A wonderful article by Shane Parrish on why slack is so important. It’s so important there is a book about it–Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency.
…imagine one of those puzzle games consisting of eight numbered tiles in a box, with one empty space so you can slide them around one at a time. The objective is to shuffle the tiles into numerical order. That empty space is the equivalent of slack. If you remove it, the game is technically more efficient, but “something else is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout is optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it.”
Having a little bit of wiggle room allows us to respond to changing circumstances, to experiment, and to do things that might not work.
Slack consists of excess resources. It might be time, money, people on a job, or even expectations. Slack is vital because it prevents us from getting locked into our current state, unable to respond or adapt because we just don’t have the capacity.
Efficiency is the Enemy
And at the end.
Amos Tversky said the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you’re headed in the right direction.
Efficiency is the Enemy
Wow!
