Andrea Rosen.



I live and work in New York, New York. You can find me all over the internet, like here, here, or here and ask me something here.


Nice things people have said about me:


"You were deemed 'good to have around.'" -a coworker


"You look like you should be in a catalog selling Brooklyn." -a roommate


"You think you're a lot funnier than you actually are." -an ex-boyfriend


"Don't put this in your blog." -my mother
October 22
brianvan: tanya77: This would work great if it was 1999 and/or you didn’t work in business. LOL. Sure, “maximize single tasking”… sign me up! All of my production jobs have had multiple concurrent urgent tasks, unlimited incoming task capacity, the need for constant email monitoring, and no daily deadlines. I’d often schedule doctor appointments in the morning because it was better to take half a personal day two weeks in advance than to possibly pay a costly cancellation fee for something scheduled at 6pm on a day where I simply could not leave my desk before 9pm. It’s a good thing I have no kids, because one of them might be halfway through grade school right now and may have never sat down for dinner with me on a weekday. An entrepreneur is lucky to be able to enforce such work guidelines for their own business, and a staff worker often has zero control over this. This is why I think people at well-funded web startups often live in fantasy land. Just like in 1999! Looking from the opposite angle: since this sort of work arrangement seems sensible (if not permissible for most people), then why don’t we work to strongly encourage these kind of effective workflows across the entire working population? Clearly, the “surf the Internet half the day, work until 9pm” thing is not doing anyone any favors. (and really, almost everyone I know does some version of that.) If you have time to construct intricate productivity schedules in a rainbow of dry erase markers on your company whiteboard, maybe your problem isn’t optimizing productivity, but focusing on your actual fucking job. Everything about this annoys me to no end. (Previously)

brianvan:

tanya77:

This would work great if it was 1999 and/or you didn’t work in business.

LOL. Sure, “maximize single tasking”… sign me up!

All of my production jobs have had multiple concurrent urgent tasks, unlimited incoming task capacity, the need for constant email monitoring, and no daily deadlines. I’d often schedule doctor appointments in the morning because it was better to take half a personal day two weeks in advance than to possibly pay a costly cancellation fee for something scheduled at 6pm on a day where I simply could not leave my desk before 9pm. It’s a good thing I have no kids, because one of them might be halfway through grade school right now and may have never sat down for dinner with me on a weekday.

An entrepreneur is lucky to be able to enforce such work guidelines for their own business, and a staff worker often has zero control over this.

This is why I think people at well-funded web startups often live in fantasy land. Just like in 1999!

Looking from the opposite angle: since this sort of work arrangement seems sensible (if not permissible for most people), then why don’t we work to strongly encourage these kind of effective workflows across the entire working population? Clearly, the “surf the Internet half the day, work until 9pm” thing is not doing anyone any favors. (and really, almost everyone I know does some version of that.)

If you have time to construct intricate productivity schedules in a rainbow of dry erase markers on your company whiteboard, maybe your problem isn’t optimizing productivity, but focusing on your actual fucking job. Everything about this annoys me to no end. (Previously)