and black dry-erase marker conveniently nearby. Sure, we didn't have 'sprints' or weekly meetings like the families in this article, but if I missed my chores my parents were absolutely going to take some time to talk to me and ask what was going on.

celim307• 7 years ago

My cousin is raising 2 kids in a major urban center. Discussions of what pre-K they needed to prepare for starts around the time they are able to independently walk. Social calanders are decided weeks in advance. Play dates are heavily documented on social media and 'bucket-lists' of rites of passage such as photo session at a historical landmark, baseball stadium, etc are turned into holiday cards. My cousin might be an outlier, she is an incredibly driven business woman who juggles a full time lucrative career with family life, but I can't imagine her lifestyle is worth the stress. As far as I can remember the kids have always been dressed in coordinated outfits, hats, vests, capes, etc.

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.

avip4• 7 years ago

I don't think that's a very subjective observation. It's really challenging to let urban kids be unsupervised (and, in some places - it's borderline illegal)

jacobolus• 7 years ago

This is more a “certain type of rich people” thing than an “urban center” thing, I think. Picture-perfect boring sheltered childhoods are common in the suburbs, and there are plenty of city kids who control their own time.

m_mueller3• 7 years ago

People, please, think about what you want your children to become. Do you want easily employed drones that just as easily can get outsourced or replaced by AI, or do you want independent and creative thinkers? Creativity needs space and time. Extend both increasingly, with age. It's sad to me that American life requires you to manage their time - elsewhere they can just independently go to school, first on foot then on bycicle. Stop living in these hellscapes that makes that impossible, I consider it essential.

j7ake• 7 years ago

I think parents want their children to be able to have a career that will allow their children to have the economic resources to navigate modern society (pay for university, home, provide for family).

Creativity and independence in thinking comes second.

_pmf_2• 7 years ago

do you want independent and creative thinkers

That's probably the worst you can do to a child. It's setting them up for unhappiness.

m_mueller3• 7 years ago

Just give em space and see what happens, don't create a damn curriculum from school out to sleep.

theshrike79• 7 years ago

Kids need boredom - the best ideas are born of being bored and needing to figure out what to do for yourself.

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.

purplezooey• 7 years ago

Trello pisses me off. Stacking some colored cards with notes. A four year old could come up with the idea. Yet acquired for $425M. The world is not fair.

TylerE2• 7 years ago

Why didn’t a four year d think of it first then?

Lot’s of things are obvious in retrospect.

We put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage.

majewsky2• 7 years ago

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.

INTPenis• 7 years ago

Me and my mom were ahead of our time. Back in 2000 I used to message her on ICQ and ask if dinner was ready. And she'd say yes so I could come out of my teenage computer cave. :)

rollthehard6• 7 years ago

Biggest stand out in this article is the stats about declining free time for play - as has been said quite a few times on HN, humans need to be bored and to play in order to be creative. Stagnation awaits otherwise I fear.

licebmi__at__• 7 years ago

Well, it just seems a brand friendly way to say "Hey, this families use technology to track activities like we use to do with pen and paper".

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.

maddy1512• 7 years ago

Just a fancy parenting gimmick!

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.

The Slackification of the American Home

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