Slack can be defined as excess capacity allowing for responsiveness and flexibility. The slack time is important because it means you never have a backlog of tasks to complete.

If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life.

Many of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing.

“It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack. It’s also possible to make an organization a little less efficient and improve it enormously. In order to do that, you need to reintroduce enough slack to allow the organization to breathe, reinvent itself, and make necessary change.”

To illustrate the concept, DeMarco asks the reader to imagine one of those puzzle games consisting of eight numbered tiles in a box, with one empty space so you can slide them around one at a time. The objective is to shuffle the tiles into numerical order.

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That empty space is the equivalent of slack. If you remove it, the game is technically more efficient, but “something else is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout is optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it.”

The Rubix cube

The Rubix cube has always been a bridge too far me. Something that is impossible and only suited to people that have a superior mathematical brain.

What I didn’t realize as a kid was that it’s as simple as learning the acceptable patterns and memorizing them. And the patterns aren’t that difficult to understand.

Check out these 5 key lessons have stood out for me in learning the cube as a ‘grown-up”.

Lesson 1: It is easier to create chaos than to create order.

If you find a cube the compulsion is to mash it up and ensure it is nice and scrambled for the next sucker to pick it up. Chaos is fun - when you are unsure doing what feels good usually results in less order and going with the flow. This is fun for a bit but evidentially doesn't get you closer to your goal .

In most parts of our life we prefer order; there is something soothing in a solved cube. For me, it is almost compulsive to solve any scrambled cube I come across. But creating order comes from focused, deliberate effort; creating chaos comes much more naturally.

Lesson 2: Approaching order sometimes involves creating more chaos.

The first phase of the algorithm I use for solving the Rubik’s cube involves picking a colour side and solving it. The next phase is to solve the middle layer. This is impossible to do without temporarily “scrambling” the top layer.

When attacking large tasks, we can get frustrated if the work we’ve already done has to be temporarily dismantled, but steps backward are often necessary to move forward with integrity.

Lesson 3: You cannot resolve chaos all at once. Pick your battles.

The main strategy I’ve seen in guide after guide for solving the cube is: Solve one side. Then solve the middle. Then solve the corners, then the last four side pieces (or vice versa).

When I see others approach the cube, I tend to most often see a holistic approach: How can I solve everything at once? If you’ve decided to solve red first, solve red first. Let orange get as messy as it gets, because it doesn’t matter yet. We’ll get to orange eventually.

Lesson 4: In a truly random world, specific chaos is as likely as specific order. Chaos is easier because there are more ways to be chaotic.

This is easier to see with a deck of cards. A fully sorted deck, A-K, sorted by suit is just as likely a configuration as any other specific shuffling. So why can we generally not expect such a thing? Because there are only a handful of “fully sorted” configurations (twenty-four, to be exact), out of about 1068 possible configurations.

So while any specific ordering is no more likely than any other, there are lots more ways for a deck to be “shuffled” than for it to be in “order.” At the same time, we want order, but if someone shuffled a deck and gave it to us in the same order that it comes out of the box, we would accuse them of cheating.

We want order, but we literally stack the deck against ourselves when evaluating randomness. Expecting chaos gets in the way of us achieving the order we so crave.

Lesson 5: To the uninitiated, systematic applications of complex patterns look like magic.

Any chaos can be brought to order with the right strategy. Some strategies are more complicated than others, and outside observers won’t necessarily see the strategies you’re using. They may even mock you. However, the efficacy of a strategy is not in how it looks to outsiders, but in whether it works.

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Social patterns aren’t that hard either

Just be confident in who you are without being a dickhead, like yourself because if you don’t they won’t either, be willing to laugh at your own idiotic stupid mistakes, show genuine interest, say hi and get to know someone.

And practice listening. And when you think you’re good at listening, realise you suck at it, and try to listen more.

There’s a kid inside of all of us. I think we take life too seriously.

Someone once told me that deep down people don’t change — they just get taller.

Go look at a board room full of ‘smart and professional’ executives and you’ll see the same things you saw in the 2nd grade playground:

Jealousy, anger, fear, anxiety, greed, hope, joy, etc.

All the primary emotions are still there.

So, when things get crappy, as they sometimes can, I encourage you to embrace your inner kid –go do something fun just because it’s fun.

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