Slacking Off

I’ve always believed that the number of good ideas one has is directly proportional to time spent shootin’ the [stuff]. 

For me, it’s not the time spent brainstorming nor is it the time spent focused on trying to come up with good ideas that matters. It’s specifically about the combination of a mindset of time abundance + being without direction + playing with others that generates the kind of lateral thinking from which really good ideas spring. 

That thought came to mind because of having read two books recently that both encouraged the intentional use of slack.

In The Good Jobs Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Zeynep Ton describes how intentionally overstaffing a service operation enables employees to work at their best. She writes: 

“Store employees operating in an environment with some slack can add tremendous value that employees pushed to the limit cannot. Employees who are not always swamped with immediate tasks and who are empowered can use their extra time to identify problems, come up with solutions, and communicate both the problems and the solutions.”

Here, it’s not just the time that enables employees to be more creative, it’s the different mindset the time creates. If experiencing time scarcity, an employee might be more likely to respond to a customer query with a curt, “That’s in aisle five,” while returning to whatever task they’re rushing to complete. 

But where the employees have and feel slack (like at Trader Joe’s, for example), they're more likely to respond, “That’s in aisle 5. I’ll walk you over there.” And because of that, they’re going to have richer, more valuable interactions. 

In Scarcity, professors Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir describe how the lack of slack affects our minds. Their research shows that when we feel time-poor or financially poor, we acquire a tunnel vision that causes us “to focus single-mindedly on managing the scarcity at hand.” Unfortunately, that focus taxes our mental bandwidth, which literally makes us temporarily dumber.  

In one experiment, people in conditions of scarcity lost 13-14 IQ points worth of processing capacity. The authors write: “By most commonly used descriptive classifications of IQ, 13 points can move you from the category of ‘average’ to one labeled ‘superior’ intelligence. Or, if you move in the other direction, losing 13 points can take you from ‘average’ to a category labeled ‘borderline deficient.’” 

In my coaching practice, this dynamic often comes up when a client describes a complex challenge they are facing. But in contrast to the multi-color, multi-dimensional, emotionally complex description of the situation, their solution set sometimes contains only a black-and-white, either-or choice. And therefore, I need to join the Marines or get a face tattoo.  

More often than not, as we debrief the thought process, there’s some form of scarcity that’s causing them to narrow their view. In other words, they’ve temporarily lost access to their full mental capacity. 

So what can one do about this?

First, create slack! 

Mullainathan and Shafir write: “Should you leave spaces open in your schedule, say, 3–4 p.m. Monday and Wednesday, just in case something unexpected comes up, despite the fact that there is so much you’d like to do for which you have so little time? In effect, yes.”

There are lots of calendar strategies that would fit the bill—my favorite is only scheduling meetings starting on the hour, which leaves time for the 30 minutes one to run over and plenty of shooting the [stuff] time in between. But the overriding objective is to leave space for the predictably unpredictable tasks and interactions that’ll come your way. That’s what prevents them from pushing you from a normal state to a scarcity state.

Second, watch out for the signs of being temporarily dumber. 

If you’re only seeing two options for a challenge, it might be a sign that you’re experiencing scarcity of some sort. Often, just talking to someone else who isn’t caught up in our tunnel can help. But if you’re coaching yourself out of the tunnel, some questions that I’ve seen be helpful are:

Who, if they helped me out, would make this choice moot? 

Many times, the tunneling causes people to take the burden on themselves rather than enlisting help.

What’s a third dimension of this problem? How might that open up the solution space? 

In reality, there may be many more dimensions. The idea is really to generate new thinking about the problem and a realization that the current approach may not be robust.

What’s the smallest decision I could make?

Tactically, this introduces the time dimension into decision-making. But it’s often helpful if the decision that’s weighing on us isn’t, in fact, a problem to solve today. Sometimes the “decision” for today is just “wait for more information” or “schedule time to figure it out later.”

Either way, we’re more likely to have access to those insights when we have slack. So here’s to slacking off!