Use This Easy Hack to Make Your Day Run More Smoothly

We have all had days where one thing after another went wrong.  The day began with missing our alarm and waking up late, then having to rush our morning routine, possibly miss breakfast altogether and then we realise that the car needs gas and we will definitely be late for dropping off the children to school and for work.

The result being that before we have even arrived at work, a chain of events had already caused a number of negative things to happen that affected our mood and those of our families and the people in our circle including work colleagues. 

The great thing about this situation is that it was easily preventable with a tactic called the “No Slack Principle.”

The No Slack Principle

Instead of leaving many things until the last possible moment, using some planning can prevent one event leading to many events going wrong.  Doing this will remove the possibility of things going wrong, or, remove the “slack.”

Slack meaning the possibility of things going wrong when they could have been prevented.  In the above example, gassing up the car the night before on the way home, making the lunches after dinner for the next day, laying out our clothes for the morning and loading the coffee machine so that it only needed to be turned on would remove slack from the morning and dramatically reduce the possibility of things going wrong.

Now that is not to say that you can totally prevent the possibility of things going wrong, but the point is to lower the odds of it happening by planning things ahead; to keep your schedule tight by removing slack.

Even if you missed your alarm and slept in, you could still recover part of the morning by having done all of the other preparation and lowering the effect of a late start.

Using the No Slack Principle will not totally eliminate obstacles but it will go a very long way towards smoothing out your day and making it much more likely that things run the way you would like them to.