Although that joke is funny, and this article is a little odd, personally I think everyone is taking away the wrong message.
Personal life absolutely could benefit from management and intelligence layers. For banking, instead of logging into each bank, I can use mint/personal capital. But when it comes to so much of the rest of life nothing plays nicely.
It would be awesome to have a shopping, construction, restaurant, recipe, health care aggregation for making decisions and projects. My family calendar should integrate right into "we need to pick a flooring contractor by xx" and when one of marks the one we want in on the platform, that info should trickle up into the management interface. If both of us mark ourselves as in the mood for Mexican, it can filter results down to restaurants we marked or might be relevant and show them to both of us. Comparing reviews between yelp, foursquare, facebook and google is agonizingly manual. Why cant this be as simple as metacritic? Right now collaborating is a painful mix of handing phones back and forth or sending links and screenshots. It's too real time. The same goes for shopping, comparison shopping together is just as disorganized as any collaborative task. Its very hard to break down the task into discrete components that can happen simultaneously. First you pick what you want, then you price shop, rinse repeat. Even simple stuff, like while planning an event, knowing who called an uber and getting an alert.
And then there is the educational aspect. Publishing and sharing a family budget, spending, net cash flow etc would absolutely benefit kids. They could see and learn how expensive things are, see what spending categories the trinkets they want chip into, where the family can reduce spending elsewhere, and what costs are fixed.
F, why not gamify chores. If you give out allowance for chores, why not have a list of available chores, and let the market handle itself? One kid wants to do all the work, they reap all the reward.
Maybe its less of a Slack/Trellofication and more what I want is a PowerBI/Tableau.
I know things like buildshop.com and getcatalant.com sort of fill that hybrid project management and reviews category, for their own verticals.
A collaborative family calendar, with goal planning, and brainstorming space isnt a bad idea. Hey you want to save for a purchase, heres a budgeting tool. Hey you need a ride to a thing at a certain time, this person is available. Building consensus over whats for dinner can be something people contribute to when they have time over the day, instead of requiring everyone to be on the same page at the same time? Oh we picked a recipe that the inventory knows we are out of an ingredient, add picking that ingredient up to the task list and assign it, before people start driving home for the day.
This comment became a very unfocused vomit of a rant quickly, and I dont feel like circling back around to edit it. Sorry.
> As per our earlier conversation, we have decided that the children will be enrolled in tennis camp over the summer. Please let me know if you want to follow up on this.
I cannot even imagine what it would be like being a teenager under that. Your two choices are either do everything you can to win your parents' approval, or run away at 16.
It's one thing for education to be hyperfocused on results and training for the workforce, it's another for the home to restructure in that direction too.
Extremely regimented people may excel in extremely regimented environments, but frankly they are often deeply uninteresting people to socialise with. (Also, any workplace I've been in hasn't actually been that regimented, and was better off for it. The less flexible people were good but often struggled with being more fluid when required.)
I much prefer the other extreme. Those junkyard diy playground kids and that whole movement away from hyperstructured and linear play. Not that you can't trello a trip to one of those in to the schedule, but I'm guessing that the crossover between the slackified group and the junkyard group isn't huge.
Something I’m trying to get better at is to be more intentional about everything e.g. I think I’ve come to the realization that I’ve wasted a lot of time and spent time doing things I shouldn’t be doing because I allowed myself to “drift” in ways that don’t help me at all.
I do not have a family or kids, but anything that helps families be more intentional with how they spend time with each other is a really good thing. I know growing up that was far from the case for me.
> Something I’m trying to get better at is to be more intentional about everything e.g. I think I’ve come to the realization that I’ve wasted a lot of time and spent time doing things I shouldn’t be doing because I allowed myself to “drift” in ways that don’t help me at all.
I disagree. Some things just need to be tried out to see if it enriches your life.
Yes there will be regrets but there is always a risk for potential worthwhile pursuits.
>"We think of Trello as a tool you can use across work and life," says Stella Garber, [Trello's] head of marketing. [...] (Slack declined to share any information about how people use its software, and Atlassian, which owns Jira, did not respond to a similar request.)
This is interesting... The author may have overlooked the fact that Atlassian also owns Trello.
Every family in the world uses IM, and Slack isn't very different from any of the hundred other options out there for group messaging. So not too surprising that families are using it.
Similarly all the other software mentioned can be used for simple calendaring, TODO lists, reminders etc., all of which most people here undoubtedly use in some form to manage their life. It's just the association of these brands with "work" that has people going WTF.
What does it say about us as a society in which a pre-high school child needs to use a productivity suite to manage their lives? The answer here is not to provide more software to allow 11 year olds to eek out a few extra percentage points of productivity. The answer is to expect less of 11 year olds.
My kids' school has just been taken over (in the UK) by an academy group whose other local schools were telling 8 and 9 year old that they needed to know what career they were going to have so they could study the right subjects...
I'm 47 and I still don't really know what I want to do with my life. How the hell does an 8 year old?
My cousin is raising 2 kids in a major urban center. Discussions of what pre-K they needed to prepare for starts around the time they are able to independently walk. Social calanders are decided weeks in advance. Play dates are heavily documented on social media and 'bucket-lists' of rites of passage such as photo session at a historical landmark, baseball stadium, etc are turned into holiday cards. My cousin might be an outlier, she is an incredibly driven business woman who juggles a full time lucrative career with family life, but I can't imagine her lifestyle is worth the stress. As far as I can remember the kids have always been dressed in coordinated outfits, hats, vests, capes, etc.
She is definitely a loving mother and cares the worlds for her kids, but I feel incredibly uneasy if this becomes the new norm for kids to succeed in our society.
This is not objective but my brother in law's extended family lives in the suburbs far from a much smaller metro area, spend their time primarily outdoors lightly supervised, and to me are far more confident, articulate, and fun kids.
I don't disagree, but I also think that 11 year olds are incredibly capable beings and it's exciting to see tooling emerge that helps us stop thinking of everyone under the age of 18 as being incapable of living a full and rich life.
The context is obvious: Parents get less house time, do more house-irrelevant things during said time, and most importantly - the outside is more hostile, so more and more kids life is organized and initiated by parents.
I'm imagining the classic scene from movies where a teen boy comes to ask the dad if he can take the daughter to prom, except he just opens a pull request
>Julie Berkun Fajgenbaum, a mom of three children ages 8 to 12, uses Google Calendar to manage her children’s time and Jira to keep track of home projects.
Firstly a calendar can be very useful for knowing which activities kids are doing, what playdates etc. Schools sometimes throw one off things into the mix. Most parents would use a regular calendar anyway.
For JIRA - well that seems a bit heavy handed when trello would do but really it's a good idea. It's a todo list... so is the default todo app on your phone bad? Pen & paper bad? It's the same sort of thing.
"american home"?
even in terms of content of article, it is clear this is confined to a very small section of society. even that is purely based on anecdotal claims.
almost no valid evidence, but broad nation wide conclusion.
If you are looking for a "standard" American home you aren't going to find it. It is a large country, and there is a ton of diversity. People mentioned in the article are as American as anyone else.
I’ll go a step farther and point out that it’s troubling that we feel like we need these sorts of tools to survive at home today. It seems to be a symptom of an ever increasing level of complexity in every facet of modern life.
People, please, think about what you want your children to become. Do you want easily employed drones that just as easily can get outsourced or replaced by AI, or do you want independent and creative thinkers? Creativity needs space and time. Extend both increasingly, with age. It's sad to me that American life requires you to manage their time - elsewhere they can just independently go to school, first on foot then on bycicle. Stop living in these hellscapes that makes that impossible, I consider it essential.
The "tiger mom" phenomenon was every bit as much in force, as far as I know, during my time in high school during the early to mid aughts.
Honestly, if you're going to be so overly organized (which some people are) this at least sounds like a better way to do it. Might as well have your calendar online and your messages in one place so everyone knows what's going on.
Well, it just seems a brand friendly way to say "Hey, this families use technology to track activities like we use to do with pen and paper".
And I personally use org-mode to track my kid's activities (and my own), but I believe a plain white board is better to track the shared goals and messages.
Biggest stand out in this article is the stats about declining free time for play - as has been said quite a few times on HN, humans need to be bored and to play in order to be creative. Stagnation awaits otherwise I fear.
I've thought about creating a family management platform before, but it seemed too weird and farfetched that people would actually use it for a long period of time and not chuck it out.
Simple translates to longevity (resilient to environment rot).
I think a family wiki strikes the right balance of simple and useful. I find in families we quickly specialise and when somebody is away, we struggle to do tasks that could have been captured in a few bullet points
Me and my mom were ahead of our time. Back in 2000 I used to message her on ICQ and ask if dinner was ready. And she'd say yes so I could come out of my teenage computer cave. :)
[+] [-] kibibyte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narnianal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basch|6 years ago|reply
Personal life absolutely could benefit from management and intelligence layers. For banking, instead of logging into each bank, I can use mint/personal capital. But when it comes to so much of the rest of life nothing plays nicely.
It would be awesome to have a shopping, construction, restaurant, recipe, health care aggregation for making decisions and projects. My family calendar should integrate right into "we need to pick a flooring contractor by xx" and when one of marks the one we want in on the platform, that info should trickle up into the management interface. If both of us mark ourselves as in the mood for Mexican, it can filter results down to restaurants we marked or might be relevant and show them to both of us. Comparing reviews between yelp, foursquare, facebook and google is agonizingly manual. Why cant this be as simple as metacritic? Right now collaborating is a painful mix of handing phones back and forth or sending links and screenshots. It's too real time. The same goes for shopping, comparison shopping together is just as disorganized as any collaborative task. Its very hard to break down the task into discrete components that can happen simultaneously. First you pick what you want, then you price shop, rinse repeat. Even simple stuff, like while planning an event, knowing who called an uber and getting an alert.
And then there is the educational aspect. Publishing and sharing a family budget, spending, net cash flow etc would absolutely benefit kids. They could see and learn how expensive things are, see what spending categories the trinkets they want chip into, where the family can reduce spending elsewhere, and what costs are fixed.
F, why not gamify chores. If you give out allowance for chores, why not have a list of available chores, and let the market handle itself? One kid wants to do all the work, they reap all the reward.
Maybe its less of a Slack/Trellofication and more what I want is a PowerBI/Tableau.
I know things like buildshop.com and getcatalant.com sort of fill that hybrid project management and reviews category, for their own verticals.
A collaborative family calendar, with goal planning, and brainstorming space isnt a bad idea. Hey you want to save for a purchase, heres a budgeting tool. Hey you need a ride to a thing at a certain time, this person is available. Building consensus over whats for dinner can be something people contribute to when they have time over the day, instead of requiring everyone to be on the same page at the same time? Oh we picked a recipe that the inventory knows we are out of an ingredient, add picking that ingredient up to the task list and assign it, before people start driving home for the day.
This comment became a very unfocused vomit of a rant quickly, and I dont feel like circling back around to edit it. Sorry.
[+] [-] asdfman123|6 years ago|reply
I cannot even imagine what it would be like being a teenager under that. Your two choices are either do everything you can to win your parents' approval, or run away at 16.
[+] [-] Simon_says|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theelous3|6 years ago|reply
It's one thing for education to be hyperfocused on results and training for the workforce, it's another for the home to restructure in that direction too.
Extremely regimented people may excel in extremely regimented environments, but frankly they are often deeply uninteresting people to socialise with. (Also, any workplace I've been in hasn't actually been that regimented, and was better off for it. The less flexible people were good but often struggled with being more fluid when required.)
I much prefer the other extreme. Those junkyard diy playground kids and that whole movement away from hyperstructured and linear play. Not that you can't trello a trip to one of those in to the schedule, but I'm guessing that the crossover between the slackified group and the junkyard group isn't huge.
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
I do not have a family or kids, but anything that helps families be more intentional with how they spend time with each other is a really good thing. I know growing up that was far from the case for me.
[+] [-] arvinsim|6 years ago|reply
I disagree. Some things just need to be tried out to see if it enriches your life.
Yes there will be regrets but there is always a risk for potential worthwhile pursuits.
Not everything can be predicted.
[+] [-] coderintherye|6 years ago|reply
Regular meditation and listening to buddhist instructors can help you along this path.
If your intention is to get better at being more intentional, then you are already halfway there!
[+] [-] seltzered_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlphaWeaver|6 years ago|reply
This is interesting... The author may have overlooked the fact that Atlassian also owns Trello.
[+] [-] AlphaWeaver|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian
[+] [-] mistermann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
Similarly all the other software mentioned can be used for simple calendaring, TODO lists, reminders etc., all of which most people here undoubtedly use in some form to manage their life. It's just the association of these brands with "work" that has people going WTF.
[+] [-] whenchamenia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fwip|6 years ago|reply
Please don't generalize your experiences so recklessly.
[+] [-] rusteh1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djaychela|6 years ago|reply
I'm 47 and I still don't really know what I want to do with my life. How the hell does an 8 year old?
[+] [-] celim307|6 years ago|reply
She is definitely a loving mother and cares the worlds for her kids, but I feel incredibly uneasy if this becomes the new norm for kids to succeed in our society.
This is not objective but my brother in law's extended family lives in the suburbs far from a much smaller metro area, spend their time primarily outdoors lightly supervised, and to me are far more confident, articulate, and fun kids.
[+] [-] jMyles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avip|6 years ago|reply
The context is obvious: Parents get less house time, do more house-irrelevant things during said time, and most importantly - the outside is more hostile, so more and more kids life is organized and initiated by parents.
[+] [-] travbrack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stackzero|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avip|6 years ago|reply
This family could use some help. If you're an experienced parent, and have some extra time, please contact us.
[+] [-] lukey_q|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmurthy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] awadheshv|6 years ago|reply
oh god..
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
Firstly a calendar can be very useful for knowing which activities kids are doing, what playdates etc. Schools sometimes throw one off things into the mix. Most parents would use a regular calendar anyway.
For JIRA - well that seems a bit heavy handed when trello would do but really it's a good idea. It's a todo list... so is the default todo app on your phone bad? Pen & paper bad? It's the same sort of thing.
[+] [-] btown|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sittingnut|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kthejoker2|6 years ago|reply
The idea is to generate a sort of "car crash" style gawking response. A classic technique is implying a nationwide phenomenon from 1 or 2 samples.
[+] [-] asdfman123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsatchmo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_mueller|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubercow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfman123|6 years ago|reply
Honestly, if you're going to be so overly organized (which some people are) this at least sounds like a better way to do it. Might as well have your calendar online and your messages in one place so everyone knows what's going on.
[+] [-] AlphaWeaver|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] licebmi__at__|6 years ago|reply
And I personally use org-mode to track my kid's activities (and my own), but I believe a plain white board is better to track the shared goals and messages.
[+] [-] rollthehard6|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radicalriddler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorfsmay|6 years ago|reply
I think a family wiki strikes the right balance of simple and useful. I find in families we quickly specialise and when somebody is away, we struggle to do tasks that could have been captured in a few bullet points
[+] [-] INTPenis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkpuma|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maddy1512|6 years ago|reply
Why can't they just use whatsapp or any IM tool to communicate?
Imagine that child's life who has to close that annoying JIRA ticket every time he cleans up his room.