
Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush - SQL2219
http://timharford.com/2018/02/microsoftofficevscandycrush/
======
leoedin
The big barrier to outsourcing anything has always been information transfer.
It's all very well handing a presentation over to a designer, but if they
don't know what it should contain then they can't design it. In the end the
spec document for the presentation ends up looking almost like the
presentation itself.

Likewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand
writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that
the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to,
but it comes out of that process already typed.

Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge.
They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you
don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the
tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the
important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation.

Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the
person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they
couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner
that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to
seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who
would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway.
(Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than
doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).

~~~
mwcampbell
Case in point on the subject of information transfer: I prefer to book my own
flight, directly with the airline, so I can make sure the "Blind or low
vision" checkbox gets checked. Then, _maybe_ , they won't tell me to get in a
wheelchair, assuming the correct information gets transferred all the way to
the person helping me through the airport.

------
crazygringo
> _Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to
> produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own
> expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping
> in the supermarket. ...it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the
> administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses
> can look, superficially, like a cost saving._

Not just superficially -- it _is_ a cost savings, and a net benefit to
society. It's the realization that slides _can_ be ugly and still get the
point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged
to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip.

This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by
millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to
work where they're most needed, such as in health care.

I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity
growth has been _negative_ since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows
it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly
positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why
productivity _growth_ might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly
presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost
laughable.

[1] [https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-
in...](https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in-2016-and-
economists-arent-sure-why/)

~~~
mmcconnell1618
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but have nothing to do with Office.

PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of
your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending
too much time trying to make slides look better:

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-
De...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-
Designer-53c77d7b-dc40-45c2-b684-81415eac0617)

~~~
mistermann
Even though you don't work on Office, I wonder if you might have some insight
into why Microsoft seems to be largely ignoring two of their biggest strategic
advantages: the desktop and Microsoft Office.

I've done years of VBA programming in Excel, struggling to make that horribly
weak language do things it was never designed to do. I've just started working
with Python, but more specifically pandas. How I got this far in life and
never picked it up is beyond me, but now that I finally have, it almost makes
me want to cry how powerful and filled with plain old common sense it is. So
far, things are pretty much exactly how one would expect them to be in a non-
insane world - if you need to do something, it is almost surely there, and
likely very close to the form you'd expect it in. Just wonderful software.

With the battle now moving to the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest
competitor Microsoft has seen in ages, why is Microsoft mostly just competing
in the cloud, rather than competing there _and_ bringing the desktop toolset
into the 21st century with seamless integration with the cloud? Why can't I do
something equivalent to Jupyter notebooks in Excel, including using Python as
the language?

It just seems extremely short sighted to me, but I never hear it discussed
anywhere. Does the topic ever come up at Microsoft?

~~~
chrispsn
It's understandable why Microsoft would be slow-moving to incorporate new
languages into Excel; what is popular now could change (eg if you add Python,
do you also do R?), and restricting the number of languages available means
people in an office can more easily work with each other.

But there has been progress!

\- Excel already has a native JavaScript API. [1]

\- They are seeking feedback on implementing Python as an Excel scripting
language. [2]

\- It's a little esoteric / proprietary, but the language backing Excel's "Get
& Transform" feature, M, is a noticeable jump in power. [3]

Nevertheless, it's still surprising there hasn't been more innovation in the
spreadsheet space given Excel's shortcomings. So I'm working on Mesh, a
spreadsheet that feels more like a 'real' programming language (because it's
just JavaScript). [4]

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script-
lab/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script-lab/)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132)

[3] See, eg, [https://powerpivotpro.com/2016/02/reviewlist-generate-
create...](https://powerpivotpro.com/2016/02/reviewlist-generate-create-
tables-thin-air-power-bi-m/)

[4] [https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh](https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh)

~~~
mistermann
I wasn't aware of that much progress on your first link.....I'm curious to
know if at the same time they've put any effort into improving the half-assed
Excel COM API.

Totally agree on the Power Query thing, if they'd support pandas + power query
+ embeddable Power BI objects in Excel + seamless integration with cloud
functionality (there's still no way to use Power Query in SSIS for goodness
sake).

Using pandas in an Azure function and then consuming that from Excel and
displaying in Power BI visualizations, all within a nie little wrapper you can
email around or whatever would just be a killer app. This is one of the few
advantages Microsoft has over the Amazons and Googles, I wish they'd take
advantage of it.

The syntax in your example is lovely and this is something I've wanted in
Excel for a very long time.

EDIT:

There is some interesting 3rd party innovation happening:
[https://www.xlwings.org/](https://www.xlwings.org/)

------
pacaro
In 1989 I worked at a pharmaceutical firm that still had a secretarial pool.
As a lab technician if I was writing a document (typically a Standard Opening
Procedure or SOP) I was expected to write it by hand and leave a copy in my
outbox (literally one of two trays on my desk) with the correct request form.
The next day I’d receive a draft, and then I’d painstakingly provide
corrections (typically every technical term and chemical name was wrong) and
repeat as needed, after about a week we’d be good and it could be signed off
and filed. While this felt inefficient, and probably was, part of that process
also included review from my boss, so done was reviewed and done.

When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations
in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings
were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did
request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only
purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.

~~~
styfle
That sounds glorious.

I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose
of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No
one?"

~~~
rayiner
Having good secretarial staff is under appreciated. Yeah, I can do my own time
(I bill by the hour), book my flights, find open meeting times, etc. But if an
administrative assistant can support 3 professionals saving them just 5 hours
a month, they can pay for themselves.

~~~
Balgair
I really don't get it. Every single place I've been at that had a secretary
was running like cream cheese. But no-one has them anymore. The only things I
can figure is that the healthcare, retirement, and sexual harassment issues
really do add up to remove the utility of a secretary.

~~~
majos
What does the phrase "running like cream cheese" mean? It sounds slow, but
from context here it sounds...fast? Efficient?

~~~
zero_iq
Running smoothly. Smooth as the cream cheese on your bagel.

~~~
Balgair
I guess that's not a phrase everyone is familiar with. It is well illustrated
via Coach Finstock in _Teen Wolf_ here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0m5wJRGHEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0m5wJRGHEQ)

------
makecheck
What drives me the most crazy is that after _decades_ these tools can’t get
the basics right, like text editing. That has to be the single biggest waste
of time.

I _always_ prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely
satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or
another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain
bullet points and it’s _still_ a mystery what will happen the next time I type
a key: will there even _be_ a bullet in front of the next line of text, will
it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.?

Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text
outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that
almost seem malicious.

I end up having to find and disable _so many settings_ just to restore a
reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).

~~~
DuncanKeith
Try using beamer
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_\(LaTeX\)))
as an alternative to PowerPoint.

~~~
maksimum
Having made multiple presentations in beamer, it's definitely not better at
everything than WYSWYG presentation editors; some things like non-standard
slide layouts are more laborious than they need to be.

I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG
editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and
invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then
the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the
text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is
more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset
equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout
in the visual environment.

~~~
tomsmeding
Having a visual frontend for a textual format sounds nice but is always
dangerous, in my experience. Before you know, you have some subtle features in
the textual format that the GUI can't represent, and as a result, any
modifications in the GUI will break your usage of the feature.

~~~
maksimum
Very interesting point. Any chance you can recall a specific example? I'm not
doubting you; simply curious since the above seems like a good idea to me and
I want to understand the pitfalls.

------
frou_dh
You don't need the mentioned smartphone to be exposed to Candy Crush. Last
time I clean-installed Windows 10, there it was in the Start Menu by default.
And, even after using the Settings app to uninstall it, it would go on to
reappear multiple times.

The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an
intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into
mainstream garbage.

~~~
titanix2
Yeah Windows 10 Start Menu is awful in part because of that. It’s like after
the Windows 8 debacle Microsoft is telling us: "oh you like this Menu that
much? Ok, here is your menu..." and give us one so bad no one dare to use it
anymore as a revenge. And it works. I almost never use it because it cannot
find what I want. And that’s when is shows anything at all, because on my VM
it’s broken 1/4 of the time (no problem with 7 & 8.1 in the same
configuration).

~~~
contextfree
the start menu on Windows 8/10 (and Windows Phone) was originally designed
under the expectation that most users would create their own personalized tile
layouts as a means of self-expression. Start menu team always wanted and
lobbied for some or all of the tile area to be initially blank with a "drag
apps here to personalize your tile grid" message, so that users would
understand how they're "supposed" to use it, but they kept getting overruled
by other teams wanting to use it as a way to promote their stuff. :(

~~~
titanix2
I found tiles a great ideas on Phone (I owned some WP and developed apps for
it) but always hated it on desktop. The ever moving parts were making
difficult to find information by catching the user attention. Also the 2D
layout also posed a problem to scan entries, especially as most were cut after
a few characters. That was a pain to found the good Visual Studio command
prompt for example.

And now some of the Win8 area remains such as wierd black squared background
behind software icon.

------
rubidium
The biggest point is more administrative staff would help productivity. I'm
flummoxed by the lack of admins at the large, successful company I work for.

Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing
manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the
president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving
fiasco for _one_ package.

When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they
get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.

~~~
maxxxxx
Totally agree. I have spent months last year parsing corporate documentation
rules. if we had more tech writers whose job is to make sure the docs are in
the right form we could free up years of engineering time. Same for booking
travel. We have to do it ourselves but still follow a ton of rules you always
forget if you do it only once or twice a year. If we had one person that could
book travel and get visas a lot of time could be saved.

------
ryz
Seems like he lacks the self-control, willpower and confidence to set
boundaries for himself and others. These are definitely skills which are
needed in a modern office environment and they especially apply to "senior
staff".

I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the
critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits
and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in
your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do
it and voilà, one distraction less.

This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous
information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external
factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in
the modern world.

~~~
coliveira
I understand your point, but the goal of technology should be to help us be
more productive, not to try to separate the ones that have strong willpower
from the rest. The clear trend here is that technology companies want people
to become slaves to whatever process they setup, instead of working to improve
our lives.

~~~
watwut
I agree with you in abstract, but examples in this article are quite odd.
Leaving aside typing, which is faster if you do it by yourself once you
learned it, they just don't take that much time. Neither travel booking nor
filling expenses nor work related supermarket shopping. Even normal power
point presentations are done very fast with company template. Preparing speech
and content when presentation mattered a lot seemed to take way more time then
layout.

Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and
I doubt they play it all that much in work.

And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are
not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have
zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they
are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.

~~~
coliveira
It depends on how much you do. If you need to book travel once a year, then it
is clearly easy to do it yourself. I used to work in a place that had a
secretary available for these tasks. I would just give her a pile of receipts
and get a check a few days later. The secretary would make reservations and
schedule important meetings. This can save a huge amount of time over the
years. Nowadays all these little tasks combined consume a lot of time we
should spend doing real work.

------
codeulike
He presents a silly argument ("computers encourage generalists but Adam Smith
said specialisation was the way forwards") and I'm pretty sure he's aware its
silly, its more of a hook to build the rest of the musings around.

------
thesumofall
In consulting it’s typical that consultants draw the layout of their sides on
paper and send it to a center specialized on PowerPoint to produce it. Or they
dummy it in PowerPoint and the specialists take it from there. For Word, at
least my firm blocks most of the layouting stuff so that you can only use the
official styles. Works for me

~~~
hectormalot
We probably work for the same firm.

I think it works well for basic formatting, but information transfer already
becomes time intensive when you’re looking to create something high-end (eg
where Message and conceptual design are closely linked)

That said, yes, I see many clients spend significant chunks of their time on
creating the ppt compared to how long they need to write down their ideas on
paper. (And off topic: the other major corporate timesink i see is time spent
in meetings, often because it’s unclear who has the mandate to make decisions,
and as a result everyone gets invited)

------
majormajor
The author confuses short term efficiency with true desirability, I think -
economically, too, not just in the "extreme efficiency is hell for us as
people," sense.

What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one
thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here:
highly optimized processes are hard to refactor.

The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the
ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be
agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the
opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.

------
spicymaki
Companies want generalists so they can easily replace employees. Employees
with specialized skills can command higher wages and can be difficult to
source and replace. You need to understand the business, be an admin, handle
shipping, book your own travel (at the lowest price), manage your work hours,
train yourself, and do your day job. Would be great skills as an independent
consultant, but this is happening as a full time employee at a fortune 500
company.

------
xtrapolate

      In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.
    

I'm struggling to follow. Putting your thoughts down on a piece of paper is
something we all need to be able to do. Do people waste time doing it? Sure,
some people will waste some time. A myriad of reasons to it. Boredom,
clumsiness, a strong need to let out your creative sides, just to name a few.

Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that
distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming
large portions of your time.

    
    
      In a modern office there are no specialist typists
    

Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other
esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully
introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more.

~~~
fsloth
"Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst
other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully
introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not
more."

Who said anything about bureaucracy? It all could be lean and agile - but with
tasks such that people could concentrate on the value adding tasks. It _seems_
more efficient to hire less people to do n amount of tasks but what happens
when the productivity of those people plunge?

As an extreme example, we in finland use the public health services a lot.
Every time I go there, the doctor fiddles about on his computer doing this
adminsterial task and that. It would be much more efficient if the doctor had
some secretary who could manage the bureaucratic fiddly bits and let the
doctor focus on medicine.

~~~
xtrapolate
The doctor example is great, but where do we draw the line exactly? Offloading
some aspects of your work by utilising other people and their expertise is
surely the way to go, but there's a balance to be kept. Sticking to your
example, good secretaries (much like good engineers) are expensive, and are
hard to come by - isn't that enough to explain why public health services
skimp on those?

You could argue that in an ideal world/society, everyone would just do those
few specific things they're really good at/love, and nothing else.

~~~
fsloth
Calling out for _highly trained_ secretaries to do the doctors typing is
really a strawman.

As a patient I don't really care of the quality of the bureaucratic output if
the case is one-shot - which most are. So in that instance they could have a
drunk monkey punching the computer. What I do care about, is that the doctor
could see more of these one-shot patients and just _forget_ the damn computer.

The value the records add, is providing a long term storage for my current
diagnostic case. Once the issue passes, the value of those records plunges to
zero.

Calling whatever it is, 80/20 principle, tipping point management - not
_everything_ needs to have 0.999999 level of certainty. In the one-shot
bureaucratic typist thingie 0.9 would suffice. Once the medical issue becomes
more prolonged and difficult, added care in the papers section will start to
add value (as patient information is logged and tracked, and so on).

On the other hand, since this is a _medical_ setting and we insist training on
the secretary, the secretary could add immense value, by just going through
the checklists the doctor really does not remember to do. The constantly
recurring problem when getting medication is the doctors checking for
incompatibilities with the patients physical condition and other medication.
From my experience, if there is any underlying condition they screw it up half
the time. As an example is a relative of mine with nut allergy and some
ongoing medication - the stuff this persons gets described half the time has
bad outcomes when combined with either of them. So in this instance the only
valuable outcome would have been applicable medicine, and since that was
screwed up, the value of output is zero, and the amount of resources used
is... non-trivial at least.

Hospitals have solved this by having nurses following in the doctors footsteps
with procedure specific checklists - and this _saves lives_.
[http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/](http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/)

~~~
watwut
The secretary you just described is going to ask way more money and has a lot
more employment options. Why would she/he take a job with zero autonomy,
little social status, non-flexible hours and not expect money in exchange?

And once you pay her those money, is it overall saving money?

~~~
fsloth
Note, I gave two versions of the secretary :) - the non-professional and the
professional one.

The professional secretary I described is a nurse. Also, the non-professional
would effectively be a nurse. They just have different duties where the latter
would also check-list through the doctors remedies. Note that this potion is
not that of non-autonomous robot. They have the right and duty to double check
on the doctors performance.

First, costs. Where I'm from nurses are fairly well trained professionals, but
have a really low salary. They seem to keep at it. I could imagine a worse gig
than GP:s assistant.

In single payer healthcare one should look at the total cost/benefit for the
entire economy, not just how to minimize the cost for the single health
center.

The cost of bad diagnosis or faulty recipe can be that the time of the doctor
visit was completely wasted. Hence, the time used for the visit by the patient
was completely wasted. If they need the medicine they need to reschedule -
thus the cost doubles not only for the doctor, but also to the patient. And
the direct cost is not the only cost. As we are effectively doubling our
resource use, now we are clogging the system, and delaying other patients.

And. I don't get it why this needs to cost more. They have plenty of nurses at
the health centers, for one accident or the other. They could just change the
routines that the secretary-duty nurse gets a call if she's needed at some
other place.

Of course, this is me looking at the situation through the lense of the single
payer social healthcare scheme. The logic of the situation is probably
different elsewhere.

~~~
watwut
Nurses in low paid systems are aging and complain. It happens that young women
don't want that job all that much. That job does not happen to have perk that
would offer low salary - hours are inflexible. But also, those who won't be
nurses because of caring or some similar general idea, are even more likely to
leave if you turn the job into secretary.

------
fsloth
Top down management. People who have no understanding of the process dictating
how many people are supposed to do it. And adding useless tasks that
secretaries could handle to the professionals task list, because "computers
can now do it". Which, what anyone who has worked with computers, can tell
that is horseshit. A menial task is a menial task and will cause interruption
of flow no matter what. And, since the expert is not so good at the typist
thing, it will actually take _a lot more time for him_ to do the typing.

So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and
the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At
high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to
do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost
to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could
implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in
public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I
imagine).

------
agumonkey
The spreading of capabilities often fails because of this, you don't have the
experience. And since you're not in it deep, you don't build real skills.
Spreading one self thin.

The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And
technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI +
Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as
much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs.

It's rarely the tool that matters.

I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and
valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access
to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a
short term basis.

------
dmix
The chart he linked to shows a very weak correlation between
smartphones/productivity, even as a single data point...

[https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.pn...](https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.png)

There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the
dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have
had a large impact.

There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see
what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial
crisis era dip.

~~~
cma
> There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s

Women began entering the labor force en masse. Way more employees available =
less productivity unless you can invent a bunch of new needs immediately.

------
erikpukinskis
Office is a productivity drain because they successfully pivoted away from the
"productivity" market to the "job protection" market.

The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company.

The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees _on behalf of the
employee_ (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to
protect their job title, against the interests of the company.

These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become
commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or
so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.

------
pbhjpbhj
FWIW Tim Harford's "More of Less" programme is one of my favourite radio
programmes - it's based on statistics relevant to popular media and news
stories.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Doh, should be "More or Less".

------
essayist
So on the one end, you have the manager who wrestles with Powerpoint, Project,
Word, Kayak.com etc.and spends only 20% of her time working as a systems
designer, her real area of expertise. On the other, you have the manager who
dictates his email to be typed up by a secretary, and who reads only printouts
of incoming email.

Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others
where that makes sense?

~~~
e_b
Only reading print outs and dictating emails sounds like a sweet mechanism for
managing your time.

------
weinzierl
> Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce
> ugly slides that nobody wants to look at.

So true. Nowadays, whenever I can, I slap something together using impress.js
and call it day. I‘m faster and the result is much nicer.

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vignesh_m
Contrary to what the title may imply, he doesnt shit on Office and say its a
bad product.

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zxcb1
Should one understand this as a productivity tool that contributes more as a
distraction than something actually designed to distract? Or maybe, that the
productivity tool no longer is employed as a productivity tool?

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tvanantwerp
I've definitely seen and done what is described here. I always justified it to
myself as doing the things that keep me sane long enough to do the things I
actually have to do.

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greggarious
I would have thought removing clippy would raise those numbers ;)

(Who among us didn't spend an embarrassing amount of time interacting with
that little rascal?)

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jccalhoun
Honestly, I think Clippy might be due for a comeback. Of course I don't think
actual Clippy will come back but I think that some actual intelligent AI could
help with office tasks if it worked (which is a big if). In the same way that
Word knows I want an outline if I type "I." I think it might be useful if Word
could know I want to type a letter if I start with an address or something.

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tempodox
> I think Clippy might be due for a comeback.

I suspect so. Just a few days ago I found an ASCII version of that troll in a
frigging code editor
([http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif](http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif))

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matthiasware
when i see what people try to swat with excel, i pretty much agree.

