A Brief Review of The Five Habits of Highly Successful Slackers by K. P. Springfield
The Five Habits of Highly Successful Slackers by K. P. Springfield caught my attention at the library. I thought.. hey, I’d like to know how to slack more effectively! Unfortunately, this book really didn’t deliver.
A lot of the book was taken up with why you should slack, and some stories of people who did it badly. The rest of the book was ideas that would work well in a sales job, but not in most other jobs.
It was really disappointing, because he opened the book talking about how he was writing the book at work. I thought he’d give me some tips on how to do that myself. Does he sneak down to the copy room? Take long lunches? Have the book open in one window and an important-looking spreadsheet open in another? Well, no, none of that. And none of the things I hadn’t thought of, which would’ve been actually useful. He just pretends to be on the phone making sales calls while in his fully-fledged office with walls and everything.
Seems to me if you have the autonomy already granted to sales associates, you can already easily figure out ways to slack. I’d like to see him try it in other jobs.
The tone of the book also seemed to be making fun of other business books and not treating the subject with quite enough seriousness. And the term he coined ‘slackism’ never does roll off the mind’s tongue. I kept wanting it to be ‘slackerism’.
Finally, whoever edited the book (quite possibly him) definitely slacked. There were mixed up words and missing words enough to be annoying by themselves. The main issue, however, was the paragraphs were inconsistently indented.
And I never did learn how to write a book while at work.
J Said,
October 29, 2008 @ 10:34 pm
Testing my comments are working.
K Said,
October 30, 2008 @ 7:20 pm
FAIL