Two sides of a coin?

[oursin]

I am so there for this: Efficiency is the Enemy: There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. Yes, absolutely, the need for wiggle room and redundancy in systems.

But I am also here for this: Embrace the Grind: 'The only “trick” is that this preparation seems so boring, so impossibly tedious, that when we see the effect we can’t imagine that anyone would do something so tedious just for this simple effect'. I can think of a lot of things that have involved someone or someones putting in some tedious repetitive grind at some point of some process so that at some other point it will be lovely and smooth and no worries for someotherones. (Funny, why should I think of those 'found hidden in the archives' that were catalogued and the catalogue put online and the documents neatly filed in conservationally appropriate folders and stored in repositories kept to appropriate conditions and made available to them in an efficiently run reading room, because processes were in place...)

Comments

[green_knight]

Thank you for those articles. I'll have to think about them a bit more.

[castiron]

Yes, I think you're right about them being two sides of the same coin. It's hard to do needed grindwork when someone's breathing down your neck about something else that MUST BE DONE NOW MUST SHOW RESULTS NOW NOW NOW NOW, even if stepping back and spending time on grindwork would pay off in the long run.

And how much of that backlog in the bug tracking system was because everyone had too much to do and not enough slack time to say "hey, let's prioritize some of this before we get snowed under"?

[dewline]

So...we need both the grind and the slack. Each has its moments of usefulness.

[snippy]

You can't effectively grind if you have no slack in which to do it - he wasn't fixing any of those problems, which means he had slack to grind them into a system.

[white_hart]

This is entirely my working life right now. We have no slack, so everything is pressurised and chaotic, and without slack we have no time to do advance preparation so it all ends up last-minute and half-arsed, and we try to develop shortcuts just to power through it all that bit faster because there is so much.

[clanwilliam]

I read that article and immediately thought of you, which is not good (for you).

[caulkhead]

That's a very interesting link, thank you. One of the things I really, really appreciate about my current job is that I automatically get a couple of days of slack at the beginning of each monthly cycle. I have been thinking about changing jobs, but I'll need to think carefully about how much I'd miss those.

Unless, of course, I get a new boss (mine is retiring at the end of this year) who objects to that slack and decides I need to fill it up with something...

[clanwilliam]

We have an editor who tries to take our slack. That led to everyone recoiling from their screens in a Teams meeting just from my facial expression alone.

The deadline was reset and everyone else was personally reassured that it wasn’t *their* fault but production deadlines needed to be run past me first.

[cesy]

That first one aligns well with a discussion about just-in-time logistics and empty food shelves - there, slack was called resilience, and that resonates for me in productivity. Efficiency and resilience are in a tug of war and I can choose to move more in one direction.

[silveradept]

I think they are both equally important, for having slack lets you decide which grind might be useful and which grind is not, but also, a good grind (and time to do it) often results in discovering a trove of slack that can be put to good use somewhere else.

I am in the unenviable position of having an organization that has been able to have some slack and has been trying intensely to get back to the non-slacked way things were, rather than using their time for big thoughts and conversations. Or if they are doing them, they're not telling us front-liners about it or any of the progress that's being made. They're also pretty bad at communicating and having channels for us to give them our thoughts, so there are multiple modes of failure here.