i haven't lived the zoom lifestyle yet, as my only pandemic gig was phone-only.

but i def feel like zoom is over-relied-upon. why else would _so_ many people have zoom fatigue?

then again, this is prob more about team-building exercises than zoom.

i do wonder about the actual effectiveness of said exercises.

i know, 'studies say' -- but....i'm skeptical. i guess i have to read some of those studies.

i wonder if, for the time/effort/money put into teambuilding exercises, could we not just give everyone a 4-day work week?

Perhaps it’s that they are tired of zoom meetings and more that they feel a need to meet people in real life.

a part of me is thinking

"ugh, why couldn't we get a tax credit for, you know, bike bikes? non-electric bikes?" :-D

but i'm not hating much -- a small step in the right direction -- i'll take it!

and i was skeptical e-bikes improve health much, but again - baby steps - i'll take it -- it does appear that they do something, and getting more support for allowing people to bike (i.e. bike tracks) is a big deal.

I suspect the answer is, like most things, 'politics'.

So, to me, for instance, take the biggest problem the world currently faces - global heating.

I think everyone knows the two or three things we would need to do to 'solve it': - carbon tax - carbon capture - energy reset/clean/green/conservation/etc.

But it's only partially 'solved', same as robocalls.

There are just too many people making too much money, having too much success, with robocalling to stop it.

i think this sounds very reasonable.

for yourself or others, do you think your workload would be reduced?

or, would you be able to get the same or more done in 20% less time?

I doubt it would be reduced, generally in these kinds of situations I've seen that the same level of effort is required, just compressed into 4 days rather than 5.

sounds like a good idea to me.

i wonder if a 4-day work week would actually be attractive to employers, especially if they could take a cut (back) of salary.

maybe even something like....it's a 20% work time cut, so maybe for that, i'll need to give you %30 of my salary, which is a lot.

but if some of the studies are to be believed, then productivity can go up with a shorter work week, so salary should actually be _increasing_.

but...you got to get the deal done. so...

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

it's great. seems to be something there for everyone.

fans. musicians. political people. artists. lovers. writers. poets. workers. NJ enthusiasts.

i suspect not.

they seem to show up a lot for me, still, for....almost any search i do.

and looking thru a lot of posts on idiehackers and related, it seems to be the number one place that small companies go to to get attention.

so, the quality may be 'finished', but...they're still highly relevant for most of the web.

i use a super-simple 'email myself' app to type up a quick message so that it hits my gmail and i process it later.

usually that means looking at it, looking it up, figure out what, if anything i want to do with it.

i might delete it. i might archive it. i might bookmark it.

i might put it in my 8-mile-long notepad as 'idea: do this cool thing' so that i can find it later and see how bad of an idea it was, or on the very rare occasion, rethink thru it again, and/or even try to do something with it, bounce it off a friend, etc.

in the end, my two repositories are: notepad (which right now is 'Text' program on my Chromebook, backed by a google doc -- i.e. where the content/file actually lives) * gmail, just in my Archived email

i've never actually known the value of 'innovation management'.

always assumed it had more to do with PR -- "hey big company x, capture the _brilliant_ idea of your _brilliant_ people and make enough money next quarter that you won't get fired, or at a minimum you'll contribute to this idea of the company as being an egalitarian place, democracy, etc."

not hating, that's just my general impression.

This is a totally valid opinion of innovation management and I share it mostly... So quick background I've been involved in 3 startups now with varying degrees of success (1 included an exit). In all of those cases we had our early days where 'ideas' pretty much drove the bus. We had an idea... we validated it (at least in the 1 case of exiting lol) and grew from there. Then something happens when there are 50 people in the office... people have ideas... ideas about the product, ideas about the sales, ideas about the fridge in the break room. Whatever. Point is, now the path forward isn't so clear and version 2 of the product is not as obvious as version 1 was. Processes that worked in the beginning are straining and the founders don't always know exactly why. Do they need to be ripped out and replaced or just incrementally changed. Now in the case of a startup it means the founder clears the schedule, sits down with people and figures shit out. In a large company (250+ people) that's not even possible. It would have been nice if as a founder I didn't have to clear the schedule and brute force this, would have been nice if I could have had a pipeline of ideas that helped team leads quickly approve incremental changes and founders understand new problems and make larger strategic decisions without turning to divination :P (which happens). Sort of like a CRM for ideas... this is how I think about innovation management. Innovation shouldn't a new management objective that demands you show what you 'innovated' on this quarter or your fired.

Been working on a service to let you listen to the web -- similar in function to the audio part of the Pocket app.

Mostly using AWS Lambda and SNS.

Some occasional weirdness in stringing functions together -- might do more with Step Functions.

But weird part is some calls just seem to hang and never return -- unless they get a clean/new function of their own.

Using Pythom 3.8 with Boto3 library.

But generally amazed with what Lambda seems like it might be able to do if I can get it humming.

http://readonthegoapp.com/

Step functions are interesting in theory but they become quite messy in my experience. Are you using Chalice for your Lambda functions? Or something else? What kind of problems are you having with SNS? With Chalice it should be pretty easy to just trigger on SNS messages that come after each step, though I’m not sure which steps you would need for your app. Is it TTS with Poly running async or something?