evizaer's comments

Has it gotten better over the past three months?

I used to use Workflowy every day, but moved back to Freemind a few months ago and can't imagine going back to workflowy. I'm generally on machines where I can freely install software, and I don't use a smartphone for viewing todo lists, so freemind fits my needs. It's also much more flexible and can export in a few nice ways (pdf and html, for instance).

Convenience is not safety. Your point is not directly relevant to the Franklin quote.

I feel like if employees attempted to assemble into some kind of union, employers would immediately lay them off. There are thousands of other people waiting to get the jobs of the professionals who try to organize. It doesn't make sense to risk your job for a chance to have a little better pay, a few fewer hours, or another couple days of paid vacation.

I'm not a particularly fast reader. I'm genuinely interested in what this article may be trying to say, but there's so much lard in this writing that I had to stop reading after a few paragraphs to save myself the potential huge time loss inherent in getting through the entire thing and being disappointed by the end meaning. The writing is so full of overwrought huge abstractions and hyperbole instead of concrete fact that I can't push myself to even get halfway through it.

I do share the feeling that it describes, though, about the uncaring nature of the way we seem to construct towns these days.

It's marginally productive to read articles about recognizing when you're unproductive.

Also, "fake work" is not not-work.

Of course, the productivity of reading an article is directly correlated to how someone interprets the article and what they learn from it.

Productivity itself is difficult to discuss, because usefulness operates on many axes (axis plural, not sharp metal on the end of a stick). Ex. I find that having a few big projects to mentally plan and chew over with friends or alone has a net positive effect on my happiness, even though such projects will almost certainly never get done. In some ways, thought about such projects is unproductive, but in terms of generating happiness for myself, I find it quite rewarding and, in a certain way, productive.

I had the same response.

The way the article is written stinks of vagueness, imprecision, and general overgenerality. Meaning evaporates under the intense heat of simplification and excessive abstraction.

The author does nothing more than suggest that wasted time is a bad thing--which is obviously tautological.

It certainly makes us and the writer, who are external to "fake work" and clearly superior, feel good about ourselves. We can see this evil that most of the inferior idiots/sheeple/morons/minions/lackeys/middle-managers/people-from-the-wrong-country are outrageously blind to. There's not much going on aside from ego-stroking in the article.

(And yes, you could probably say the same about THIS post if you really wanted to get into it. I think it's important, though, to isolate articles trying to say concretely meaningful things from articles that are just here to make us feel good about ourselves at the expense of some indistinct others.)