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Posted by adam.dada on June 8th, 2006
A few weeks ago I found myself sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of tea and staring out the window. At 11:30am. On a Wednesday. My energy wasn’t tapped from overworking or overpartying or over-extending myself in any way. The fact is, I was slacking because life was getting very steady and stable. I’m driven best by customers who call with last minute deadlines, emergencies and big news days — I also get to charge more for those events. When self-employment settles into a regular daily habit, it can become very easy to slack.
For most people, there is a difference between taking some time off to “veg out” and slacking. If you’ve just worked harder than ever before and if your body (and friends and family) are telling you to take a break, do it. If your responsibilities are met and you’re not under any deadline pressure, nothing is wrong with taking a day or two vacation from work just to refocus and get back to working hard and profitably. Slacking, though, comes from when you’re just doing enough to earn a check, but not really doing enough to look to the future. Looking to the future to me means marketing, thanking your past customers, and following up on leads.
For an entrepreneur, slacking is part of the business, it seems. We tend to get into a steady cycle of work and fun, and eventually we find that we can work a little less and still earn as much as usual. Becoming productive and efficient at your work will leave you with much more time than you’d get in your 9-5, when you’d slack in between visits from the boss or the managers. Instead of slacking in 5 and 10 minute breaks throughout every work day, you build it up and spend that slack time when it is least warranted: when everything seems stable and things look good for the time being.
Business is never stable, and if you don’t grow, you’ll shrink. I find myself in slack mode about once every 3 months: just as I’ve picked up new customers and finished some normal projects, I’ll find myself wandering off into lazy-land. It takes a full day or two to realize it, and that is 2 days lost to no productive results. Vacation time is good because it does produce a positive result: you get much needed downtime to refocus. Slacking doesn’t do this, it just lets you forget about today, tomorrow, yesterday and everything that needs to be done or needed to be done. It is a real destroyer of many entrepreneurs who start to slack regularly, happy that they can make in 8 hours what used to take them 40.
When the day comes where there isn’t 8 billable hours of work in a week, they’ll wonder where the work went. I’ll tell you where it goes: it slipped into the walls around you when you slacked, and you’ve lost all that time not being productive in some way.
Don’t slack.
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