Tom is responsible for ordering hardware for a custom home his company is building. The contractor installing the hardware is scheduled to start in 5 working days, but the hardware is on backorder and will not arrive for another 9 working days. Fortunately, Tom has 10 days of slack; however, he shares this slack with the hardware installer. He will have to let the contractor know that the hardware will be ready 4 days later than expected and that the slack for the installer has been reduced by 4 days. Tom and the installer share 10 days of:

In project management, free slack refers to the amount of time that a certain task can be delayed and not affect the completion time of the general project. Slack time can be considered "just in case" time, because even though delays should be minimized, rarely you can eliminate them completely, and slack time gives you a little extra room for managing projects.

In this case, the free slack time is 10 days, and this delay will consume 9 of them.