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The Ideal Worker Is All Work, All The Time

Is ‘Love Your Work’ Just Propaganda?

You may be among the many who have found themselves working longer hours during the pandemic than before. In fact, those working from home in the US increased their workday by 40%, about 3 hours a day. This is a reflection of the culmination of the protestant ethic, the ‘ideal worker’ who makes their job the center of their life, and is available every waking minute.

Here is a definition by Eric Reid and Lakshmi Ramajaran,

To be ideal workers, people must choose…

The philospher Elizabeth Anderson is responsible for the concept that businesses run as ‘private governments’, lacking democratic principles that we expect in our ‘public governments’, made up of people we elect to office and the laws and policies we enact through them. In her book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), Anderson explains how we have conserved pre-democratic governance within the business as a holdover from preindustrial practice. As the publisher wrote about her book,

One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number probably would be…

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In Slack is becoming a full messaging app, David Pierce breathlessly wrote about Slack’s allowing direct messaging across the ecosystem of users:

It’s [texting] the highest, most elusive rung of the business communication ladder, and it’s exactly what Slack wants to replace.

[…]

Connect DMs mean that, in theory, Slack can be the only place most employees talk about work. If that happens, it creates a powerful growth engine for the platform, because using Slack no longer requires any kind of organizational buy-in. A freelance designer might use Slack to talk to all their clients, or a salesperson at…

In November 2020, I wrote about the early beta for Dropbox Spaces in First Look | The New Dropbox Spaces, where I did not have access to the beta but just descriptive materials that Dropbox provided. I was limited to an earlier take on Spaces, which was more or less what Dropbox folders have now become: a collection of files with an optional description area at the top.

As I wrote at the time

This version of Dropbox Spaces does not seem like an evolution of the earlier Dropbox Spaces. It’s a radical break.

The New Dropbox Spaces

Some minor changes confused me before…

Quote of the Moment

It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around. The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward.

| Sönke Ahrens

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Linkedin Marketplaces

Microsoft’s New Gig: A LinkedIn Freelancer Market Rivaling Upwork, Fiverr | Amir Efrati looks into Microsoft’s plans for LinkedIn, which extend far beyond a business social network focused on finding jobs. How about a freelancer platform?

LinkedIn is developing a new service called Marketplaces to let its 740 million users find and book freelancers, pitting it against…

I came upon Complish a few months ago and thought I might fool with it before writing it up. However, my time is so limited these days I haven’t had a chance. But I want to draw attention to the founders’ motivation to building a content-centric, asynchronous work management tool:

The first reaction to transitioning to distributed teams is usually to start scheduling more video calls to stay aligned. This works for the first few weeks, but ends up being disruptive, blocking focus and real work. What if we could keep everyone updated on our own time, without interrupting anyone…