So, here you are, working through your daily tasks, balancing e-mail, files, meetings, phone calls, deadlines… You are trying to make a meaningful progress with your work. Over the months or years, you’ve been trying to perfect the routines to achieve the highest efficiency possible. You are a multitasking master, you know plenty of time saving tricks, and you can seamlessly follow the processes. In spite of all this, at times you feel like you’ve been working really hard, making every minute count, you are exhausted at the end of the day and you may still be frustrated. Frustrated because certain tasks took you longer than you expected, or because you’ve realized if you teamed up with that guy from the second floor you wouldn’t need to do so much research on your own, or because they told you at the end that they really just needed that table on the page 13 out of your 25 pages long report.
Well, what you need my friend is “essential slacking”. I can imagine people having really bad images of slackers – they imagine someone in a messy office drinking soda while playing solitaire on the computer, or girls in the café downstairs, chatting about personal issues. That’s not what I mean, although actually maybe a bit of it too. We get so much caught in the daily routines and in perfecting our moves that we often forget about the big picture, we may forget the real goal, we may become isolated work bees without creativity, and innovation may seem as something only the scientists and researchers can do.
What I mean by essential slacking is a deliberate pause in your routine. Notice yourself spinning the wheel, working hard, multitasking… and stop. Just sit for a while, walk around, talk to someone, do whatever it takes to take you out of your routine. And then imagine your work from the higher perspective. Remind yourself what you are doing, why you are doing it, what is the whole purpose. Imagine what you would do if you had only 2 hours to finish what you are working on, instead of a week. Forget about the process and think about the goal. Maybe you will all of the sudden remember a person who has some expertise you may use instead of doing everything all by yourself. Can you team up? Maybe you will stop fretting about the colors or fonts. Is there a simpler way to do this? And maybe you will just focus on the most important parts and streamline your original plan into something short and crisp. What is really necessary and why?
Getting into essential slacking is difficult at first. Whenever you are deeply into something, you feel the rush and working on a task may give you a great feeling of self worth. It’ll feel uncomfortable to just stop. You may fear that if you stop now, you’ll lose the momentum, you’ll get distracted, and you’ll lose the thought. Come on! Have a little trust in your ability to go back to whatever you are doing after some time. And risk a little too. Maybe you’ll forget an idea that you have right now. But with essential slacking, you may come up with even better ideas, that will actually save you time and create a bigger impact.
Essential slacking allows you to stop and rethink your approach. There will always be more work than we can do. But the point is not to work the hardest. Let‘s face it, what is behind being successful in anything what people do? It is getting the right things done. And essential slacking will prevent you from losing yourself in your own world, from getting blind to the reality and from wasting time on trying to spin your wheel faster and faster.