How to be a Slacker
A version of this post was originally published on October 31 2019 in my newsletter.
One of my favourite pieces of parenting advice is simple:
Don't be in a hurry
(Simple — not easy.)
Kids, much like grown folks, want agency and influence. They want power, and they will get it however they can.
The state of being in a hurry is a powderkeg. It's a situation which contains an immense amount of energy, ready to be exploited.
Children are smart, and they soon learn they can apply the limited tools at their disposal — lingering, dawdling, distracting, tantruming, or whining — to activate the energy of being in a hurry. Their actions can result in outcomes like your increased agitation, lateness all around, and best of all, your undivided attention.
Taking the hurry out of the situation takes the powder out of the keg. So you're whining? That's okay, let me know when you’re done! Can't find your shoes? No worries, we have time to look for them!
Even better, when you're not pressed for time you can give your child power in ways that work for both of you, like letting them put on their own jacket or choose their own gloves.
But I digress — this isn't a parenting blog. What does this have to do with living your own life?
One word: slack. No, not that Slack, the other one: "not taut or held tightly in position".
Slack is the title of a 2002 book by Tom DeMarco. His idea is that organizations need to build slack time into schedules in order to accommodate change, allow for reflection and learning, respond to crises, and defend against burnout.
The advantages of slack time apply outside the office, too. With flexibility in your schedule, you'll have time to think, learn, and make changes. You'll also have time to respond to a crisis or opportunity: recover from an unexpected illness, pursue a sudden inspiration, help a friend, or meet a colleague for coffee when they're in town for a day.
In short, you'll have time to be the kind of person you want to be.
I realized how important it is to me to have slack in my life after my mum had a stroke. I was able to be with her while she recovered because my work and life was flexible — there was slack to work with. Ever since then, I’ve tried to keep some slack in my schedule.
Be a slacker
The idea of having slack in your life can be scary. We admire busyness and productivity, and the thought of having an hour or two every day (or even every week) to “spare” seems impossible.
For a lot of people, it is impossible, as their time is crushed between underpaid part-time jobs and unforgiving commutes, childcare and elder care. Slack time, like leisure time, is a privilege.
But if you are able to create slack time, it will allow you to respond to emergencies, and to be there for people.
You don’t need to to block of hours in your calendar labelled “in case of emergency”. Here's my trick: I take up a hobby, and fill that time with something that's interesting but not critical. Lately it has been studying Korean. I spend about three hours a week on it, but it isn't imperative for my income or caregiving roles. If I had to, I could put it on hold or scale it back.
Slack time isn’t leisure time
A note of caution: Don’t mistake leisure or self-maintenance time in your calendar for slack time. What I mean is, don’t tell yourself, “if there’s an emergency I’ll sleep less, or stop working out, or cancel my standing coffee dates”. If there’s an emergency, you need to be well rested and you need to take care of your body and soul as well as you can.
Slack time needs to be truly optional, as much as you can manage it. And if there is an emergency, and you give something up to deal with it, pay attention to what you’ve given up: it may have become more important than you realized.
Coda
Sep 6, 2023: I did end up giving up Korean, in the long emergency of the pandemic. I didn’t give it up to create time, though, as much as because it wasn’t much fun learning Korean by myself and in online classes.
Now, my slack time is probably the time I spend watching TV or YouTube with my kid in the evenings. I could give that up in an emergency, but I’d also miss out on the joy I get from the videos and shows I watch, and the time I spend with my son. I’d have to figure out how to fit those things into my life in other ways.
Links
Here's a good summary by Herbert Lui of Slack by Tom DeMarco.
The illustration is Rest by French painter Berthe Morisot.