from Hacker News

I'll take it slow today

by markozivanovic on 3/12/24, 12:20 PM with 16 comments

• by shermantanktop on 3/14/24, 7:22 PM

  This article has a lot of "trend" and "have you noticed" and "people are doing X" and "this is a thing" statements. I'm not looking for hard data in a blog entry but this smells a lot like someone extrapolating from a few interactions to create a buzz article.

  But I'll take the bait: I have noticed no such trend.

  People did that before pandemic, they do it now. Some of them are performatively demonstrating that they are important, and therefore busy, and therefore tired. Some of them appear to have medical issues. Some of them have a cold but find lying in bed boring. Some of them are indirect-bragging about their heroic alcohol intake.

• by brickcrocodile on 3/14/24, 6:59 PM

  There's little consideration for the times where this isn't some sort of voluntary choice. "If you’re not feeling well enough to work, don’t." is fine and well if you've got unlimited sick days, never get sick, or don't have any sort of disability.

• by zemvpferreira on 3/14/24, 6:59 PM

  This seems to me like a lack of people skills on both sides of the conversation.

  Not feeling great today? Keep it to yourself or at most tell people who depend on you for something critical today. Avoid all work that isn't urgent and important. Communicate as necessary and expected.

  Other person not feeling great today? Don't ask them to do anything that's not urgent and important. Feel free to ping them via message on random stuff, they're not doing work-work anyway.

  Any of that feel like too much? Person fucked up, they should have taken sick leave instead.

• by WesolyKubeczek on 3/14/24, 6:57 PM

  Here’s my secret: my every day is a slow day. If they don’t accept my slowness, they don’t deserve my quickness.

• by marginalia_nu on 3/14/24, 6:56 PM

  Interesting that almost every take is about various ways how other people will react to this.

• by Jevon23 on 3/14/24, 6:56 PM

  I assume that the text is as AI-generated as the picture is.

• by inSenCite on 3/14/24, 7:13 PM

  People still have/use status messages? I haven't seen a status message in almost decades now probably, and definitely not in a work context.

  Signaling you are sick and working via a status message just seems like an odd choice. The pessimist in me looks at this as signaling for sympathy.

• by rwc on 3/14/24, 7:13 PM

  It isn't my responsibility to adapt to your slow day. Keep it to yourself, be a professional. This "trend" seems little more than just immaturity.

• by triceratops on 3/14/24, 7:08 PM

  Do people really say "I'm deliberately working slow today"? It sounds unprofessional. Just work at the pace you feel comfortable, commit to deadlines accordingly, and block your calendar if you aren't at your desk or are working heads-down on something.

  Sometimes I work slow, sometimes I work fast but either way it isn't other people's business to know. I always hit my deadlines, and if I can't I meet a deadline I communicate it as early as possible.

• by __loam on 3/14/24, 7:16 PM

  If I only worked on days where I felt "fully recovered", I wouldn't do that much work at all. This article feels kind of tone deaf.