TWH#46: Against Overwhelm (Part 2)
How To Take On Less By Saying ‘No’... Better
Last week I outlined a strategy for keeping overwhelm at bay. It involved clarifying your goals and intentions; making visible where your time and energy are going; focusing on leverage instead of mere productivity; and designing an explicit ideal week you can track yourself against.
All fine and dandy, but if you keep piling stuff on to your plate, none of it will be of much help. You’ll just be like this little dude:
Not allowing this to happen requires a tighter filter on your inputs. Alas, that’s far from trivial. We’re not exactly hardwired to say no to other people. We evolved with the need to belong, to be part of the tribe, because back in the day being alone translated directly to being dead.
This week, I want to address a thought I suspect was in a lot of my readers’ minds: “Paulo, that’s all cool, but it won’t work in my case. I just have too much to do, and I can’t say no to any of it!”
Yes, you can.
At least to some of it. And you should. It’s likely that you’re simply not setting yourself up for it. And perhaps also forgetting that everything is a skill.
First Things First
Before we go any further, let’s lay a few mindset-related non-negotiables out on the table. Without these front and center it’ll be 10x harder for you to keep your workload sane.
Saying “no” is what makes your “yes’s” mean more. It’s that simple. Don’t fall into the trap of looking at your “no’s” in isolation. Think about them instead as something you do to strengthen what you really want to say “yes” to.
Your time is as valuable as anyone else’s. No, the busy CEO’s time is not more valuable than yours. She just has a bigger scope, and a different set of tasks. Everyone has a responsibility to use their time in the most effective way for the company’s mission and that preserves their well-being. Therefore everyone’s time is equally valuable. Yours included.
The wrong ‘Yes’ is short term comfort for long-term pain. It’s not just the immediate opportunity cost of saying that ‘yes’. It’s how overwhelmed you’ll feel later on. Be kind to your future self by being firm with your present self.
‘No’ now does not mean ‘No’ forever. We’re terrible at understanding long-term consequences of our choices and that also leads us to believe that that opportunity will never come again. In practice, that’s very rare. There’s almost always another train pulling into the platform.
‘No’ is a complete sentence. That’s a direct quote from American novelist Anne Lamott. Not every ‘No’ needs an explanation. Sometimes a simple ‘No, thank you’ is all that’s needed but we trick ourselves into endless justification that creates a lot more problems than it solves.
What Keeps Us From Saying No
Last week, I wrote:
It’s no wonder we get into this. Some of us have a savior complex, others have a tendency to be people pleasers but, regardless of the specific variety, it is usually rooted in both a desire to help and a need to be liked. Sadly, when that keeps taking precedence above all else, you end up putting yourself last. No bueno.
Here’s a thought: when you say ‘no’ at work, you’re not saying ‘no’ to a person. You’re saying ‘no’ to what that person is asking you.
Sounds obvious? Think again.
Conflict avoidance, people pleasing… all of this stuff is rooted in a fear that we will disappoint, frustrate, or anger other people. But the fact of the matter is that you’re not denying the person—you’re denying their request.
And here’s another thought: how they react to that is their task. Just like it is your task how you react when a request of yours is denied. Let that sink in for a moment, because it’s likely that you’ll feel some resistant to this idea. But, ultimately, it’s simply the truth.1
You know what’s also your task? How you say no. Which is what we turn to next.
Compassion is a Superpower
In a post on the BetterUp blog, Dr. Jacinta Jiménez highlights the difference between empathy and compassion (emphasis mine):
Empathy is our feeling of awareness toward other people's emotions and an attempt to understand how they feel. Compassion is an emotional response to empathy or sympathy and creates a desire to help.
This desire to help is the game changer.
If you genuinely possess a desire to help the other person, you can more easily turn on your curiosity and seek to understand what motivates their request. Often, what they’re asking for is not the only (or even the best) way to accomplish what they truly want. But without inquiry, you can’t know what that is. Showing interest in understanding what the other person is trying to accomplish leads also to potentially deepening the relationship.
Avoid the trap of thinking you’re “challenging” them or being “offensive” by asking what the goal behind their request is. While there are indeed toxic people who just want their way and don’t want to talk about it, in practice that is extremely rare. If you’re dealing with someone like this, it’s even more important you are compassionate—a person who behaves that way is going through a lot. A kind but firm ‘no’ is in order.
Practically Speaking
While all of the above hopefully helps you reframe the act of saying ‘no’ as something constructive rather than destructive, it still takes quite a bit of energy to do so.
The following practices can further support you putting the mindset in action.
Set your intentions and use them as a filter. Last week’s post was all about creating clarity on your goals and using them as a lighthouse that guides your every decision. Make sure you don’t say ‘yes’ to something unless doing so clearly aligns with your intentions.
When in doubt, ask for time to think. Avoid knee-jerk reacting and instead ask for some time so you can reflect and respond. Few substantial requests require an immediate ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Creating this space allows you to think more clearly, tease out second- and third-order consequences of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and even help you formulate a good way of saying ‘no’.
Use the Yes-No-Yes sandwich. By wrapping your “no” in two “yes’s” you can make it more palatable. For example, you can acknowledge the validity of the request and that you’re glad they thought of you (the first “yes”), then proceed to explain why you can’t meet their request at this time (the “no”), and wrap up by suggesting an alternative approach or someone else they can reach out to (the second “yes”). This won’t apply in every situation, but it will help you avoid many unnecessary commitments.
Enlist support from others in helping you say ‘no’. This one is great advice from author and coach Lara Hogan: “Ask your manager, a leader on the team, or someone else you trust to hold you accountable to saying no more often.”2 You can leverage the space you created by requesting time to think to ask someone you look up to how they would say 'no' in that particular situation.
Have a prepared response. This one is also from Lara: “Draft emails that you can copy and paste whenever you need to say no clearly and gracefully, but feel hesitation.” Having something ready as a generic reply that has worked well before can sometimes be all you need to overcome the resistance to saying ‘no’.
Improving your ‘No’ over time
As someone obsessed with continuous improvement, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that saying ‘no’ effectively is a muscle you develop.
To build that muscle, establish a feedback loop with yourself. As you go through your week, keep track of your commitments. For example, you can maintain a “version-controlled” running list of everything that is on your plate by simply copy-pasting the list anew at the beginning of each day.
At the end of the week, look throught the daily lists and ask yourself:
How did my commitments evolve day over day? What do I tend to say ‘yes’ to?
Did I end the week with more or less than I started it with?
Where the things I said ‘yes’ to aligned with my intentions?
Which ‘yes’ could have been a ‘no’? Next time, how can I say it?
Saying No With Grace
I wanted to end this week’s post with a concrete example of a graceful No.
The following is an email response from science fiction author Neal Stephenson to Tim Ferriss’s request for participation in his book Tribe of Mentors:
Hey there, Tim,
Sorry for the slow response and thanks for thinking of me in this context.
It has become pretty obvious of late that I’m trying to do too much, and so I started an experiment of not adding anything whatsoever to my “to-do” list, so that it wouldn’t get any longer.
The result is that the items that were ALREADY on my “to-do” list only spawned more items as I crossed them off, and so it’s a little like fighting a hydra. I am hoping that if I am ruthlessly efficient, I can one day get to the point where the list actually gets shorter instead of longer.
In the meantime, unfortunately, the “ruthlessly efficient” part of this plan means that I am turning down things like this just as a blanket policy.
Again, thanks for thinking of me and good luck with the project!
Can you reverse-engineer what Stephenson is doing here? It’s a masterclass in the art of saying no.
TL;DR
First, set your mind straight. Be clear that your time is as valuable as anyone else’s regardless of rank, that every ‘yes’ has a cost, and that if you don’t take responsibility for your time, someone else will.
The other person’s reaction to your ‘no’ is not your task. Your task is to say it in the kindest, clearest way. Don’t take on other people’s tasks.
Compassion is key to creating understanding about the requester’s goal, and the space to find alternatives better suited to achieve it that might not require you.
While there are a number of tactics available, the key is to experiment and keep improving. Establish a feedback loop with yourself so you can reflect weekly on how you’re doing in terms of commitments.
I have mentioned this idea of the “separation of tasks” a couple of times in the past. I learned it from the beautiful book The Courage To Be Disliked, which I reviewed on TWH#7.
https://larahogan.me/blog/how-to-say-no-right-now/#say-no-in-a-way-that-works-for-you