
The Slackification of the American Home - laurex
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/families-slack-asana/593584/
======
kibibyte
This reminded me Atlassian's 2013 April Fools joke, JIRA Jr.
([https://www.atlassian.com/jirajr](https://www.atlassian.com/jirajr)). Funny
how life imitates art.

~~~
basch
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.

~~~
kibibyte
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.

------
asdfman123
> 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
Or just rebel and be a little monster like everyone else at that age.

------
tempsy
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
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!

~~~
garmaine
We shouldn’t need religion for this.

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
Meditation isn't religious. Zen-style mindfulness is proven to be beneficial
for stress, anxiety, and even some indicators of physical health. It just so
happens that most of the best meditation instructors are Buddhist (to some
degree).

~~~
gmas
Meditation like what you described is a Zen Buddhist custom.

~~~
zbentley
Intermittent fasting is also a custom with largely religious origins. It is
also considered beneficial by many non-religious people.

You can take the baby out of the bathwater.

------
seltzered_
In 2001, the article "The organization kid" was a popular framing of early
millenials - [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-
org...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-organization-
kid/302164/) . 18 years later...the organization household.

------
AlphaWeaver
>"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.

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

~~~
msolujic
[https://www.google.rs/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlass...](https://www.google.rs/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-
acquires-trello/amp/)

------
paxys
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.

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

~~~
paxys
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.

------
rusteh1
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.

~~~
celim307
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.

~~~
avip
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)

~~~
komali2
I mean, maybe? Walk around Brooklyn and you'll see tons of unsupervised kids.
Seem to be doing fine to me.

~~~
avip
YMMV. How old are said kids?

~~~
mruts
Maybe like 10? I don’t see that many kids younger than that walking alone in
NYC.

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

~~~
lukey_q
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

~~~
majewsky
"Will you marry me?" \- " _Merge request closed without comments._ "

------
awadheshv
>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..

~~~
quickthrower2
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.

~~~
Balgair
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'.

~~~
quickthrower2
Yes I agree, I was thinking more in line with people like me, who can’t hold
everything in their head, so these tools are sophisticated todo lists.

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!

------
sittingnut
"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.

~~~
kthejoker2
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.

------
Causality1
There's ample evidence this makes you more organized. I haven't seen any yet
that it makes you happier.

~~~
unsatchmo
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.

~~~
jonas21
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.

------
m_mueller
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.

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

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

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.

~~~
m_mueller
Yes, I understand that. I just want people to relax on this more.

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

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

~~~
austhrow743
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](https://www.youtube.com/user/GarethPronovost/videos)

~~~
mistermann
Brilliant, thanks so much for that link!

------
licebmi__at__
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.

------
rollthehard6
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.

------
radicalriddler
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
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

------
INTPenis
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. :)

------
Wowfunhappy
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.

------
darkpuma
This is certainly _not_ what Dobbs had in mind.

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

------
maddy1512
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.

------
purplezooey
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.

~~~
TylerE
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.

~~~
majewsky
> 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.

~~~
TylerE
It's even whackier that it took them another 17 years to figure out the
optimal design - the first two-wheeler with an extending handle didn't hit the
market until 1987.

