157 - The importance of slack ⌛
No, not the technology, , the concept of slack. Let me explain.
“I’m so busy”
I say this, so…damn…much. How are you going? Yeah, busy. How’s life been? Oh, I’ve just been busy. Work, y’know?
Busy-ness has become a kind of…badge of pride, especially in the corporate world. If you’ve got things going on in your life, then you’re productive, you’re a contributing member of society, you’re going places, you’re doing things! The more you output, the better you are as a person and this can lead to pretty damaging things for your identity, especially when you make a mistake, or seem to slow down.
Recently, I realised that I had cultivated a bit too much of an image of ‘being busy’, and was using it as a bit of a way to dodge things, or as an excuse for why I was tired, or not up for things (both inside and outside of work). I’m notoriously bad at taking time off, for no reason whatsoever other than I never felt like I needed it, and somehow enjoyed the toil.
Or at least felt I liked the toil - probably some Asian grit thing I was raised with.
Working hard became an identity, but without any purpose, I would just heap things on my plate to make sure I was busy busy busy all the time. I started to have what I saw was called ‘Revenge Bedtime Procrastination’, a phenomenon from China which is essentially ‘staying up late because I didn’t have time during the day to actually do anything I wanted to do’.
I tried to think through how to get around this, and serendipitously stumbled across this article - Efficiency is the Enemy once again into my life - I had read it before, but it was a good reminder of why we rest, that I thought I would share.
“Take it easy”
The main contention of the article is that there’s an optimal amount of slack that a person / business should have to optimise their output.
With too much ‘efficiency’ and utilisation, our lives become chock full of tasks, and we actually find it difficult to take on new things that come our way. They get added to an ever-growing list, which exponentially increases as we try to get through it.
This diagram shows that there are two main costs to utilisation:
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Low utilisation means that any new task you put into the queue can be easily performed, and there’s a low delay cost (i.e. you can get to it quicker). The busier you are, the longer it will take for you to get around to doing something, because you still have so much other stuff to do - thus, a higher delay cost.
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However, a low utilisation also means that there’s a cost to idle capacity - i.e. an opportunity cost of someone sitting around doing nothing.
Basically, there’s an optimal amount of utilisation that gives you the right amount of slack to respond to things when required, while not wasting time sitting around waiting for something to happen.
The article explains it quite well:
Slack also allows us to handle the inevitable shocks and surprises of life. If every hour in our schedules is accounted for, we can’t slow down to recover from a minor cold, shift a bit of focus to learning a new skill for a while, or absorb a couple of hours of technical difficulties.
I think this idea applies to dating, hobbies, learning new things, tv shows - everything in our lives that we need to make time for, but we’re so freaking busy. Without some down time that is ‘empty’, we can’t be creative, we can’t take on new things, we can’t explore and play.
You’ve experienced this, I’m sure. When you get really sick, your whole world has to stop, and you need to take stock of where you’re at and what you’re doing with your life. How many times did I hear through the pandemic ‘yeah it was good to take a break for a while‘ when people had COVID, and then go straight back to work right afterwards? I know I did that exact thing, and it was stupid.
In a more common example, my tv show / movie list continues to grow and grow. “Yeah, I’ll put that on the list.” What list? When will I have the time for it?! All the boardgames I want to play - “Yeah this’ll be fun when I get around to this!” - I have a bunch still in the damn shrinkwrap.
“Breathe”
The solution, you might say, is to make sure you build slack into the week. I’ve started doing this now - scheduling rest days and adding extra time after long nights that I know I’ll need to recover from. Burning the candle at both ends, or trying to do everything you want to without taking the time for yourself leads to a puddle of wax that can’t do anything - and that’s even more of a waste of time.
But it also might just be how you consciously use that slack time to do things you want to do, and you can indulge in as a salve for the soul. It’s about being more aware of slack time that’s being taken up by shit - YouTube rabbit holes, Reddit doomscrolling, Instagram and Tiktok reels. What can you create, or experience, or learn, or do, that would be something more intrinsically fulfilling?
It’s not just rest I’m talking about, where you need to sleep, or turn off your brain for a bit to make sure you decompress and destress from your day. I’m good with that level of ‘doing nothing’ - that’s just as important.
But in addition, it’s about the time you set aside for yourself to explore and do something fulfilling that’s just for you. It’s about the slack time we have at work for coffees and chatting and socialising, to help us figuratively get up and stretch our brains as we might do with our muscles.
Just some time to breathe.
“Just do it”
This whole piece is pretty much just for myself to think out loud and understand why I have felt I can’t do things, or I don’t do things that enter the queue. Previously, I would have a thought of something I might want to do, and then I repress it thinking I’m really busy, when in actual fact I’m just busy doing dumb shit.
When I cut those things out, I started again. I started writing fiction again. I started a new hobby, lockpicking, so that I could have something to do while I watch TV. I started jumping into my tv list of things I have really wanted to watch for a very long time, and I’ve loved every bit of it. I started to make time again, for games and writing and sunlight and exercise and the joy of novelty.
I started feeling whole again.
To slack, and new beginnings.
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Matrix Resurrections - recommended ONLY if you have a spare night, you don’t care about the legacy of the Matrix that much, and you want to see some not bad action sequences. They really tried - you can see it. The action scenes have cool set-ups, but they miss the mark on choreography and actually seeing what is happening. The character reveals are really cool, but they aren’t impactful. The story tries so hard to be a meditation on the illusion of choice, but it doesn’t exactly land. I know that this was Lana Wachowski’s way to just…do the sequel, but it was still a bit hamfisted in execution. Won’t fault the performances though - they gave it their all, and some of the decisions re: how the machines work with humans are great, but it just didn’t give enough breathing space to the story to actually do anything. Thus, a heavily caveated recommendation.
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Cork and Chroma - a fun paint and sip place in Collingwood - the Picasso night was done for a friend’s 30th and was not bad at all! Honestly stressful because I’m shit at painting, but a fun night nevertheless. The joy is in the journey, not the destination. Recommended!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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The Last Floppy Disk Business - my favourite link from the last week or so - an interview with one of the last guys in America who sells floppy disks. They’re still used in old machines to transfer data and programs - and he’s the last place to buy from!
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55 the game - flip this switch on for exactly 5.5 seconds. Fantastic.
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How to beat a deepfake - tell them to turn sideways. AI hasn’t learnt how to map someone’s frontal face with their profile, which is one of those gaps I was talking about last week. Stay one step ahead of AI!