Tag: productivity

Virtual Courts

In July the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators jointly endorsed a set of “Guiding Principles for Post-pandemic Court Technology” with a blunt message: The legal system should “move as many court processes as possible online,” and keep them there after the risk of infection passes. The pandemic, they wrote, “is not the disruption courts wanted, but it is the disruption that courts needed.”

Tenants facing eviction in Arizona and parents threatened with losing their children in Texas also proved much more likely to make their court dates when they could do so online. Likewise citizens summoned for jury duty: In Texas, 60-80% show up online. That’s 2x as many as formerly appeared in person. The trend bodes well for diversifying juries, which tend to skew white and affluent.

As these trade-offs become clearer, some initial consensus is emerging as to what virtual courts should and shouldn’t do post-pandemic. Just about everyone, even a skeptic like Douglas Hiatt, agrees that they should keep handling the routine business—from scheduling and settlement conferences to contested traffic tickets and uncontested divorces—that fills most court time.

China Slackers

Buy a large thermos bottle, and fill it with either Chinese herbal tea or whiskey, as a desk-side companion. Set a reminder on your phone to drink 8 glasses of water every day, and leave your workstation every 50 minutes to get that water. Start doing 15 minutes of stretches, or planking, in the office pantry. Set the goal of becoming the person who uses the most toilet paper in the company.

These are some of the tips for how to slack off at work provided by Massage Bear. Her philosophy of “touching fish” (mō yú), synonymous with lazing around at work, has resonated with many Chinese, increasingly exhausted by society’s ever more intense rat race.

as China becomes more prosperous, bullshit jobs are growing, just like in other advanced economies. Makes me wonder whether the transition to UBI will happen faster in China if these trends accelerate, as they likely will.

Solving online events

It’s often struck me that networking events are pretty inefficient and random. If you’re going to spend 1 hour or 2 in a room with 50 or 500 people, then you could take that as a purely social occasion and enjoy yourself. But if your purpose is to have professionally useful conversations, then what proportion of the people in the room can you talk to in 1 hour and how likely is it that they’ll be the right ones? Who’s there? I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners, as in the image at the top, so that you could look across the room and see who to talk to. (First Tuesday did something like this in 1999, with different colored badges.)

This might just be that I’m an introvert asking for a machine to manage human connections for me (and I am), but there is also clearly an opportunity to scale the networking that happens around events in ways that don’t rely on random chance and alcohol tolerance. A long time ago Twitter took some of that role, and the explosion of online dating also shows how changing the way you think about pools and sample sets changes outcomes. In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA started online. Next, before lockdown, you would often have planned to schedule a non-urgent meeting with a partner or client or connection ‘when we’re in the same city’. That might be at some specific event, but it might also just be for some ad hoc trip – ‘next time I’m in the Bay Area’ or ‘next time you’re in New York’. In January most people would never actually have thought of making that a video call, but today every meeting is a video call, so all of those meetings can be a video call too, and can happen this week rather than ‘next time I fly to that city’ – or ‘at CES/NAB/MIPCOM’. In the last few months video calls have broken through that habit. I wonder what happens if we accelerate all of those meetings in that way.

On the unbundling of events, and how networking might be done better.

Mental Models

A mental model is just a concept you can use to help try to explain things (e.g. Hanlon’s Razor — “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.”). There are 10k of mental models, and every discipline has their own set that you can learn through coursework, mentorship, or first-hand experience.

There is a much smaller set of concepts, however, that come up repeatedly in day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking. As Munger says, “80 or 90 important models will carry 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.”

This post is my attempt to enumerate the mental models that are repeatedly useful to me. This set is clearly biased from my own experience and surely incomplete. I hope to continue to revise it as I remember and learn more.

Fighting for the user

longer term, this will be an AI arm race of sales bots battling user bots.

Comcast cancellation is just the beginning for AirPaper, whose stated mission is to make bureaucracy “surprisingly pleasant.” Next the startup wants to tackle San Francisco parking permit and business tax registration, as well as the visa application process for visiting China.

UBI pretend work

this is encouraging from a feasibility of basic income point of view:

If you add any actual value to your company today, your career is probably not moving in the right direction. Real work is for people at the bottom who plan to stay there.

i’ve long suspected that people at most companies don’t actually do anything and would not be missed.