#️⃣ Slack Productivity, Auditing The Media With Critical Thinking, and more
#️⃣ Slack Productivity, Auditing The Media With Critical Thinking, and more
Advice on wow to use Slack effectively, a healthy reminder to have a little skepticism towards the media, and the interesting links of the week
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#slack #productivity #communication
My colleague and Gray Matters co-writer Joan published this week a new article on how he uses Slack as his main communication tool at work: A Slack Engineer’s System to Using Slack Effectively.
This must be easy for him working at Slack, but for others like me, old-fashioned email dinosaurs, working mainly in Slack/Teams seems like the closest thing to productivity hell I can imagine.
Anyway, he almost convinced me that you can use Slack to send long pieces of mulled-over and structured content like you do by email and that you can search and find exactly the message/content you are looking for, similar to Gmail. I still have my doubts, but it seems that probably in the near future, all of us will use less email and more messaging tools like Slack.
Where I totally agree with Joan is that "notifications should be rare". I die inside every time I see anyone receiving like 20 email notifications, WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, updates and any other irrelevant popup that makes you totally lose the point you were working/thinking on so, please, go ahead and disable all notifications right now. Your life will be much better.
Anyway, you should read Joan's article as there is numerous precious concrete advice on how to improve your experience with Slack and any other messaging tool you may use.
— Mario
Mario's links
Tesla Autopilot is better than you think! Here's why.: If you ever saw one of Tesla Autopilot videos and you ever wondered how autonomous cars see the road and the environment, you need to see this video. It is a simple general overview where you will understand the basics of how Autopilot identifies lines, road signs, cars, pedestrians, and even road conditions like rain and the like.
The Best Networking is Not Networking: I fully agree with this article that also gives some very interesting hints for introverts like me on how to make networking. Very recommendable.
Selling My Bootstrapped SaaS Business: Tyler Tringas has one of the most interesting blogs on SaaS and entrepreneurship and this is probably his best piece. He gives lot of detail on the selling process for his former SaaS business Storemapper. The article is from 2017 but it is totally worth reading.
Promnesia from beepb00p.xyz: This blog is one of the most interesting, strange and creative I found in a long time. The author has several blog posts (I don't know if I should call them blog posts, articles, ideas or what) on how to increase productivity via software and in this case he presents Promnesia, a tool to organize all the information that we consume online. I am not sure if I understood exactly how it works but the idea seems very powerful and I'd pay a lot of money for a more usable version of the product.
How to never lose another memory again: Superorganizers is a very useful source of information for productivity nerds like us but this is way too much. MC (fictional name) has a fully complete log of all his days since 2013 with detail on what he did every single day since then.
Joan's meditations
#media #COVID-19 #critical-thinking
Recently, this headline from CNN caught my eye.
First of all, my condolences to Andre's family and his friends. I can't imagine what you must be going through. What follows is not any kind of critique or attack towards Andre of his behavior.
I know that COVID-19 deaths in healthy young people are extremely rare — they admit that much int he article too:
Andre is among the small number of children who have died of Covid-19 and Indiana's first recorded victim under age 18.
I eagerly read the article to try to figure out what happened to Andre. Maybe a new, more virulent strain of the virus emerged? Maybe I should take even more precautions when doing my groceries?
Halfway down the article, it reads:
Although Andre had no underlying medical conditions, the first thing doctors discovered was that he had developed Type 1 diabetes — his blood sugar was a dangerous 1,500 milligrams per deciliter, more than 10 times normal. Type 1 diabetes frequently comes to light for the first time in the setting of an infection.
Wait, I thought Andre was healthy. I am not a Doctor but, as far as I know, you don't just develop diabetes overnight. According to the CDC, Diabetes (both type 1 and 2) is one of the risk factors that put you in the “high-risk” category for COVID-19. I also couldn't help but notice that Andre looked like he was probably overweight, which is another risk factor towards COVID-19 according to the CDC.
While overweight people suffering from diabetes can thankfully have an almost-normal life thanks to drugs and medical advances, I wouldn't objectively describe them as “healthy” if I were a journalist trying to cover the facts and inform people unbiasedly.
Why, then, did the reporters who wrote the article write that — to be generous — disingenuous headline? Well, we should ask them to know for sure. Maybe they were trying to leverage Andre's tragic story to raise awareness of the dangers of the virus in young people? A more machiavellian take could be that CNN, given their political leaning, might be trying to purport the virus more dangerous than it really is because… “reasons” — Don't get me wrong, I think the virus is dangerous and we must take measures (like wearing masks, social distancing, etc.) against it, but does that justify the lying (albeit if “only a bit”) to the public?
Wouldn't you agree that this headline describes the tragic facts more accurately?
I can’t help but think that if the media — I am not talking about CNN specifically here, they are all awful — manipulates even in this seemingly non-political story, one can only imagine how far they bend the truth to fit their narrative in other, more impactful stories.
This kind of easily detectable lies only hurt the publication’s reputation and contribute to the growing divide we are seeing in the US by radicalizing people into one of the sides while creating a vacuum in the middle of any argument. Reality is now more black and white than ever if you blindly believe the media, and the only way to appreciate the actual nuance of reality — the many actual shades of gray in between the extremes — is using critical thinking to cut through its distortions and bias (both conscious and unconscious).
Matt Taibbi has a very interesting article about this subject, where he mostly addresses the political facet of the problem. Read at your own discretion — I don’t completely agree with all his points, but he has a quote that really stuck with me (emphasis mine):
The ideal instead was that we [journalists] showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change. [...]
Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?
All this made me think of what Sam Altman said the other day on Twitter:
It sadly seems that critical thinking is becoming rarer and rarer in these times where everything must be dumbed down to false dichotomies of “us vs them” mentalities in any subject. Consider this to be my little grain of sand towards a more respectful, factual, and science-based public discourse where people can express nuanced and complex opinions and be heard without adhering to any side or party.
— Joan
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