The power of slack time
Slack time are the slots during your presence at work where you’re not actively (co-)processing some actual ticket that was put into e.g. the Kanban flow by one of your stakeholders. The most common reason could be that your team has certain work in progress limits in place and the columns are filled. Now, one natural reflex could be to disregard those limits because what can possibly be wrong getting more work done, right? And yes, there may be points in time where this could actually make sense but most of the time it will not.
So… you sit there, doomed to be idling around, now what? Well, this is where slack time can come about. What are the things you could and should do instead of pulling another ticket?
Swarm aka do something
Swarming refers to going around your team or across other teams and see whether or not you could be of any assistance in whatever fashion, be it providing your colleagues with another pair of eyes for an ongoing pairing session or just a cup of coffee — being ready is always nice to know and yes, this of course requires your peers to know that you’re available for swarming — you’ll figure it out yourselves.
Maintain aka do something better
Something that is always possible is to look into that nasty piece of code you’ve stumbled across the other day and just try to think of ideas to make it better. This goes more into the direction of analysing and thinking in concepts rather than actually coding stuff, but it can be — by spiking the proposed solution and creating a ticket based on what you found. At a later stage you or a colleague will happily pick that ticket up which already has a possible solution at hand.
At the end you end up having made your project a bit better and Bob’s your uncle!
Think aka do ‘nothing’
Another very cool and natural thing is just to sit down and ponder and contemplate about higher matters or about possible solutions to a very complex issue you and your team were recently facing and collectively decided to postpone. Leave your desk, make yourself a coffee or start/continue reading a cool book or just take a fifteen minute power nap and rise refreshed and recharged for the second half of the day. Some people are a bit befuddled when it comes to this form of slack, but there is no such thing as actually doing nothing; getting your head straight is always a right thing to do.
Innovate aka do something new or different
And of course there are these left-over loose ends from the last Free Coding Day so why not catch up on that? Or you’ve always wanted to check out on that cool new profiling tool or IDE cheat sheet? Or there’s this Community of Practice going on and you think you need a bit of time for some in depths analysis for your next session? The answer to all that obviously is to please just do it!
The above examples are the most common things to do but there are more of course — just be creative, look out for yourself and the needs of your team or of any team and act accordingly!
Most modern tech companies, as COYO, have dedicated slack time boxes implemented that usually range from 10–20%, so it’s generally a good idea to only commit something around 80% of your teams ‘work force’ to actual tasks at hand. This way you’re almost always able to charge yourself with that proactive momentum every agile product development team should have — you will realise that you’ll become more motivated and related to your work which ultimately is a good thing for you and for your project!
