There’s a study about emergency departments that stuck with me — the finding that when doctors have overlap in their shifts, it looks wasteful on paper, but patient outcomes actually improve. The researchers who wrote The Efficiency of Slacking Off: Evidence from the Emergency Department found that built-in slack in the system wasn’t waste at all. It was the thing making the whole system work better.
The same logic applies to how I think about my own work. When I let myself relax and my mind wander, I get more ideas and I actually get more done. That’s what “slack off to perform better” means to me — it’s not laziness in the pejorative sense, it’s the breathing room that makes good work possible. The Relaxation and Performance connection is exactly this: you can’t separate the rest from the output, they’re part of the same thing.
What people get wrong is looking at slack in a system and calling it waste. They see the overlap, the downtime, the wandering, and they want to cut it. But that’s the Paradox of Busyness — the more you optimize for looking busy, the less you’re actually producing anything worth producing. The NBER working paper on this puts hard numbers on something that, honestly, most people already feel but can’t justify to a spreadsheet.
If this is true — and I think it is — then the thing I’d actually want to change is how I structure my time. Less guilt about the wandering. More trust that the The Paradox of doing Less to be More Consistent is real. The Econometric Society publication made it rigorous, but the idea is simple: let yourself breathe, and you’ll do better work.