Perhaps I should join the Church of the Sub-Genius, because my uttermost value is discretionary time. In other words, slack.
What motivates me at work or play is solving puzzles that save me time, and therefore give me more slack, some of which I invest in solving more puzzles that save me time, therefore giving me a return on my slack.
Time is my money. What I earn or do is valuable insofar as it earns me time.
Too bad the world isn't officially set up that way.
What I would love to see arise in an economy in which individuals and organizations were rewarded and punished based on their net product of time.
Regardless, the economy of slack is there, and persons in business (and sometimes, in a dim and diffuse way, the businesses themselves) are working with slack, in maximizing and improving output of it, and by generating this precious resource are leading the way to an economic revolution.
That's right: Move over, Industrial Revolution! The Age of Slack is here to stay!
Officially, consciously, you work for money, a currency with with you can purchase other commodities including, you think, slack.
Oh, no. It's the other way around. You are an economy unto yourself, one of the world's leading producers of discretionary time, time that is sought after by persons, corporations, schools, Mormon missionaries, the telemarketers, the kid selling magazine subscriptions. Even the government is out to get a piece of your life.
For your time is special; it comes nicely-loaded with a special feature: you, your skills, your experiences and insights. Such items sweeten the pot for customers out to purchase (sometimes at ludicrously cheap rates) your slack, but mostly they're after taking a piece or two of your life at a time, and using it to do things that they want to do.
They're sucking the life out of you, pal. But that's okay; you get yours, too.
And we're here to discuss how you can protect and expand your slack.
Slackness = Productivity
That might evoke a collective Huh?, and by golly, it did.
It's true. Think it through.
Slack Saints
The manager who handles the getting of information from other departments, of arranging valuable meetings, getting staff appropriate gear for their work is one who generates time, and therefore is worthy of a bump in pay. There's a lot of housekeeping BS in a corporation; that sort of service is what good managers do, and bad managers delegate. It's called management.
This leader is taking up slack, and investing it in the team, saving not one but several people precious time, ergo slack. That's productive.
Likewise the worker who innovates and creates either a new service or a means of performing an existing role in less time, is a net producer of slack. Throw that person a bonus. Keep on eye on that future captain of industry, will you?
Slack Sinners
The reverse cases are also present, and should be sanctioned; the bane of Weberian organization, too many meetings, should be vanquished, and all managers who call too many meetings should be sent into exile, never to return...that is, until they are ready to play nice and be with people in appropriate doses and formats. :)
Likewise, the worker who blows off assignments, leaving the tasks for peers to perform, or doesn't bother informing internal customers that they aren't going to make that objective, is wasting other people's time.
That would be cutting into my slack, and by golly, I won't stand for it.
Slackness = Sound Business
As corny as all this sounds, the fundamental mathematics of commercial civilization is based on the two-way conversion of between the value of time and money. Think of it as physics for finance.
Things to Do to Protect and Expand Your Slack
1. Pay yourself sufficient hours of sleep.
Being sick and foggy-headed when awake cuts into your slack. Sick and foggy people have to spend more slack maintaining personal and professional relations, and performing routine tasks. Solving those puzzles that earn you more slack become more challenging. Further, sleep deprivation makes a person error-prone, and that can lead to slack-damaging consequences such as extended work hours, reduced likelihood of raises and promotions (which can get you valuable resources to convert into slack), and bad judgment calls that eat into your slack and that of others, at which point you run into the ultimate slack risk: the need to spend time finding a new job.
2. LIVE at work. You only think you have a home; most of your waking workweek is either preparing for work, getting to work, being at work, or returning and recovering from work. There are people who rent apartments near their places of employment, because it is physiologically unsustainable for them to commute back and forth from their primary residences every workday.
Modern corporatism has forced this uber-commuter motif onto your life, at grievous charge to your slack portfolio. You, my friends, are being exploited; feel like your life is not your own? That someone has taken it from you? That's because someone has.
3. Don't get revolutionary. Enrich yourself with slack.
Regardless of your actual work hours or the mode of same, the chief driver of slack production is your occupation. Most organization are incompletely aware of the principles of slackness, therefore leaving you opportunity to appropriate your producer surplus of slack in real time.
This isn't stealing from the company, since you are paid for goods and services produced, not time. Read it! Most of you are exempt salaried employees! It's the law!
4. That time is yours, and you know it!
Many of you are doing this already: fun conversations with peers, a little computer game action on the side window, some Kos conversation when there's an off moment (or hour or two) in the work cycle. If you did not do your job as evaluated in terms of physical, service or data output, you'd be spending slack finding a new job.
On the other hand, companies have an empirical understanding that happy workers do two things (a) they come to work, at which point they are more tractable, and (b) they don't demand quite so much in the form of wages, salaries and financial benefits. Companies are negotiating for their cut of slack, too, some more astutely than others, but all are aware that something is going on, even if they don't quite get it.
Now, in a true slackness-minded enterprise, your net production (and consumption) of slack while on the premises would be much more closely monitored, but the good news is that you, as a lifelong expert of slack, would find your compensation and promotion prospects skyrocketing. Cool, huh?
5. Diversify your income It's great having a job, splendid having a nice-paying one. But only one income source is problematic. You need backup. Find ways to invest some of your time in projects that yield a high return on slack later on; crafts that lead to other, interesting occupations, even inventions and business ideas, mingling in places where ideas are generated. (I make no bones about it, I'm a big fan of random conversations in bars and coffee shops.) Invest some slack to widen the scope of your aspirations for more slack. Get in the habit of using some of your slack to work on ways to own your own business, to sock away slack for later on when you will really want it -- for your retirement, or just recreational daydreaming about how to...
6. Generate Slack for Others. You want friends, wealth, influence, power, more slack? Then share the wealth -- save other people time, give them discrete quantities of more of their own lives, and they will not only be grateful but generous. You cannot buy the gratitude of wealthy, powerful, influential and slack-saturated persons.
But all are appreciative of more slack, more time.
The simplest way is to not waste people's time...
...which suggests that this diary is over. :)