Slacking as Self-Care

So this one time I was at a job interview at a supermarket chain based out of Welwyn Garden City and I was asked “what would you say is your biggest flaw?” Or something like that. What sticks out in memory is how cheap the office was furnished for a company which amounted to a 1 pound in every eight spent in the UK. The excuse they gave was that everything they did was ‘for the customer’ and no frills were spent on staff. Anyway, I was canny enough to understand that you don’t say something like “I’m a cold-hearted bastard” or “I’m on medication for anxiety” or “I collapse under pressure.” I realised that you’re supposed to say something which is a strength and instead make it look like a flaw. So I said that I’m a perfectionist and that everything has to be correct and that I really couldn’t even sleep if I thought I’d done a bad job. The interviewer - someone from HR - smiled in a way which is now reminiscent of an expert hunter and we moved on.

I didn’t get that job - the feedback I received was that I was too quiet in group settings - and looking back I think I gave the wrong answer. There is no correct answer to that question but saying I’m a perfectionist leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Perfectionism is a terrible flaw. You will waste your life on tasks which don’t matter. The standard cultural story is that a perfectionist is somebody who gets everything done to an impossibly high standard. Now I see why the HR rep smiled in the way she did: My desire for professional competence created a psychological trap which made me exploitable. It took me a decade to realise that some professionalism was not killing myself over every detail. Professionalism is ruthlessly distinguishing when what deserves excellence from what should be just good enough.

In other words I had to learn that to prioritise.

This meant refusing to do tasks which are neither important or urgent. I had to carry the attitude that it’s not an issue if, on a cosmic scale, things aren’t perfect. What happened is that I got much more done, and had a better time doing it, if I let my standards slip.

I can almost hear the objections: isn’t this slacking? Isn’t it selfish? Don’t you feel, even a little bit, guilty? Let me address these one by one. Yes, saying no to unimportant tasks, doing an acceptable job, this is slacking. Yes, I agree that slacking can be a bit selfish, but I disagree that it’s a vice. I would be selfish if I forced my colleagues to do pointless work, where instead I expect them to slack early and slack often. This way I sleep soundly at night.

What changed? What cured me was plotting my life out in a grid: one box for each week in a year, five years aligned vertically, each row a 52 box row. I realised that my life was finite. I coloured in the boxes that had already passed, and the empty boxes were going to get filled in whether I liked it or not. So instead of orienting myself around what I could do, or what I ought to do; instead there was what I wanted to do, and I had to chase after that.

Realising you have to prioritise isn’t sufficient. Finitude isn’t a shield against the daily stream of tasks coming your way: you still have to figure out which tasks you can refuse without consequence. So you need to classify them in some way. Classification will allow us to prioritise, and then simply drop things which aren’t a priority. It’ll also give us some idea of what slacking actually is, in a technical sense. There are millions of classification systems out there, hidden away in productivity blogs and on youtube and tiktok. By far the most popular is the Eisenhower Matrix. It’s popular because it’s simple. You might think that because the framework is simple, everyone can understand it. This is false. The idea is too simple, and easily dismissed. I have seen seasoned professionals fail not because they don’t know the Eisenhower Matrix, but because they know it and still can’t execute it. Here’s why.

The Eisenhower Matrix classifies tasks in two dimensions: Urgent and Important. Urgency implies an upcoming deadline, and a failure to complete the task in time will result in consequences. For example, if you don’t pay your rent on the 1st of the month every month, then you will get evicted. There are actual consequences attached to the deadline of an Urgent task. Actual is the operative word here, since most professionals operate in a world of fantasy consequences. You can tell that there are no consequences attached to a task because when questioned people will use language like ‘could’ ‘maybe’ ‘if’ ‘possibly’ etc. That is, completing the task will block off some hypothetical consequence in the completer’s mind, which is another way of saying that the productivity was all about anxiety or ego or something else and not anything which we can point to as a consequence collectively.

Important tasks are tasks which, in some small way, contribute to your long term goals. Maybe it’s buying a house, getting a promotion, starting a business, etc. They are about life values and long term goals. They are the raw material of what our life becomes. These are tasks that grow businesses and write books and plant orchards. They are not dotting every i and crossing every t.

So what do you do with your tasks?

First you classify them. The easiest is whether they are Urgent or not. This should be simple, since there either is, or isn’t, a deadline attached to the task. Then you decide if a task is Important. This is a little more subjective, but you can always change your mind.

Once you have your tasks classified, then there are four basic actions you need to take.

For tasks which are both Urgent and Important you need to do them now. As in, now this minute, this day, this week. These absolutely cannot wait.

Tasks which are Important but not Urgent do in your diary. You have to make a commitment to actually do them, and the strength of your commitment will determine your outcomes. The more a business owner works on their business instead of in it – for example by expanding their product range instead of serving customers the products they already have – the more that business will grow. These are your golden tickets to a different life essentially. Spending a Saturday morning drafting this, and then editing and publishing this post, this is my Important not Urgent task.

For tasks which are Urgent but not Important you need to Delegate. These are usually tasks you don’t have the expertise for. think back office functions like taxes and payroll. These need to be done, but ideally not by you since they are a distraction from your values and long term goals. These tasks are where you need to expand your team and work collaboratively. Don’t underestimate the power of being nice to people who complete these tasks.

Tasks which are neither Important or Urgent you should delete from your list. This is the most impactful lesson of the Eisenhower Matrix. I see a lot of professionals diligently prioritising their todo lists and then trying to do everything they wrote down. that’s a mistake: if something isn’t a priority, then you never do it. Simple as. There is only so much time we have in life, our attention is finite, so why waste effort on things which aren’t a priority?s

Smart people fail because their perfectionism convinces them that everything is important and urgent all at once. Every detail matters. Every task could have consequences. The framework is useless if you can’t see that most of your tasks aren’t actually priorities.

The HR rep in my interview was smiling because she’d found the perfect prey: someone who would grind himself down on every task, and blame himself for failure. A decade more experienced I know I can slack on the right things. I know those boxes will fill up anyway, just with other people’s priorities.