13305: In Praise Of A Little Slack In Your Schedule

Raw transcript:

You know how I love efficiency. You know
how I say have a bias for action? Well,
in in this moment, I want to take an
opportunity to set efficiency off to the
side in honor of being a slacker.
What? David, what?
Give me Give me I’ll give me a moment
and we’ll talk about it in this episode
of the VO Heroes podcast.
I feel like Eric Marowitz, who had an
article on bigthink.com, I give you a
link to it in the in the show notes, was
talking to me, was singing my song, was
speaking my love language. He said, “We
worship efficiency. We optimize. We
squeeze. But when the storm hits, and it
always does, what keeps you afloat isn’t
optimization. It’s excess capacity,
wiggle room, optionality, margin for
error. It’s slack.
And
it’s so true. I mean, I obviously don’t
want to waste motion. I don’t want to
waste energy. I don’t want to waste
time. I don’t want to waste my time or
my client’s time. But I also want to
make sure that I fail safe my schedule.
You know, I talk about the fact that if
you wait until the end of the two week
period that you have to do a certain
task, ah, I’ll get it done before the
17th. That that’s fine. But what happens
if on the 15th your hard drive crashes,
right?
If you’d gotten it done on the 10th or
the 12th or even earlier in the process,
uh you wouldn’t have had to deal with
that necessarily. You could deal with
the repair of whatever happened, the
disaster that occurred. So, it’s it’s
great to have efficiency. I love
efficiency. There’s something really
glorious about being efficient and sure
about what you’re doing and spare and
brief in your in your motion. But it’s
also a good idea to have some slop built
into your schedule, some wiggle room.
And it’s what he had went on to say was
it’s better to have slack than ultimate
efficiency.
Like it’s better to have some savings in
the bank than to be living paycheck to
paycheck. It’s better to be prepared for
that unexpected moment to pop up by
having some extra room built into your
schedule, you know. Um having a bias for
action when disaster strikes
uh is is helpful because you’ve already
taken care of something. It doesn’t mean
you have to deliver it. You know when we
talk about audiobooks for example um you
can get things done very quickly and
deliver them very quickly and go see I
was I beat the pants off that deadline.
Well, just do the work and then deliver
on deadline, but not so much that you uh
start to beat yourself up if you can’t
beat that deadline like crazy every
single time. Right?
I think that what I’m trying to say is
it’s great to pursue efficiency. It’s
great to pursue honing and refining your
processes,
but not to the point where you constrict
your schedule so much that you have to
be efficient and if disaster strikes,
you’re kind of stuck. So be joyful that
you have built slack into your process,
that you have some room to maneuver in
case lightning strikes or an earthquake
happens or a fire happens and you have
to recover. I can’t tell you how many
times there have been issues where a
piece of software failed me or a piece
of hardware fails me, but my clients
don’t even know it because I have this
slack built into my schedule and they
don’t know what, you know, like tornado
happened on a Thursday when their stuff
is is due the following week and I’ve a
I’ve been able to recover from what’s
going on. If you don’t have that slack
built in though, it’s kind of hard to
recover from that. So, just know that
when I talk to you in these episodes
about being efficient, about uh honing
and refining your processes, your
procedures, your strategies, and
especially your tactics,
that I’m not asking you to then trim off
all the excess of your calendar, but to
take advantage of that. How about just
like being able to relax a bit and maybe
check your work, you know? So enjoy
Slack is what I’m trying to say uh here
in this episode. Uh if you like what
you’re hearing, please feel free to
forward this
to uh a creative type who is waiting
till the end of their schedule to get
things delivered or even done. Hit the
like button if you like what you’re
hearing. Uh you can subscribe to the
channel. You can click the notification
bell to know when these episodes come
out.
I’d be thrilled if you did that. Join
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goodness of all the things that we send
out. I’m David H. Lawrence the 17th. I
thank you so much for watching and for
listening and I will see you in the next
episode of the VO Heroes podcast.

(from YouTube)