This Week - Jun 03, 2018

Just because it’s fun to hang out at the water cooler at work, it doesn’t mean I want to work there....

There’s also a subtle side effect to asynchronish business, and that is its effect on the decision making process. When work gets done over email, there’s a general expectation of a response buffer of at least an hour or two. In you, though, people can convene and decide on anything at any time.

This is awesome for speeding up the tempo of company directives, but it also places a ton of pressure on everyone involved to maintain even MORE Slack omnipresence; if any discussion might lead to a decision being made, that provides a whole lot of incentive to be available for as many discussions as possible.

Even worse, those with the least on their plates can maintain the most Slack presence, which leads to the most gregariously unengaged representing the majority of the discussion base while penalizing those who are fully engaged in their “real” work.

— Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You (Samuel Hulick for UserOnboard)

Harmon handled it the way he handles everything: out loud, in front of strangers. It’s the way he handled his divorce (episode 167) and the complicated relationship he has with his parents (too many episodes to name). It’s how he’s confronted the estranged brother who called him a lazy piece of shit and hasn’t spoken to him in 12 years. It’s where he works out his guilt about his sister, born with the rare neurological disorder Rett syndrome, which has left her institutionalized for most of her life. ‘I feel like I was born a criminal,’ Harmon tells me. ‘With a karmic credit card that’s maxed out.’ He says these things in hope of staving off inevitable retribution.

— The Tortured Mind Of Dan Harmon (Sean O’Neal for GQ)