141–150 of 203 posts
Body doubling might help on not getting up from the chair while working on a computer. However, not having someone watching over my screen -which I’d rather not do for obvious reasons- allows me for infinite procrastination. For other kind of tasks like studying, writing on paper, or doing phone calls, I agree body doubling does the trick.
Of course we had schedules but there was very little "planning". Everyone was just there almost all of the time. Anything you wanted to do, someone like-minded was just there. We played cards in the winter, football or frisbee in the shoulder season, ate, hung out, socialized with guests, and of course, studied together. It just worked.
I can still think of a hundred things I regularly did in those days that I haven't done since.
Now I'm an empty nester, tired of pandemic living and tired of working so hard to recreate what came so naturally back then.
Nice to see someone trying to use the technology that displaced so many of us to bring us back together. Best wishes. I think you'll need it.
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Seems like a pretty coarse level of analysis asking if “in-person” is better. What’s more productive for a manager will be different, maybe the exact opposite of what’s productive for a programmer. Some people get paid to talk, but many of us do not. The talking is paid for by our sacrifice of personal time, time spent with kids, or exercising or whatever. Managers, being decision makers, will push us back to offices…
I agree with you that productivity for managers versus programmers is different, but my view is that the majority of workers do more work in person and people actually really enjoy being productive! The “body doubling” that goes on in offices is IMHO an underestimated phenomenon, especially for new employees coming into the workforce. For remote work to be a permanent choice, I think we need to be a bit more honest a…
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Whenever I visit for my parents for holidays, they have the TV playing something. However, I've always found the ads incredibly distracting, like they're intentionally designed to get my attention.
Netflix with a show you've seen multiple times?
I think this is the reason why in-person work environments will be more productive over the longer term for any larger organization. Not saying I’m against remote work, as I actually prefer it myself.
At home, I am within a few seconds from my wife (since she is working from home too), which allows for a significantly more rich social environment for myself and her, than having to be in the extended physical proximity of those in distant social tiers (e.g., loose ties, or "work friends").
I value the time I have been able to spend at home so much more than any social connections I may have made at the office; in fact, I focus on getting my stuff done even more quickly precisely so I can return to the quality time that I have to focus on those who truly matter to me.
I am no longer at the age where I care to go for a drink afterwards with work friends. For those of us who have richer social home lives than work lives, remote work is a godsend.
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profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is This is the main problem in my marriage, we don't consume the same media - we've tried to find something in common to watch, but mostly spend it on our phones watching our own media streams, edu-tainment YouTubers for me and Netflix/Disney/Facebook watch for her. You can't make cultural references or have inside jokes if you don't consume the same media.
Put the phones away and find activities which you both enjoy?
Our media consumption habits probably aren't the core problem, being able to easily ignore the other person; because the barrier to entry to time wasters is so low, certainly doesn't help.
Glad I know about the term “body doubling” now though and that there are services available, this is great!
There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was. After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc. I can't but think that so many of the ma…
I'm born late 1980s and I've never seen so many people out in the streets just chatting outside of parties and village fairs.
There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was. After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc. I can't but think that so many of the ma…
There were idiots in the 50's crowing about how some day we wouldn't have to eat at all. I really wonder about the diet and favorite dishes are like for someone who thinks never eating is progress. And that's without even getting into the communal aspects of eating with a group.
If you could replace a typical home-cooked meal which cost $3->5 in materials and at _least_ half an hour in personal labor with a pill that costs $0.03->0.05 and can be produced in the thousands per hour, that's a significant win. And if you can build those pills from the byproducts of vats of cheap-ass microbes (rather than through ordinary (or -worse- factory) farming), then that's a massive win for both the environment and animal welfare.