I'm kind of over people complaining about how LinkedIN sucks because ... or Facebook users are ... or Instagram Photos are .... Social Media channels are like TV channels. If you don’t like them you can ignore them or even delete them. Just do that. Why fill my feed with your rubbish. In fact you can refine your feed even further ... block, remove, delete the people that offend you. It is much easiermassively more effectiveway quicker than writing a screed on why you feel so upset.

Photo by AR on Unsplash I promise, Manton, Daniel and I did not coordinate this - I think sometimes synchronicity just happens. In last weeks newsletter I asked the question "Why Do You Work?" A reply post will be available this Saturday. There have been some great answers, but that is not the reason for this post. Manton Reece - the brain behind Micro Blog 1 and Daniel Jalkut - the brain behind Red Sweater 2 have a weekly podcast called Core Intuition.

For decades, the business world has embraced worker empowerment. But recently a countermovement—workforce optimization—has been on the rise. It treats labor as a commodity and seeks to cut it to a minimum by using automation and artificial intelligence, tightly controlling how people do their jobs, and replacing employees with contractors. This approach is especially prevalent in the tech sector and the gig economy. And it is cause for deep concern.

”I thought back to the day I decided to go to law school. It was a warm spring day. May 4, 1970. I was a freshman at Oberlin College. A few days earlier, President Richard Nixon had expanded the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia. Antiwar college protests erupted throughout the country. About 1 p.m. in the afternoon, the news hit us in the gut as we huddled around TVs and radios on our sheltered college campus.

Or as Cal puts it … "Slack is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work." ”The future of office work won’t be found in continuing to reduce the friction involved in messaging but, instead, in figuring out how to avoid the need to send so many messages in the first place.” Cal Newport Cal nails the problem I have with Slack that I have never managed to nail down.

A response to a recent newsletter. Specifically one where I explored Work Location. (You might want to click in and have a read to get the context.) Sometimes people have a lot to say, but they don’t join into the dialogue - nor even make comments. I get it. I really do. Another post from an anonymous reader, this time answering something I wrote in a newsletter and again - reproduced with permission from the original writer.

As a reader of this blog and newsletter or as a listener of my podcast - you know that I am a keen supporter of the broad category of ‘creative professional’ - and specifically ‘musician’. What follows are not my words, but those of a musician that wrote to me recently. Reproduced with their permission and names and venues changed/anonymized to ‘protect the vulnerable’. I just got my first real paying gig since March 17 for Saturday December 26th.

Why employee surveys, like political polls, are misleading. They should have called me!