Ask HN: Why are larger e-readers much more expensive than tablets? - <AUTHOR> Looking at larger e-readers (8-10inch) I am surprised how few options there are and the prices $300+. Yes the regular 6" Kindle is cheap but larger sizes are not.
I would rather read text books on an e-reader not a tablet.
The specs of most e-readers are low. Is the screen that costly? Is this the reason for them being that expensive? Or is it lack of demand? <comment><USER2> I'm guessing, but I have to imagine production volume has something to do with it. Little e-reader screens for cheap devices like the 6" kindle are where the volume is.

In any case, I'm kind of bummed that the e-ink/ereader market has sort of settled on the current state of affairs.

What I'd really like to see is good e-ink laptops. First, because of battery life. I also think they could be great "focus machines." A laptop you can use to write, code, read emails and maybe articles but without the full blown "multimedia PC experience" we were sold back in the early 90s.

A little "kindle PC" designed for writers as the canonical user could be a great contribution, and right up amazon's alley. Way more interesting than the kindle-fire stuff. I guess content for kindle fire looks like a juicier market, but… no one is making e-ink laptops! We have plenty of app stores, music services and online video stores.

On the reader front, I was really hoping amazon would do more to change the business of publishing. When magazines or paperbacks became mass market, publishing changed. The type of stuff that got published changed. e-readers, a lot less.

Amazon seemed to be focused on making big publishers happy, and _they_ were focused on keeping the industry's structure intact. I wanted more of a shake- up.

Publishing could be more democratic. The writer-reader relationship could be more disintermediated. We could have more short stories by authors in their prime, maybe as trailers for novels. We could have more short/concise nonfiction, without the need to fill out a "whole book." Some parts of journalism could have been changed. I know of no better platform for "micro payments" to writers than kindle's…. It feels like they left the job half done.

So, I'm with you on big readers. I'll raise you one laptop and a small-to- medium publishing revolution.

<comment><USER3> I don't think they'd sell well at all in laptops. I don't think the tech is far enough. The ~1 FPS performance and occasionally needing to flash the entire screen to clear artifacts are really poor selling points for productive work.

Things like for example scrolling a document or moving a mouse pointer would be quite painful and streaky.

<comment><USER2> You're probably right, but are these insurmountable hurdles, or just problems that exist because no one has solved them yet? Someone has to start making them, and they need to improve over a couple of generations. At first, the software would need to navigate around any issues they can't solve. Surely there're alternatives to scrolling and mouse pointers, at least as primary UI elements. I mean, is a good email client or word processor really impossible in e-ink?

<comment><USER4> These characteristics are also annoying, but not "product-killingly annoying", for e-readers. So if they're going to be fixed, I'd expect them to be fixed in the e-reader space first, and then applied to laptops. Putting out an e-ink laptop before the tech is ready would just be throwing money in a hole.

I just wouldn't expect what's going to be essentially a mid-'80s word processor (Xerox Memorywriter, not WordPerfect) style user experience, complete with the screen with the really low refresh rate, is something that would sell.

<comment><USER2> Why would the software be bad? The display is the only thing thats different in terms of hardware.

Besides that, circa 2000 hardware specs are embedded in £40 devices these days, even ereaders. Word processing has been fine for a long time. No need for bleeding edge performance, or even somewhat sharp.

<comment><USER4> So the only analogue I know of for a device that was designed for that kind of task, and used a display with those kinds of limitations, was word processing appliances like the Xerox Memorywriter.

And I also know that nobody actually _liked_ working on those things; they just put up with them because because, at the time, an actual computer set up to do the same task could easily cost something upward of US$5,000 in today's dollars.

<comment><USER2> Idk how fair that comparison is... The specs will be way better than anything consumer grade in the 80s. These would also be general purpose PCs, in the same sense that a phone is. They'd just be built with certain use cases in mind, like phones.

I think your first point on ereaders being a sufficient platform for iteration and working out kinks is accurate though. Scrolling and mousing we can work around. Typing, no. If the refresh is not fast enough for a nice typing experience... there is no workaround for that.

I still hope someone will make this. I really want one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe mass manufacturing drives down the prices. Book owners like to read something that is handheld ~6inches. Book readers won't buy large eink devices.

I don't think the eink screens are that costly. It may have something to do with the demand.

This is ridiculously expensive [https://remarkable.com](https://remarkable.com) And the Sony Digital Paper is expensive too.

I would love to see more phone cases with eink screens.

<comment><USER6> The remarkable tablet would be amazing if there was a print driver to send the document directly to your device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's mostly the screen. Manufacturing costs scale non-linearly with area due to defect rate.

I think they are really worth it, though. Now some 13 inch models even accept video input, so you can potentially use it as a terminal / PDF screen.

<comment><USER8> I wish they would make defective units available at a lower price. I don't mind some stuck pixels if it means I can get the reader half off.

<comment><USER9> I think you're being too optimistic about the discount to defect ratio.

<comment><USER10> What happens to a defective unit? Is it disassembled with the base components put back in the assembly line? Or is it just sent to the landfill? I suppose OP was assuming defective units are just trashed.

<comment><USER11> That's not the way the economics works. If they sell you a half price unit with a defect, they have potentially lost a sale at full price. So they don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is anyone else looking for an inexpensive, 13-inch, read-only e-ink tablet for reading pdfs? If this exists can someone point me in the right direction? I feel like I can't be the only one who's been looking for this.

<comment><USER13> Inexpensive? No. But you're basically describing Sony's DPT-RP1:

[https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper- notepads/dpt-...](https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-notepads/dpt- rp1)

[https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/4/10/15242238/s...](https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/4/10/15242238/sony- dpt-rp1-giant-digital-paper-tablet-notebook)

It's $700. Also, it can take input from a stylus to annotate the documents on it. But otherwise it's what you want. I, too, wish there were cheaper options for this purpose - even if it was a thick, heavy monitor with a stand and built-in 120V power supply rather than a tablet (though I suppose the power characteristics of e-ink displays mean that the economics will typically prefer the tablet form-factor). Reading is just a lot more pleasant on an e-ink display.

<comment><USER14> Apparently the EULA oversteps. Gives sony the right to grab data from your pc when connected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't really see the room for demand beyond 8 inches ever growing, largely because most bigger books are just far more complicated to transform to a digital format (e.g. textbooks with multiple sections on each page and tactically positioned images)

...but, Kobo in the last two years seem to have done pretty well with h2o and aura one models. I'd be very interested in seeing how the h2o in particular performs compared to their smaller models; 6.8 inches seems like a pretty ideal compromise between size and portability for me that 6 inches does not.

<comment><USER16> The reason for bigger screens is not e-book formats, but PDF. I've got tons of A4/letter-sized PDFs that I would love to read on A4-sized e-paper. But e-readers that size are unbelievably expensive.

Colour would be nice too, but I guess that's impossible.

<comment><USER17> >>Colour would be nice too, but I guess that's impossible.

Well, not possible yet[0]. In a few years the technology might be refined enough though. I also heard that the refresh rate is in the range of minutes for now, but let's hope that'll change soon :)

[0][http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160524006209/en/Ink-...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160524006209/en/Ink- Announces-Advanced-Color-ePaper-Breakthrough-Technology)

Edit: added quote I was responding to

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Limited market. Can't sell them to folks who want to read novels. Can't sell them to folks who want the full features of a tablet. Can't sell them to folks who want colour, such as comic readers.

They are really only useful for reference books, and mostly of interest in academia.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's only a single manufacturer of e-ink panels and they haven't managed to get the prices down. High prices lead to low demand. The competitors in this market seem to have given up.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure if there's something specific about e-paper technology that makes it expensive despite being seemingly primitive compared to a typical tablet. But it's worth pointing out that none of the most expensive e-readers are more expensive than the cheapest iPads ($400 for the iPad Mini with 128-GB and a 7.9 inch screen), which most definitely have sophisticated screens (Retina, multitouch).

I'm a longtime iPad user but I have one of the cheaper Amazon Fire tablets (whatever was the 7-inch model that sold for $30 for last year's Black Friday). I mean, it's a tablet, but it's not very fun to use compared to my iPad/iPhone because of how clunky the multitouch is (among other things). And the screen isn't high res -- under 200 ppi IIRC. Even the new Kindle Fire HD 10-inch model maxes out at just 224 ppi.

The ebook reader I currently own is the Kindle Voyage, which apparently has 300 ppi on a 6 inch screen at a cost of $199. The Kindle that I would _recommend_ is the Paperwhite, which is just $90, while also having the same screen quality as the Voyage.

(I owned the Paperwhite before getting the Voyage. I don't have any complaints about the Voyage but I honestly could not tell you why it's any better than I remember the Paperwhite being).

So if PPI is a large factor in cost of screen, it turns out that the Kindle e-readers aren't that much out of whack compared to the Amazon Fire HD tablets. Yes, it's just black and white, but for most books, that's all you need. And it is very legible black-and-white. I have an iPad Pro but I do almost all of my e-reading on the Kindle.

If you're a student, one thing I might worry about is whether the Kindles and their small screen can handle all of the textbooks that you might use. For books where layout is important, the small Kindle can be kind of a pain. And some books (purchased on Amazon) will refuse to open on the Kindle, so I have to view them on my iPad. I imagine the 10-inch version of the Kindle Fire would handle full=size books, but that is me just guessing.

\---

You probably have seen these links, but just in case:

[https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/amazon-kindle-is-the- best-...](https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/amazon-kindle-is-the-best-ebook- reader/)

[https://goodereader.com/blog/category/reviews](https://goodereader.com/blog/category/reviews)

<comment><USER21> Small ereaders are much more affordable than the larger size the parent is looking for. A few examples at this size class are remarkable[1], sony dpt- rp1[2] and good ereader[3] and all cost at least 700 USD

[1] [https://remarkable.com/store/reMarkable-and- marker](https://remarkable.com/store/reMarkable-and-marker)

[2] [https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper- notepads/dpt-...](https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-notepads/dpt- rp1/buy?retailers=QW1hem9u,QiZIIFBob3RvIFZpZGVv)

[3] [https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e- reader-13-3-e-re...](https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e- reader-13-3-e-reader)

<comment><USER20> Worth pointing out that all of those products feature writing functionality. And the non-Sony ones come from small startups that likely don't benefit from economies of scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember KindleDX since you can get A4 (or US Letter) w/o zooming in/out.

But... DX is phased out and has no replacement. Also most eReaders are slow - due display. There is no needs for something super-fast but there is needs to be energy efficient. And mine Kindle Touch (ver. 5 i think) battery lasts few weeks (between 2-3).

<comment><USER3> Bought a DX for reading PDFs, I would have loved my DX too, but they hadn't and said they likely wouldn't update the software to support the kindle document cloud, so I had to manually email all my PDFs to it, or move them via USB.

Ended up returning it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Speaking of larger e-readers, does anyone have experience with the Remarkable product?

At some point, I'm going to have to replace my 1st gen Nook and would love to have a device that I can write on as well. So, the Remarkable product looks great despite the price tag. But, I'd want at least a 10-year life.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure economies of scale factor in - not just for components but for other costs as well, e.g. will engineering and tooling be split across 10k, 100k, 1m or more units?

</comment><comment><USER25> Mostly lack of demand. But I would really want to get a big 10 inch ebook with smooth interface.

<comment><USER26> There's reMarkable (10.1"), which does a bit more than a traditional ebook reader and you can get it now, but it's bloody expensive (630 euros): [https://remarkable.com/](https://remarkable.com/)

<comment><USER27> You sort of have to love their advertising: "How is reMarkable different?

No tablet has less functionality than the reMarkable. "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Also why are all the android ereaders running Android 4?</comment>


Sorry, we can't join your Slack - <AUTHOR> https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2019-09-03-sorry-we-cant-join-your-slack <comment><USER2> I never truly understand issues people have with these things. I tune my notifications as to avoid true interruptions and filter most false positives by quick looking.

I see people at my office (and different companies!) saying they quit Slack/Whatever because they were getting bombarded by notifications... They had the option to notify on all messages. ¬¬

Even then, come on, I cannot believe experience hasn't taught most of you how to handle quick interruptions. I usually just quick look at the notification to see if it's really urgent. Otherwise it may be 7-10 minutes until I actually check the application, in case I'm doing some heavy thinking/coding session.

There are true interruptions like constant notifications, people physically talking to you about other things, and stuff, that while you cannot really tune them all out, you should be able to handle better with 2-3 years of experience. I read a lot of people on these forums with many more years not being able to cope with that.

I will die still unable to believe it was the norm, and not the exception :(

<comment><USER3> My problem (with Skype, so ok that's two problems) is people just put "hi" or "hello" and then the choice is to either ignore them and hope they'll get around to actually asking the question, or give in and say "hi" (passive aggressive or "hi, what's up" (I don't care what's up - you started it). I can't think of a polite way to say "please don't just type "hi"" without making it sound like I think I'm special, but at the same time ignoring them outright seems rude. They know I'm here because of the presence indicator.

<comment><USER4> How is responding with "hi" passive aggressive? Why would someone type a potentially large question to a the abyss?

<comment><USER5> It's not the abyss, it's just asynchronous. If you make me say hi back then you have trapped me rather than giving me the option to look at your question, determine the importance, and respond at a time that is appropriate for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are modes of work where Slack or another instant messaging option make me far more productive than anything else, and there are modes where it makes me far less productive.

When collaborating on a time sensitive issue with remote colleagues it's fantastic. When trying to get my head down and complete a tricky bit of work it's awful.

I think the most important thing is not using Slack or avoiding Slack, it's building a culture that allows people to opt-out of it, without any sort of penalty, perceived or otherwise. If people want to hang out in Slack they can, if they want to shut it off for the day and just drop in to give a standup update or something like that, that's fine too. Important things are done asynchronously in a forum that everyone can experience.

<comment><USER7> > Important things are done asynchronously in a forum that everyone can > experience.

This is how email or ticketing systems to an extent work. Though we have a rule that certain ticket discussions should go into a ticket itself so decision changes are not lost and people have accountability (which is better cause I get asked sometimes why I wrote code a certain way by the very person who suggested the change).

<comment><USER8> > we have a rule that certain ticket discussions should go into a ticket > itself

The last three companies I've worked at had the same rule, except with no exceptions. _All_ discussions get recorded into the system, precisely for the reason that you state -- so there's a historical record of what was discussed, what was decided, and why.

Any "external" communications, such as with email or IM, are expected to be copy/pasted into the system so its permanently recorded in a useful way.

<comment><USER9> That's a lot of extra stuff to read through. Do you summarise the discussion too?

<comment><USER8> Most places that I've been at that have worked this way have had periodic "checkpoints" in the tracker (usually when the code involved is sent to QA), where the current state is summarized at a 10,000 ft level.

In practice, these records are only read from beginning to end when someone new to the issue at hand needs to come up to speed. Otherwise, the value is in being able to search through the record to find specific things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even a customer "should" know that Slack is no small matter.

I worked in a support role for a big company. We had one notorious customer who was prone to just racking equipment, not setting it up, and calling in priority 1 support cases to basically have us configure it for them with little to no data / would not do what we said. (this was their SOP, and they're also a huge company...)

We used Microsoft's messaging service at the time and I had no idea that IT had configured it to allow people outside our company to message us.

So as you might expect one day I'm working another customer's "real" network down priority 1 case and I get a frantic message from someone I didn't recognize asking a vague question as if we were in the middle of a conversation. I assume this is some sales guy I never met frantically messaging me (some sales guys knew me and handed my name out as I was friendly and I'd help them out if I had time). But then I can't find this guy in outlook and suddenly I realize.

So I mute my mic and announce to my cube mates "Guys... X company is instant messaging me ..." The response was hilarious, managers came running, some folks announced they were shutting off their laptops ... it was immediately clear that this was an untenable situation.

Fortunately the solution was right in front of me. In another conversation I had a sales VP in on a chat for the customer who had a "real" priority 1 case. I told him that I was receiving instant messages telling me I needed to stop helping his customer and go help X company. Granted I wasn't actually going to drop him and I phrased the FYI in a way that made that clear, but also let him know he had some competition for my attention / our focus on his customer's issue.

Suddenly we had a Sales VP as an ally breathing down ITs neck to shut off outside access to the support team's instant messaging.

<comment><USER11> The road to hell is paved with good intentions, right?

<comment><USER10> So true.

At one point management had the idea that we should do "chat support" on the website.

The website (a god awful mess) was run by the marketing department (that's why all our handy documents were hidden from the world) and they took the lead and suddenly announced support was just gonna be available to "chat" 24x7... and support via twitter would come soon too... nobody in support knew anything about it.

Thankfully even the CEO recognized the amount of manpower it would take and how bad an idea that was for what often were complex issues.... and really most social media and chat contacts were from folks who bought second hand equipment and had no support contract.

<comment><USER12> Speaking of children in the room.

I've known a few people in my life who could talk anybody, including themselves, into any stupid idea you could imagine. And then talk themselves out of it again in six weeks. The whiplash is tremendous. I've started applying advice for talking to addicts to my conversations with them (supportive, but don't invest in it). It's so disruptive. And personally, I find it exhausting.

Most of them have been in sales, at least once.

Promising things that the company can't possibly deliver for a price that will bankrupt you. Classic marketing dept.

<comment><USER13> Your description of whiplash resonates with me. One of the most common bad management traits I've run into is constantly changing priorities. Typically in these environments every single thing is an urgent crisis, but the super duper critical stuff from earlier in the week almost always gets completely forgotten about because 1) It was never actually that important, and 2) Everyone immediately has to jump on the next "crisis".

Working in a place like that is exhausting, but very little ever seems to get done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I definitely feel this one. Slack reminds me of the open office plan, in that it _seems_ like a solution to a bunch of problems, but in practice creates a whole new set. It's also a bit like having a candy dish within arm's reach. In theory, I should just be able to say no, but in practice I know I'm going to eat more candy than I want.

I'm definitely more productive the days when I keep Slack closed.

<comment><USER15> > a candy dish within arm's reach

Chatting with the customers and making them feel good is sometimes the actual product. Some people buy candy and not salads!

Here's a perspective: Since most businesses fail, you're usually making entertainment for rich people.

<comment><USER16> > Since most businesses fail, you're usually making entertainment for rich > people.

You made me chuckle, since you're definitely right about app-of-the-day startups. Strive to build something that matters!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I ran my own consultancy, I went on holidays for a month once, leaving the company under the management of a long time employee.

I came back to find an employee of one of my customers sitting at a desk in our office. Turfed him out. Had to "fire the customer". Lost about 30,000 euros of work time and unpaid invoices.

In my view joining someone's Slack Channel would be no different than that little piece of "management kidnap". Everyone in the office had completely turned their attention on that single customer's problems.

<comment><USER18> How does this happen exactly, and why is having one of your customers working temporarily out of your office an issue - I think I'm missing context

<comment><USER19> I read it as the customer wasn't happy with something, and having learned that 'the boss' was on holiday, decided to parachute in their own management to oversee things.

<comment><USER18> that could very well be it - but I'm not sure I'd leap there - as someone who has been embedded inside my customer sites for months at a time, its not unusual for me to get attempted micromanagement from the customer - I've learned how to push back both politely, and impolitely, as the situation calls for.

<comment><USER12> Bidding.

They learn that you will say no, every time. So they ask someone else, and someone else, until they get the answer that most resembles what they were after, then they lock into that as a commitment instead of a hypothetical conversation.

As a child you figured out which parent was more likely to say yes to treats, and under what circumstances (mood, which sibling asks, how they ask).

The thing is the customer gets rewarded for results, no matter how they get them. So if they stoop to juvenile tricks and get a promotion for it, they're just gonna keep doing that forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had the opposite experience. A client of ours was souring on us and we invited them to our Slack to try and help them with some issues. Slack was the easiest way to help work through their issues. The ability to quickly and fluidly clarify ideas in a conversational manner as a discussion is ongoing make it far superior to email for technical conversations. Often in emails people seem to talk past each other, as there is too much time between emails and people lose track of the conversation too easily.

Video calling might be even more efficient during the call itself but personally I would spend so much time thinking about the call, preparing or worrying before the call itself that it would be a bigger drain on my productivity overall.

Not to mention that my personal productivity is not even the most important thing. In this case these Slack conversations fixed a client relationship and moved our work with them forward in a way that was far more valuable than any SLOC I could have produced in that time.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't have a slightest clue how they derived to not join slack from the 25y rule.

<comment><USER22> Yes, all their reasons for not joining a customer slack seem reasonable, but none of them seem related to the 25-year theme. They are all about problems in the here and now, you don't need a quarter-century-long stare to see them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a testament to the value of purposeful, scheduled, and task-oriented interactions.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely. Nothing has destroyed my productivity over the years as effectively as the expected instant response from ICQ, instant messenger, and Slack chat messages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like this essay. I'm not anti-Slack, but I'm not much of an "IM" person. Partly comes from the way I work (I get "zoned," and don't surface for hours), and also because I used to work for a Japanese corporation, where IM was worthless.

I like the fundamental ideas he puts out:

• We felt busier, but were getting less real work done

• We knew the clients better personally, but we knew the product less

• We had more superficial conversations, but fewer substantive ones

• We were able to react more quickly, but our responses were less measured and effective

That said, Slack is a pretty cool tool, but there's lots of cool tools that I don't use that much.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hate Slack. It started as a copycat of Yammer and didn't grow outside of that. It doesn't have native apps on the Desktop and although they've improved things a lot, it still not as good as it should be. Compare it to Spectrum, let's say, which builds up profiles and is affordable. Why I can't have a single profile, which I use across different companies? Why do I need to create tens of accounts? Don't they get what "identity" is? On top, they shot themselves in the feet not building identities as that opens the door go grow well beyond Yammer. What I don't get it why developers still choose it - it's code-pasting unfriendly, it converts your quotes and dashes - even in URLs. There's no syntax coloring, etc. Microsoft Teams is much better although it suffers from many the limitations of Slack - including the limitations in the vision. Slack is not a replacement of email either - it lacks basic features to be a replacement. In general, I don't think Slack will survive this as Teams appears to be winning.

</comment><comment><USER27> Some teams fundamentally don't work to work in something like Slack, anywhere. That makes sense.

If you're using it internally, though, it probably makes sense to use with high-value customers, too. Slack's shared channels go a long way toward enabling teams to stay in their own space, on their own terms, while working together.

On its own, Slack isn't as well suited to working with customers -- notifications and confused ownership get complicated, and stuff starts to slip through the cracks.

We've helped teams scale up Slack-based support and customer management with an add-on called Frame for Slack (disclaimer: I work at frame.ai).

With @frame sitting in the channel, it's way easier to manage these channels just like a support system. Tailored escalation schedules to fetch only the people who need to respond in a given channel at a specific time, state management to remind people a conversation has not been resolved, and analytics to provide transparency into the level of effort by each person in each channel, responsiveness, full text search and reporting on the substance of historical messages, etc.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Assume your company is going to be around for 25 years, and treat the first > few years accordingly.

This statement makes sense in the smaller context of the point the author is trying to make, but is IMO pretty bad advice taken generally, and it smacks of survivorship bias. It's a good way to overengineer, overplan, and run out of money without delivering much, from my experience.

<comment><USER29> I got a different take out of it though. I think the author's point is that one has to be more careful with their decisions and choices as the consequence/effect could last a long time (this is where the 25 years assumption comes in), and I could see how this advice applies even in the general sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > We felt busier, but were getting less real work done

> We knew the clients better personally, but we knew the product less

> We had more superficial conversations, but fewer substantive ones

> We were able to react more quickly, but our responses were less measured and > effective

These are very similar to the reasons our company moved from Slack to Google Chat a couple years ago. It was quite liberating.

Edit: In addition to Slack, we also started using Twist ([https://twist.com/](https://twist.com/)). We use Google Chat for quick communication, but anything requiring more than a few seconds of thought goes into Twist. So far this has worked really well for us.

</comment><comment><USER31> Written like a total noob who built their business in a boom and never had to survive an economic downturn. When the next recession, you'll be begging to be added to your clients slack, IRC, forum, whatever. Hell, you'll take change orders by fax machine if that's what it takes to get the PO. GTFO of here with this attitude. If you're this much of a pain in the ass with something so small, I'd hate to work with you when the fit hits the shan. We ask ALL of our vendors to join our Slack. Don't like it? Neeexxxxt.

</comment><comment><USER32> My experiences (with different situations) were nearly the opposite from those described in the article. My previous company (real estate company with a small software development team in house) hired various outside contractors. One was a company that worked on a mobile app, they invited us into a slack channel and it was effective. It worked well with our workflow as we already used Slack for a large part of our engineering communications. We also communicated with them via email and even some regular old phone conversations. Additionally, we hired a devops engineer who we invited into our slack channel and that was effective. Nearly 100% of our communications with him was in Slack. The devops engineer wasn't someone we communicated with on a daily basis but occasionally we messaged him and it worked fine. We also hired a few engineers through Upwork and invited them into some slack channels in our company and again nearly all our communication occurred through those channels. So, our experience of being invited to another company's Slack as well as inviting outside contractors into our slack channels were both positive. Our work is very different than a marketing firm, so I guess everyone can take these anecdotes with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER33> They say that Slack brought them closer to the clients on a personal level and then they chose to kill it. That's a terrible choice that clearly shows their 25-year priorities are whacked out.

As long as the output is basically acceptable, clients are going to prefer to employ contractors with whom they have strong personal rapport. Making communication difficult and intentionally avoiding the "distraction" of building that relationship is a quick way to die.

</comment><comment><USER34> Setting aside the organizational issues here…

I'm in about 15 different Slack, with 15 different credentials. Authentication is a miserable problem, yet Slack chooses to make it worse.

<comment><USER35> It's amazing to me that Slack has been operating this long with such a backwards concept of Organization > User hierarchy. After Apple fixed their portal a few years ago, Slack is the only tool I have left that requires this multiple credentials. It's also frustrating that every time a user leaves an organization, my entire chat history with them is deleted as well.

<comment><USER36> > It's also frustrating that every time a user leaves an organization, my > entire chat history with them is deleted as well.

That may be a setting in the organization or something that your Slack admins are doing? I'm able to look up DM history with former employees in our Slack, their account is just tagged as having been deactived.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Slack is less than ideal from a customer support perspective due to its extremely limited channel organization tools. I loathe having a blob of 15 customer channels that I'm contractually obligated to be in, but for the most part only have activity once a month or so, if ever.

Stuffing those in a folder a la Discord would be a boon, but the only option that comes close is using a separate organization, which would cost more.

</comment><comment><USER38> _We liked this because it revealed that building something for the long haul is very different than building something designed for a quick exit,_

Once they took VC funding, by definition they are building for a quick exit.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reify- health](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reify-health)

<comment><USER39> Why is that by definition?

<comment><USER38> A VCs goal is always a quick and large exit. They aren't in the business of owning small profitable private "lifestyle companies".

It no longer matters what they want, it matters what the VC wants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We made the exact same experience (our company is also roughly 3.5 years old). In the beginning it was US who suggested to open a slack because we thought it would help us to resolve questions quickly. However we observed that this only incentivises to have chat discussions over topics that are better discussed and resolved in person/over Skype or via an thoroughly thought through e-mail that cuts straight to the problem. In addition it added another communication channel we HAD to monitor from that point onwards because our clients had learned from US that we'd respond quickly, so not responding was not an option. This was especially problematic for our developers who would get disrupted way more often. In addition communication was scattered among channels which made it difficult for the PM to stay ahead.

Our lives are easier and our communication with our clients is way more productive ever since we abolished slack.

</comment><comment><USER41> Should this be considered controversial? I'm not sure what service they offer but if a client asks for someone to join the their slack why would anyone accept unless they were paying someone to monitor it on a full time basis?

Would you do work for free? Nah. This isn't a slack thing.

<comment><USER42> Why would you accept an email from someone unless they were paying someone to monitor emails on a full time basis?

Maybe it's just the way the companies I've worked at have used slack, but it's never been expected to be any more "real time" than email.

<comment><USER43> This. In my experience: if "joining slack" means you spend a lot of time chatting about random things and get to know the people privately, you're not doing your job and the work culture is a red flag. I've seen people do the same via email, where they quickly spiral out of work and end up sending each other pics of their pets all day. I don't think it's a medium thing, it's a people thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I actually fully understand this situation. If you build stuff you want to reduce communication channels and keep it lean, otherwise you get a lot of distraction about mostly superficial and insubstantial matters. Important things will happen there too, of course, but you prefer to have a controlled ways of communication (e.g. something that works in your team). Sometimes it's good to shorten some communication paths and directly reach relevant people. But in the longer term you want to avoid it. Otherwise you will have your devs being contacted from other different people and it will create a lot of communication mess. You want to secure your people from such noisy communication.

</comment><comment><USER45> Wouldn't a solution be to have a public slack channel that your customers can join? SparkPost does this and it has been quite helpful to me as a customer, without the overhead of SparkPost having requests to join hundreds of client slack channels.

</comment><comment><USER46> My background is in hanging around 100+ IRC channels which is probably why I never have felt Slack distracting a bit. I have notifications on for only direct @s and I can postpone any interactions accordinly when needed.

Compared to that emails (and Basecamps and such) feel anxious: tens and tens of different information cramped in a long form text and the expectation us to handle all of them at once and as soon as possible, after all it's email.

And then again I know of people that have it completely other way around and I understand that. I also think that there's no solution for that in software form, but in behaviour: we need to embrace the asyncronisity.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think Slack/IM is a great tool, but maybe not for "deep" engineering work and requirements discussion. For things like this it is more important to have some structure and documentation behind it. As mentioned in the article Trello works well, I personally like Wrike but anything written down in one place is good!

Where Slack helps me the most is asking my group questions which seem too small for an email, like "hey what is maximum RPM of the motor we are using?" where anyone could respond and also other people can benefit from the answer.

<comment><USER8> > Where Slack helps me the most is asking my group questions which seem too > small for an email, like "hey what is maximum RPM of the motor we are > using?"

That's interesting, because I view this exactly the other way around -- an IM is like a phone call, in that if someone is sending one, it's because they have an urgent need and are expecting an immediate response. Email is for the lower-priority things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Slack has shared channels now which solves this quite well for my company.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is not really any different than customers clamoring to get the direct email/phone # of developers instead of going through the normal tech support process, or to clamor for daily meetings/phonecalls/sessions.

Slack might just be worse by degree.

I hate all of the above often having to "support" Tech Support.

I have often wanted to tell a customer, "We will not make progress on this till we stop updating you on progress every 5 minutes."

This stuff is even worse when you have an army of internal "Customer Success" types at a big company.

</comment><comment><USER50> I used to work for a digital consultancy, one of the projects I worked on had a shared slack team between the client and my company. It definitely created problems, but IMO, the problems were because there weren't limits or understanding around how slack should have been used. The staffing of the project changed pretty significantly throughout the years I worked on it and the trouble came from not setting expectations around how slack (and channels) should be used.

</comment><comment><USER51> I never even considered that people would add clients to Slack. We don't even have all our consultants on Slack. We use it as a purely internal message board to communicate short thoughts, updates, publishing reports, maybe ask for an impromptu meeting etc. External communication is almost all by email, phone, or Zoom.

That said the 25 year rule is absurd. Who really thinks Slack is going to exist in 25 years? Netscape was just founded 25 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER52> I agree that Slack can pull me out of the zone. Also it's terrible when you're trying to find a decision your team made in the past.

I tried Twist but couldn't get any buy in from the team. Seems like it would solve the issues I have with Slack: it has real-time chatting, but also long- term async storage. It's also easy to move a conversation from the real-time chat to the long-term storage thing.

</comment><comment><USER53> We've started inviting strategic customers as guests to private channels.

No noise. Just 2-3 people having a very focused discussion.

</comment><comment><USER54> Noisy notifications is NOT inherently a Slack issue - slack is just a communication platform; it is however a company culture /team culture/communication style. Fix that instead, Slack is just a tool, it also has controls of muting notifications as many others mentioned here.

</comment><comment><USER55> Something they didn't mention is that joining would not at all be a sustainable course of action. You'd end up having to join for all of your customers, or at least all of them that use slack and thought to ask.

</comment><comment><USER56> Complete opposite experience here. I assist customers with technical implementations and the projects where we connect via Slack go SO much better.

</comment><comment><USER57> I have a bit of a different take on this. Personally speaking, I've only been a Slack user for 2 years. Prior to that, I lived out of Skype for Business (now Teams[0]).

On one hand, I've had each of the issues he lists in his bullet points when dealing with Slack (though we only ever join customer's Slack channels), though I've adapted my approach and it's been minimal-to-non-issue, lately -- and I've got no customers asking for this at this very moment. The thing is -- I do not and have not had these problems on Teams.

I believe these sorts of problems aren't general problems that messaging applications introduce, but are problems Slack doesn't handle well. At first, my thinking was "everyone can have it, so it's like the old days of AIM, except people use this for business and a _lot_ of businesses use it", so I went to "it's a public form of AIM that corporations are _asking_ employees to use". None of that is particularly accurate, and it ignored the fact that every OCS - Teams installation that I've used had been federated with people I worked without outside of my organization. Slack didn't really "mainstream" this sort of thing with the people I worked with, so why do people on Slack behave differently?

The only reason I can guess is "Status". Microsoft always pushed this as a huge selling point to their product and I remember thinking "that's dumb" for the first several iterations, but right around the Lync time-frame, I realized that it created a behavior change in me. We used OCS for everything, including telephony, so when someone had a meeting blocked out in their calendar, or was using their phone, their status said "In a call" or "In a meeting" and was bright red. When you shared your screen, your status went do not disturbt[1]. Screensaver pops up and your status goes yellow "Away". You can also set these statuses, manually (which was rarely abused at the 3 shops I was at).

Another important factor was that chats were not persistent[2]. This changed with Teams, and the jury is still out as to how this impacts things, but I think it will make the specific bullet points he mentions worse. In general, when I would send someone a message on Teams, I'd not expect an immediate reply -- even if their status was green -- and if I didn't get a reply, I'd follow up with another method of communication. The idea was to _avoid a phone call for something easy_. Yes, this eliminates a lot of the "personal hands-on sort of interactivity" that a phone call grants, but it also eliminates 10 minutes of talking about spouses/families when you and I are in the middle of 3 other things and aren't terribly interested in keeping up with cultural norms.

 _Because_ status gave me enough information to answer the questions (1) "Are they likely to respond?" and (2) "Am I likely to interrupt them?". I did a lot of development for this platform and I had a ~15,000 person installation to get stats from -- it's interesting to see who had "status change alerts" setup for whom, when they'd be turned on/off, how often people would set their own statuses vs. using the one automatically set. It worked about as I described; replies fell off when statuses were not green, follow-up phone calls frequently followed unanswered chats -- all of this data was relatively easy to grab out of the massive set of SQL databases that powered the whole thing on-prem.

Contrast that with Slack. Unfortunately, at my new employer, we use Slack and are migrating to Teams, online, so I can't get stats like that any longer and my only visibility is myself and my immediate coworkers. There are, effectively, three/(four?) -- mostly worthless -- statuses, some of which behave in a manner that contradicts the features they provide:

(1) Zzzz - it's before or after work; useful when I need to reach out to folks in Seattle and I forget how to subtract by 3. Otherwise, as useful as a clock or my own two eyes looking at the desks nearby. And why warn me not to send this message? You're going to keep it there until they wake up and _look_ , so how about just warn me that you're not going to notify them because they've snoozed alarms, but that the message will be waiting for them when they return?

(2) Offline - grey circle - they're not there or left, or maybe they went to screen-saver or their client as acting up. The thing is, I rely on status so minimally that I can't remember if there are two to cover Offline and Away. Both mean "don't bother" even though they shouldn't -- they're saving my history (if I'm paying, but even if I'm not ... for at least a few hours!)

(3) Online - green, solid, circle - they might answer me.

In addition to that, you can set an icon with a secret (/s) message. I say "secret" because nobody ever sees or reads it. I set mine last week to a "BIG RED STOP SIGN" with a message indicating that I was focused solely on a single project and in the middle of a crunch. I've been done with that for a few days; I received more messages about other projects I had to table last week than any other time working here and this message was so noticeable that I didn't even remember to turn it off until I looked at it just now for the purpose of this post.

So people message more. And they still follow up with phone calls and e-mail, just like they did before, but the messages are reaching their audience less frequently. When people at my last employer sent messages on Teams (Lync at the time), it was 85-90% targeted at "Available" and "In a meeting[3]". I'd bet it's the same way now, only "Available" covers a whole lot of time when nobody is available, causing more messages, less success and more frustration with the product

[0] To be accurate: I lived out of Office Communications Server (OCS), OCS R2, Lync, Skype for Business (and all of the CUs in between) -- I used to develop for these platforms so I was an early adopter.

[1] So intelligent -- never have someone send you a sarcastic or embarrassing comment while you're sharing your screen.

[2] Not, strictly, true and not true at all with Teams. If administrators enabled the capability, chats were stored in your e-mail box where they might as well have been deleted. Group Chat behaved exactly the opposite -- you had to install a massive client and all chat logs were kept forever with no way to delete them IIRC. Very few actually used this product. Teams behaves more like Slack but with all of the capabilities of Skype for Business.

[3] This was puzzling; we assume it was because the vast majority of meetings were conference calls after full adoption of OCS R2, so "In a meeting" meant "I have a meeting on my calendar that got cancelled" or "I have a very rare, in person meeting with only people in the office", otherwise it said "In a call". So really, it became "Extra Available" since you had time blocked out that freed up.

<comment><USER58> some good comments and thoughts in here.

the Slack status feature you mentioned is -- sadly -- most often used by Slack users to add a cute emoji or whatnot. this is unfortunate.

Slack administrators can set suggested or "default" statuses. it's at [https://<yourslack>.slack.com/customize/statuses](https://<yourslack>.slack.com/customize/statuses)

and so, a company can set statuses that staff can be required to pick from, perhaps some common ones like:

\- In the office \- Working from home \- In a meeting \- PTO

and the company can then make it known to staff that their status icon should accurately reflect their current work ... status, and not whatever cute emoji they want to use.

DND/Do Not Disturb should not affect use of Slack status. Force the notification through if your message is urgent.

this is not rocket science.

if Slack usage is affecting how a company works because staff can't tell if someone will respond or not -- change the way the staff use Slack to better suit the business.

/shrug

<comment><USER57> You make fair points and I'll be the first to say that my experience (and preference) lies elsewhere, so I'll explore the links on Monday to see if they make life easier.

The major point that I didn't make clear enough about statuses "not working" is that even if there were more statuses, they are manual. We observed that people manually changed their status, most often, to "Available" from another non-available status, under Skype for Business. Outside of that, people simply _didn 't_ manually manipulate their status. And when they _did_ , they'd often leave it that way for a ridiculously long time because they'd simply "forget".

Inadequate status choices are not as bad as completely unreliable statuses. Teams shined in providing enough status about a user, automatically, for a non-developer, non-technical user to reliably answer the question "Will I get an answer to my IM/call when I send it?" and "Is my IM/call highly likely to be an interruption?".

If you used it for telephony, or had the Skype for Business mobile client installed, you switched to "In a call" when you were on the phone, "In a conference" when you joined a Skype for Business conference call, "Do not disturb - Sharing" when you started screen sharing (and it kept inbound messages from showing up on-screen for your audience). Honestly, it seems like one of those under-the-fold bullet point features, but it is its most important.

In the scenario you talk about, above, two things have to happen (after configuration is altered to allow changing statuses). The user has to regularly change their status to signal their availability (not physical presence or time of day, but "I am busy doing something that should keep me from responding"). And the rest of the users have to rely on that status. The only way that happens is if the status is accurate far more often than it is wrong. That won't happen unless everyone is rigorous with making status changes... and that's not a memo I want to send.

Lync/Skype for Business (and I assume Teams) gives you both options. Let it run automatically and it'll switch your status when you receive/make a call, join a conference or have a meeting time blocked out in your calendar for you and put it back when you're done, or set it to what you want. And you could extend this capability[0] and automate it in different ways.

[0] The old on-prem version was insanely customizable; you could completely re-implement the client, they provided every hook required to re-implement dial-in conferencing (an "Enterprise" feature) in Standard edition (and actively assisted in a project I worked to do just that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Never used a chat client for anything other than work. Not sure why that's so difficult.

Not to mention, chatting with people usually means they treat any request you have as low priority. Whereas going to them elevates that priority substantially.</comment>


Obamacare Premiums Set to Rise, Even for Savvy Shoppers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/upshot/obamacare-premiums-set-to-rise-even-for-savvy-shoppers.html <comment><USER2> Obama should do more outreach to industry to promote the idea of more competition in the insurance space.

<comment><USER3> A major percentage of the problems with US health insurance and medical industry is directly due to government interference in the marketplace. We saw an example of it with the housing market crash that dragged the economy down with it. You can see the same thing happening today with the runaway costs of universities.

I would prefer they just take a step back for a while.

<comment><USER4> Freemarket for healthcare is stupid.

You are poor? You die.

You are rich? Here is a nice bed and 3 doctors to care for you.

I do not want to live in that world. I do not want my children to live in that world.

<comment><USER5> Ever heard of charity?

<comment><USER6> My head explodes at this comment. You want to determine if people live or die just based on the charity they can get. How fucking barbaric is that? What do we live in, the 15th century?

<comment><USER4> My head also exploded.

<comment><USER7> Is that covered by your insurance? I think for me that is out of pocket.

<comment><USER4> $20 copay

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ...but we still get to keep our doctor, right?

 _Right?_</comment>


Ten minutes a day - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexallain/ten-minutes-a-day-e2fa1084f924 <comment><USER2> So if I time-slice the 8 productive hours of my day into 10 minute slots, can I write 48 books in 499 days?

Of course not.

I've tried working on pet projects for 10 minutes before going to work each day. The problem I find is that while I might only do active work on the task for ten minutes, my brain is thinking about it for much longer.

Spending those ten minutes in the morning reduces my ability to do my day job because I've used up a significant fraction of my day's useful thinking budget. I find I can only sustain these pet projects when my day job is in a boring/easy phase. (This might have something to do with getting older - I'm 42, or it might be because my job isn't boring/easy much these days).

<comment><USER3> No, if you read what he wrote, he said during the time he isn't writing he would be constantly working and think about it in his mind. So practically, he works on it like a few hours a day. The writing just takes ten minutes, the design takes the rest.

<comment><USER4> So, something like: "Think really hard, then execute really quick."

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say that it felt like I was thinking really hard in times I wasn't writing. It's a bit like the technique of putting down a crossword for a little while when you get stuck - you might not be thinking much about the puzzle, but somehow you're turning it over in your head.

FWIW, I do agree with the original comment at the top of this thread that this technique couldn't yield 48 books in 2 years - there's only so much headspace available, and this technique is one that taps into that headspace effectively for long-term projects, but it's not magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a 10min attention span for intense activities like reading. I use this to my advantage to do I might otherwise not do.

* Reading: I take my Kindle to the toilet.

* Solve quiz on Brilliant.org during office commute

* Listen to audiobooks before sleep

* When waiting for the next meeting, I read bookmarked articles.

\--- My Lessons: \---

* It is very important to stop doing something once I realize I have no more juice.

* My total learning time per day is around 1hr on best days.

* Takes 1hr to reach office. So during cab rides, after a quiz is done (10-15min), I nap.

* When zoned out in and realize I'm doing random wild-wild-internet-reading, I immediately turn tech off. I just talk to people (work or casual chat).

* During times of silence, I observe things around me. I learn new things about stuff that has been around me for a long time. I put these observations to use when I draw (I use Procreate app on iPad). For example: I observed reflections in water and attempted to draw a reflection [https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxmF1enz87/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxmF1enz87/)

</comment><comment><USER6> > Writing every day kept ideas top of mind. When I finished writing, I'd carry > the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I'd talk to people about them. > My ideas were always nearby, making it easy to jump back in.

This sounds like the main takeaway. Even though the direct time spent on an activity may seem small, the total effective time spent on that activity shoots up if it is performed daily (v/s weekly or longer).

<comment><USER7> I also liked this: "... today might not be a good day, so let's use it for something I have to do anyway."

The idea transfers well to coding. Maybe you're not feeling inspired today, but there's probably something mechanical that needs to happen to your project -- resolve a TODO, update the docs, triage a bug report. So do it, and even if that doesn't snap you back into the groove, at least you got that one thing done.

<comment><USER8> "You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn't matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side."

— Joel Spolsky, _Fire And Motion_ , [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and- motion/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/)

<comment><USER9> "If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward"

\- MLK

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recently I have start workout for 10 mins a day including warmup.

To go for an hour in the gym it's much harder because it take +30 mins to commute +15 min to shower. After 1 hour of gym I feel exhausted and I don't want to do it again next day.

But with 10 mins per day, I don't have to convince myself to do it, it's such an easy task and I feel better after doing it. I don't lose my time in commute and I do it every day which is much better than 3 times per week.

Most days I do 10 mins of meditation and with that I have two great habits that takes most 30 min from my time.

<comment><USER11> I have found cycling to be a good daily exercise. It becomes my commute so it takes no time out of my day also there is no way to give up. I can stop at any time at a gym but if I stop on my bike I still have to get back home.

I have a pretty brutal uphill way back home but I feel great after which makes me do it again the next day.

<comment><USER12> Yep, it's great unless the uphill is actually on the way to the job, then it becomes not so great :-)

<comment><USER11> In that case I'd use an ebike. Still decent fitness but not super intence

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Writing for 10 minutes a day is great and all, but if you're not the type of person that can easily switch tasks and be immediately ready to perform then it's not going to work out for you. Similarly, if you get stuck on a task and just want to keep going until you're done, you're going to have a hard time stopping. When I was doing NaNoWriMo I generally tried to go for the estimate of ~1337 words a day, but some days I had good ideas and kept going. Other days I didn't and spent a lot of time thinking about where to take the story and didn't write a lot. I don't believe at any time I spent less than 30 minutes working. And even then, it was always on my mind. Different people have different abilities, I don't believe that this is generally applicable and different people may have different minima/maxima for how much time they take to start up a task.

<comment><USER14> Conversely Hemingway recommended to stop when the writing was going well:

> The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know > what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel > you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so > try to remember it.

<comment><USER15> This is a great advice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the pomodoro technique [1], which breaks tasks up into 25 minute work chunks with 5 minutes break between parts. I find I'm able to get more work done because I'm focused on one task.

10 minutes seems like not enough time to really get meaningful work done since it often takes me a few minutes to get back into whatever it is.

I think 10 minutes just isn't quite enough time, so I think I'll just include it as a pomodoro internal. I like the idea of forcing myself to do something everyday, so perhaps I'll schedule two small tasks for the internal, and if I'm making really good progress on one, I'll reschedule the other task.

But I definitely like the main idea here, since I often let things languish because I'm worried about them taking too long.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique)

<comment><USER17> What if what you're working on is going to take longer than 25 minutes, and then taking that 5 minute break breaks up your mental flow?

That is, after returning after 5 minutes it takes a couple minutes to re- orient yourself to the problem at hand?

<comment><USER18> For me, Pomodoro is a technique to help you get started, and to focus. Vs procrastinate all day.

For the case you mention, I would adapt the technique to whatever benefits you the most. If you're in the flow, defer the break. If you defer too much, and start feeling burned out, adjust.

For some people, 25 minutes is too long. Find what works for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The post concisely explains the power of taking small steps in terms of productive work and projects. One thing I do is the pomodoro technique every day. I track and graph the amount of pomodoros I do, so ostensibly I could go back later and measure how many pomodoros it took me to complete some specific project.

The author has sewn together the concepts of non-zero days, the Seinfeld method plus a tweak to the pomodoro technique and then measured his progress. This could work for anyone, it's a good combination, simple to implement and with a little patience almost certainly leads to powerful results over time.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some of this reminds me of how I wrote my thesis. I lived in a duplex, and my neighbors moved out. I'd been sharing their internet, so that went away with them. My spouse was supportive of my decision to not get our own internet connection until my thesis was out the door.

I uninstalled all of the games from my computer, except one. I embarked on a weird quest in the online game I was playing; which was accomplished by running a daily script on a cron job and effectively shut me out of the game. The game I left on my computer was XCOM: Terror from the Deep -- which I was playing on the hardest mode.

That XCOM game is frikkin impossible. So I hacked the save games, extracting them into spreadsheets. My spouse would ask, "Are you playing the spreadsheet game again?" So that wasn't very engaging for long. I'd get bored and go back to work on my thesis.

All that was a success, in the end. When the content was finished, I spent about a week on minor tweaks. I got sick of that, and turned my thesis in two weeks before the deadline. And to be honest... once we got internet hooked up, all my bad habits came flooding back. _sigh_

</comment><comment><USER21> I find it relatively easy to stick to doing productive things every single day if I do them the first thing in the morning, before I have breakfast. Later in the day things always get in a way and it is much harder to concentrate on non urgent things.

</comment><comment><USER22> I started using the Pomodoro technique a few years ago, and I've successfully shipped 3 (almost 4) FOSS projects since then. The hardest part is getting started. It's surprising how much work gets done with only 30 minutes a day, over a few months.

On an unrelated note, like the author, I also keep track of how much time I've spent on these FOSS projectss. But it's disheartening to see how much time I've spent on FOSS, and while I have users (they want support/features :) -- potential employers spend almost no time looking at my work, but will still ask me to spend hours on their tech challenges (averaging ~20 hours per challenge).

<comment><USER23> > The hardest part is getting started.

This is a big problem for me as I age. Personal problems etc take up my mind space and it is very hard to motivate myself to work. Also constant interruptions which I have to attend to makes things really miserable and have stopped my progress of personal projects.

What do you do to handle starting up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a hobbyist coder, I've tended to have a lot of success doing the same with coding. I try to have a contribution on GitHub every day. Doesn't have to be a big new feature, maybe I fixed something, maybe I edited some comments somewhere. But I'm _touching_ my various projects frequently, which by that nature, tends to keep me on a track of progress.

When I fall off of the routine, sometimes I have a gap in working on my code for months.

</comment><comment> a-saleh I never got into a place the 10 minutes a day would really help me accomplish anything. I do know it is possible, one day I would like to replicate something like [1], splitting a work-weeks worth of work into several months of pomodoro a day.

It kinda worked when I was attempting to write a blog, but even then I never really figured out how to make the routine stick and often it took me half of the designated time to even start writing.

This time-to-start was even worse when programming.

Well, one day!

[1] [https://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars- kata/](https://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/)

<comment><USER25> I try to take inspiration from this article: [https://fs.blog/2018/06/succeed- at-work/](https://fs.blog/2018/06/succeed-at-work/)

I think a 15-minute resolution is more reasonable than a 10-minute resolution. If you assume that you allocate each block to a unique activity that means doing six different things per hour instead of doing only four things in the same timeframe.

There's nothing stopping you from using four blocks in a row for an activity, or two, or three, but the minimum amount of time to spend on something is 15 minutes which I think is more worthwhile than 10 minutes.

The only downside is it doesn't let you do two pomodoro blocks per hour, if that's something you want to incorporate into your routine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The email trick seems like a great way to avoid procrastinating, and get started:

> The other thing that really helped is that I didn't allow myself to check my > email until I worked on the book.

</comment><comment><USER26> I use [http://dontbreakthechain.com](http://dontbreakthechain.com) and have a few different 10 minute things in there.

<comment><USER27> I'd love to hear from full time parents how they do routines like these.

I'm sure it's absolutely possible but between a 2 month and 2 year old I don't come close to finding the time to think about extra projects.

<comment><USER28> Short answer is that, like everything in life, it is harder as a parent.

I've meditated for ten minutes a day for a few months now and written 500 words a day so far this year. The chain method absolutely works (I'll stay up late at night staring at a blank page until I get to my 500 words) but it can be a chore. I go through with it because I know that once I break the chain that makes it easier to break it tomorrow.

I'm hoping that my current work craziness calms down a bit in a few weeks at which point I'll be scheduling these two things on my calendar in the morning and not start the rest of my day until they are done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just curious, if I wanted to setup several working environments and make it as quick as possible to switch between them (programming vs video editing vs photo editing). How would I go about doing that on a Mac to be as quick as possible. Several different programs would need to be open and closed automatically.

<comment><USER30> I have a several ".command" files organized in a stack in my dock. Each one of them is a bash script that opens all the files I need for a project. When I'm done, I manually close everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think my problem with the 10 minutes day is that maybe my ideas wont come until minute 9 and now I'll need to put them down, which will take me another 15 min. This probably works for things that don't require imagination, like exercise or labor work.

<comment><USER32> Surely, 10 min is a lower bound. If it takes more time, I guess, it's even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > When I finished writing, I'd carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower, > and I'd talk to people about them

I do find myself shower-coding most days, but I never talk to people about it. There's never anyone else in the shower.

<comment><USER16> Get a rubber ducky. It's not a person, but then again, I meet very few people who know enough about what I'm working on that they're helpful in giving advice, so they might as well be a rubber ducky.</comment></comment>


Firefox: Leave My DNS Alone - <AUTHOR> https://markalanrichards.com/2019/09/14/firefox-leave-my-dns-alone.html <comment><USER2> Mozilla jumped the gun on this, all they really needed to do was announce their DoH application program _before_ they started turning it on by default.

As it stands, Mozilla has a Trusted Recursive Resolver Policy[0], which CloudFlare abides by, but lots of other resolvers (such as Quad9) are not allowed to be added to the FF config.

I'd reached out to Mozilla months back asking for the application process (when they announced the TRR policy). I've been running a DoH resolver from within Indian jurisdiction (for legal research) - but without Mozilla having a process - it is just me using it.

[0]: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver- policy](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver-policy) [1]: [https://captnemo.in/doh/](https://captnemo.in/doh/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Paul Vixie gave just gave a talk at vBSDCon about DNS-over-HTTPS where he outlines some the problems he seems at it. Hopefully the video will be up shortly, but in the meantime some slides:

* [https://twitter.com/DLangille/status/1169962162854514688](https://twitter.com/DLangille/status/1169962162854514688)

</comment><comment><USER4> Agreed. Mostly regarding the part that DNS should be solved at the OS level. Encrypted DNS is a good idea, HTTPS seems like a questionable encryption layer, but it will serve. However, apps should not take DNS into their own hands.

DNS is part of a systems configuration. By setting it, you choose, and can change, your views of the internet. If all of a sudden, that view becomes inconsistent across apps, that is confusing. Moreover, if an application gives an unexpected view of the world (e.g. missing local domains, local redirects, or local blocks) that can have negative impact.

If we screw this up in our haste to secure DNS, we'll be stuck with another legacy half-solution our internet infrastructure. This is essentially taking on global technical debt to get secured DNS requests just a bit faster.

</comment><comment><USER5> For us Russians, it's a very welcome feature. Our government illegally does mass-scale censorship/blocking of websites, making the Internet almost unusable without commercial VPN, and it looks like soon commercial VPN services would be blocked too. This DoH feature might help to combat the problem without complex measures.

<comment><USER6> I, for one, rejoice that the United States government has outsourced the squashing of unpopular, dissenting opinions to private industry.

Having search engines and social media sites implement our censorship affords American citizens more room to do victory laps about our Constitution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be nice if Firefox also had DNS-over-TLS support.

I'm not against encrypted DNS, and can see where DoH can be handy for a lot of the general public, but as someone in IT, having to jump through hoops to keep our internal split-horizon DNS workings is annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have a problem with DNS-over-TLS, I don't know enough about it... but I'm afraid I want DNS from Firefox's perspective to be plaintext, transparent and easy for me to check and even change. Like the filesystem is.

Not just for me, easy for Privacy International to audit when verifying apps tracking, easy for OpSec on my work laptop and easy for my firewall tooling to intercept and manage.

I want the OS's network stack to transparently proxy that plaintext request to an encrypted one: which may well be DoH or DNS over TLS, just like filesystem drivers proxy plaintext file requests over encrypted hard disks.

Whether this is by a plain text request over loopback, using the existing plain text DNS protocol or a more efficient OS api I'll happily leave evolution to resolve: but for now the plaintext protocol might be the fastest thing to proxy.</comment></comment>


Thoughts After Y Combinator Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2010/08/thoughts-after-y-combinator-demo-day.html

<comment><USER2> _Interestingly, VC's still try to cherry pick_

I wonder why they do that. Naively, it seems like they are in the best position for a carpet-bombing/index-type strategy since they can follow-on beyond Series A with as many as work out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know for sure, but one theory is that if they carpet bomb at the seed stage only some of those companies will be series A fundable, which means many will be cut off. The negative signaling to other investors when a startup isn't supported at the series A would be significant, so VCs know if they carpet bomb eventually they will get a bad rep.

Ancesotally, more super angel funds are saying they will participate in later rounds, and since some of them are doing lots of broad seed investing they are the canary in the coal mine on how this will turn out.</comment></comment>