I think the overall point you’re making is intriguing, and I could see how it might alter my home behaviour if I considered it more deeply. But I also strongly disagree with the following:
Just about every work behavior is an example of bad home behavior
There is a bunch of “work behavior” that has been very useful – in the right measure – for my personal life:
Task Management – This cut down on the time I spend on “life admin”.
Scheduling – Reaching out with “let’s find an evening to play tennis” helps me increase the number of fulfilling activities I do with friends.
Prioritization – Day-to-day life can obscure what’s really important. Thinking about what I really value and want to achieve can make my life more meaningful.
Creating Spreadsheets & Documents – Apart from the obvious use case in personal finance, Spreadsheets are also very valuable to me for evaluating crucial life decisions (“Where should we move?”). I use documents for private events I’m organising (e.g. a weekend trip to the mountains with friends).
Maybe some of them are too obvious and common. But they are things that my grandmother wouldn’t have done – and I suspect that they are mostly derived from work culture.
Agree with you that there is some overlapping tasks. If I were more precise I would say,
“I believe 85% of work behavior is an example of bad home behavior, but depending on your job and other factors this has a wide confidence interval”
Even if the tasks have the same name, they can look very different. For example: scheduling is something we do at work and at home but at work I use outlook and teams to schedule while at home I use text. Entire etiquette of what to do if someone proposes an alternative time, who is expected to come, what you are expected to say if you can’t come. I would argue that while it’s called “scheduling” in both home and work environments there are more differences than similarities between the two behaviors. This is going to wildly depend on your job, I kind of skipped over the assumption that a lot of less wrong users work in an office-like environment.
I think we learn how to use tools at work like spreadsheets, to-do lists, etc that grandma would never use but we are using them to accomplish different goals than at work. I am semi-confident in this even though I haven’t thought through all the tasks because I believe that the incentive structure underpinning the whole work environment leads to different behaviors. It would be an odd coincidence if despite different incentives work and home behaviors were exactly the same.
I think the overall point you’re making is intriguing, and I could see how it might alter my home behaviour if I considered it more deeply. But I also strongly disagree with the following:
There is a bunch of “work behavior” that has been very useful – in the right measure – for my personal life:
Task Management – This cut down on the time I spend on “life admin”.
Scheduling – Reaching out with “let’s find an evening to play tennis” helps me increase the number of fulfilling activities I do with friends.
Prioritization – Day-to-day life can obscure what’s really important. Thinking about what I really value and want to achieve can make my life more meaningful.
Creating Spreadsheets & Documents – Apart from the obvious use case in personal finance, Spreadsheets are also very valuable to me for evaluating crucial life decisions (“Where should we move?”). I use documents for private events I’m organising (e.g. a weekend trip to the mountains with friends).
Maybe some of them are too obvious and common. But they are things that my grandmother wouldn’t have done – and I suspect that they are mostly derived from work culture.
Agree with you that there is some overlapping tasks. If I were more precise I would say,
“I believe 85% of work behavior is an example of bad home behavior, but depending on your job and other factors this has a wide confidence interval”
Even if the tasks have the same name, they can look very different. For example: scheduling is something we do at work and at home but at work I use outlook and teams to schedule while at home I use text. Entire etiquette of what to do if someone proposes an alternative time, who is expected to come, what you are expected to say if you can’t come. I would argue that while it’s called “scheduling” in both home and work environments there are more differences than similarities between the two behaviors. This is going to wildly depend on your job, I kind of skipped over the assumption that a lot of less wrong users work in an office-like environment.
I think we learn how to use tools at work like spreadsheets, to-do lists, etc that grandma would never use but we are using them to accomplish different goals than at work. I am semi-confident in this even though I haven’t thought through all the tasks because I believe that the incentive structure underpinning the whole work environment leads to different behaviors. It would be an odd coincidence if despite different incentives work and home behaviors were exactly the same.