Saying no can be hard. But taking a moment to consider the importance of each thing you say yes to can be even more radically disconcerting.
Someone who navigates a normal level of busy-ness must confront obligations, and parse through the ones that are most necessary. Most people I know (myself included) do not rank-order every task throughout a given day.
Saying yes to as much as possible is often mistaken for productivity. Being productive doesn’t mean you take on as much work as possible, because that’s a sure way to get very little accomplished.
Saying no, rather, is how you can better execute on only the essential things that move the needle.
To recalibrate your priorities and willingness to say yes, here’s a quick thought-experiment to try out.
Imagine you only have one year left to live. What would you do with that year?
Then, imagine you only have 24 hours left to live? What would you do with those hours?
Finally, imagine you only have one hour left to live. How would you spend your waning minutes?
As the time-horizon scales down further, you’re forced to select less things to do, and select more things to do away with. Once time becomes starkly finite, nearly everything else becomes far less pressing. It’s a question of what, among all the infinite possibilities, would you not be able to live without.
Among all those do-able things, very few have enough staying power where you keep it in your year, day, or hour.
This is a terrifying exercise. Frightening in its suddenness and frankness — it puts you face to face with your own life, and how you choose to spend it. It can highlight the wisdom you may lack, and whether your priorities are awry.
But afterward, clarity (hopefully) comes to you. The things you need to say no to can emerge once you get off of autopilot. In rushes a sense of control; the ability to know and — if you are lucky, dictate — exactly what you want to do.
Maria Popova, the writer behind The Marginalian, calls productivity a great trap — something that hampers and haunts our search for meaning. Becoming more rushed can be mistaken for becoming more efficient, and any attempt to clear the deck is simply a way to refill it even quicker.
And for more creative individuals: The result of rushedness (in the name of productivity) almost always lowers creativity. Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, puts it succinctly:
This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it…Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.
The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.
Taking a moment to stop, think, and reflect about the things you would choose to do if you were fundamentally out of time is a startling, enriching practice. And it’s one you can turn to again and again, in the pursuit of less and less.
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