jp

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My mom and her siblings report learning their phone number this way. It's effective enough that I know that the house phone of my grandparents half a century ago ends in seven.

This is extreme JP bait.

Exactly the sort of mild optimization that I will become obsessed with.

I think you and the previous commenter would both do well to read the short, hyperlinked definition. (Sorry.)

We use Asana for this. (It's broadly great, and I don't understand how Jira isn't getting its lunch completely eaten. And I'm not just saying that because of my funder.)

I agree with a lot of this, though I think the mental attitude here is still extremely useful. For example, you may be dealing with something outside of your usual ticket system, or a ball may be smaller than something that would justify an Asana ticket.

I have a classic rationality comment on the EA Forum that's reasonably popular. I thought I'd crosspost here. The context is "What are work practices that you’ve adopted that you now think are underrated?"

***

CEA (my employer) has long had the concept of "who owns this ball."[1] I'm gonna have a hard time in this answer conveying exactly how much this has become a whole encompassing working philosophy for me.

Level 1: The alarm bells about dropped balls

If you are having a conversation and someone's like "we should do X"... Someone should really be the person owning the ball for doing (or not doing!) X.

If there's a "ball" (a task of some sort) that's sitting around and not moving forward, and anyone has any uncertainty about who's responsible for it, they should flag that.

Example: "Ok, who owns the ball of reaching out to GWWC?"

Level 2: Passing balls

Be extremely clear in your communication when you're handing off a ball to someone else, or taking on a ball. This prevents balls from getting dropped in the first place. We use dedicated emoji-jargon for this at CEA:

  • 🏈 for handing off a ball
  • 🤾 for catching a ball

Example: "I'm not sure what happened there, looks like a bug. 🏈 to you to fix?"

Level 3: Systems that prevent dropped balls

We have a round robin system in our code reviews, to make sure that each code review is assigned to a single reviewer, who knows that it's their job to review that code. The reviewer then assigns the task back to the original developer to address comments and/or merge the code. The code review can literally never be in an ambiguous state. (Ideally anyway. Human be humans, and it happens.)

Both our developers and our moderators has the concept of an "on-call" rotation, both developed by me. Quoting from the moderator on-call doc:

You should be aiming to ensure an efficiently running ship. It’s your job this week to make sure that everything’s running smoothly. That does not mean doing everything yourself. But this week, the buck of dropped balls does stop with you.

***

I think I've done a fair job of communicating the type of thing I mean, but it really goes quite deep and broad for me. As I predicted, moreso than this suggests.

  1. ^

    I wrote this answer, and then realized I needed to give a shout out to @amywilley and the (CEA) events team, who really embody the spirit of this philosophy. Amy at one point bought like 40 styrofoam balls and had CEA write tasks they were worried might be getting dropped on them, and then we went around finding an owner for the balls, or deciding to drop them by choice.

We've been thinking about this for the EA Forum. I endorse Raemon's thoughts here, I think, but I know I can't pass the ITT of a more transparent side here.

This comment feels like wishful thinking to me. Like, I think our communities are broadly some of the more truth-seeking communities out there. And yet, they have flaws common to human communities, such as both 1 and 2. And yet, I want to engage with these communities, and to cooperate with them. That cooperation is made much harder if actors blithely ignore these dynamics by:

  1. Publishing criticism that could wait
  2. Pretend that they can continue working on that strategy doc they were working on, while there's an important discussion centered on their organization's moral character happening in public

I have a long experience of watching conversations about orgs evolve. I advise my colleagues to urgently reply. I don't think this is an attempt to manipulate anyone.

I basically probably endorse this for you, but would also suggest whether you could do more automatic red-shifting and dimming of your lights in the evening.

Is that common?

My model was that this is the thing going on for many night owls. I believe I had studies at one point that would back this up, but could not immediately find them.

if you benefit from a visual indication of wake time blacking out the external light and replacing it with light under your control seems much better, if you can get it bright enough?

I'm not in principle opposed. The approach you mention has super conceptual benefits under the model you and I share. In practice, I find my friends often have lights that go from zero to very bright very fast. I expect this to be more equivalent to an alarm clock than a subtle nudge to your sleep cycle mechanism to start moving towards wake-up-land.

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